A REAL Goaler Challenge

I should have prefaced a previous post (Goaler Warm-ups) with a reminder, in that our goaltenders start learning to juggle on their very first days with us. Most of them need to start with one ball, and then very slowly progress to a second and a third.

Yes, a little at a time, the degree of difficulty should be increased — for any drill.

That said, take a look at this one…

~ Dennis Chighisola

I hope you’ll agree with me, that the game of hockey is pretty wild.  I mean, there are all kinds of things going on out there in the game action, which causes our players to have to very often deal with more problems than one.

Knowing this, I create a lot of drills to meet this challenge by combining several previously learned skills into one new drill.  (Let me repeat:  The drills that are combined have been fairly well mastered by a player or players, which signals the need to increase their difficulty.)  Such is the case with the following.

As the adjacent photo shows, our goaltenders are using the long jumprope, and at the same time juggling two pucks.  (Down the road we’ll follow the same kind of progressions noted earlier, moving to three pucks!)

Ya, this surely is an unbelievable challenge.  But, click the following link to see a video of a young NEHI HS Prep goalie doing a pretty good job.

By the way…  Can you envision how this might help a goaltender in the wildness of an older level game?  After all, they so often have to move and bob and weave to see through a maze of sticks and bodies, while at the same time needing to keep focused on that puck.

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