Mental Aspect Introduction
To be a successful goaltender at ANY level, you have to be fully committed to learning everything you can about the position and about the game of hockey. You need to spend a great deal of time physically training your body, practicing game situations over and over, and working on your mind. This is the missing ingredient for many goalies in reaching their full potential.
The majority of committed goalies will spend several hours a week practicing the physical game. It is recommended that you study the physical game of goaltending, and you seek out the best goalie coach you can find to make sure you are practicing correctly. If you don’t have proper coaching, you could be practicing the wrong moves, the wrong angles, improper reactions, and bad save selection. If you wait too long to get good coaching and instruction, you will need to unlearn everything you’ve been practicing before relearning the proper techniques. This can be a monumental task. Get the right coaching early. Young goalies today have access to so many great goalie camps, books, manuals, videos, and personal instruction. Make this a priority in your training. You must continually work on your physical game the right way as a first step toward achieving full potential as a goaltender. Intense training of your body through repetition of the proper movements, techniques, skating, balance, angles, and save selection will give you the muscle memory to make your reactions automatic during games. The more automatic that you can make your reactions, the more you can concentrate and focus on the game situation in front of you. This will also build your confidence, which you’ll need in order to have the right frame of mind when playing in games.
It is universally agreed that goaltending is over 80% mental. What this means is that no matter how good you are at the physical game, if your mind isn’t working the way it should, you will never be able to fully utilize your physical skills in competition. Training the mind is often overlooked or ignored by young goalies. This has a lot to do with a lack of awareness of just how important this aspect of your game really is. Also, training your mind is not an easy thing to do. First, you need to know what to do, and then you need to put as much time, or even more time into working on your mental game as you do working on your physical game. The other obstacle in your way is a real lack of instruction and training tools available.
Understanding what you need to do is a good first step. You will need learn techniques and strategies you can use on a daily basis to train your mind properly. It may be uncomfortable for you at first, but this is no different from the day when you strapped on the pads for the first time and tried to stop the puck. You have surely come a long way since that day. Make the commitment to learn how to train your mind. Don’t wait until you feel you have gotten as far as you can with your physical game. You need to start now!
Every year, as you progress through the various levels of hockey, the play is going to get faster, the shots are going to get harder and more accurate, and the level of your mental game is going to become more and more important. You are going to face coaches that will challenge you mentally. At the higher, more competitive levels of hockey, coaches are very demanding. They won’t hesitate to replace you or cut you from the team if you can’t handle the pressure. In your early years, good coaches can tend to be very supportive and positive with you. They have more patience while you are learning the game. Later on, things start to change, and if you aren’t ready to handle it mentally, your confidence can disappear, and your anxiety can rise to a level that strangles your ability to perform at your best.
You need to build a fortress of confidence, and a rock solid mental attitude, so that even the toughest of coaches can’t negatively affect your play.
At the higher, more competitive levels of hockey, your teammates can also be merciless. They will expect you to be on your game at all times. When you perform well, you’ll be their hero. As soon as you have a few off games, you’ll become the object of their criticism and frustration. Many of them will let you know it too. If you are vulnerable mentally, your confidence can go out the window quickly. This will also effect how your team plays in front of you. If they lose their confidence in you, they won’t play well when you are in the net. This information is not meant to scare you; it is only meant to prepare you. The bottom line is that if you start working hard on your mental game now, and you commit yourself to building a wall of confidence and positive thinking, you can get yourself to a place where nothing bothers you when you play goalie. You will be able to let the negativity of others roll off your shoulders. You will be able to take the constructive criticism and instruction from your coaches and use it, while tuning out all of the negative comments and added pressure that comes with the competitiveness of hockey.
You will be untouchable. This should be your main goal as you begin your journey of training your mind.
RE-Posted with written consent by John Haley, The Goalie’s Mind, © Copyright 2004, All Rights Reserved
