u/l2protoss

The "flop" I'm referring to is the move/bad habit I see a lot of novice goalies do when they strap on the pads for the first few times. I've seen a lot of young kids do small jump before attempting to go down into their butterfly and end up more just jumping onto the front of their pads - that's what u/FreshProfessor1502 was referring and what I'm talking about. It's a bad habit that some kids have and what I described was my approach for how I have helped some kids stop doing it.

If I tell an 8 year old to “drive” their knees, they have a harder time conceptualizing that compared to me describing it as a “push”.

No worries! Another sign of the “flop” I see a lot is their shoulders coming up almost like they are jumping up before dropping. If your kid is doing this, they aren’t “driving” into their butterfly and I’d talk to them about how that little jump is going in the wrong direction - they should want to get into their butterfly as fast as possible so everything should be moving down into it.

As someone who has coached more than a dozen beginner goalies his age in the past 2 years, a big reason is what you mentioned: the flop. I try to teach my goalies it’s more like a “push” than a “drop” - you’re driving your knees down and the feet should slide out naturally from that. Usually in these cases I walk the goalie through how they think about getting into their butterfly and go from there. A lot of times they aren’t evening thinking about where their pads will be facing, they just care about getting down.

Don’t do it too many times or you’ll be transported to Kansas.

At that size, consider pro stock of goalies the same height.

89631094

There’s no shortcut. It’s all practice.
Practice playing stuff slow enough to not make mistakes. It takes a long time to be both fast and accurate and there is no substitute for practice.

Gold gang rise up!

You’re never getting those PBCs fulfilled.

The “spring” analogy is what I use with all the kids I coach - both on ice and during dry land conditioning.

And to add on to your suggestions, any plyometric exercise that has an explosive component is great for building that “spring”.

Maybe, but it would years (decades) and thousands of hours to discover that ceiling, so I wouldn’t worry about it. Just keep practicing.

It’s also self inflicted in a lot of ways. If you want juniors to learn, you kind of need to make them work without agents for a while to learn what good code / architecture looks like.

And not just offense - defense too! Seems like at lower levels, the blocks, deflections, and screens from my own teammates can be brutal.

If the A to D skate is a drop in game with a couple of A league players, 20 goals isn’t that crazy. No one back checks at those and the guys with speed can just blow by everyone and it’s basically an extended form shootout at times.

Put in a basement below your house and close up the entrance with some floorboards. Destroy the floorboards when you need to go in.

That’s what I heard as well

Perfect - yeah just get a slight edge on them. Have fun!

I would put a very light edge on them to help he stay up and keep her feet from sliding apart as easily, but like you said, she won’t be doing much skating. What kind of skates did you get?

I did the half hinge and took the stock medium stiffness below the knee and the most stiff above the knee. I was tempted to go for more stiffness, but the demo pads they had were already plenty stiff and much more stiff than my r4s. I also did the short calf wrap.

The slide plates? If so, yes. Going to give them a shot and see how I like them. They look pretty easy to remove.

Went with a 75.

Yeah I wasn’t a huge fan of the graphic at first, but what made it click for me was turning the print zone on the large section white and adding a bit more white space to it. I originally had that part as brown and a friend convinced me to try it whited out.

33+1.5

Very nice. Feels incredibly natural. I also went with the intermediate palm and it feels a lot more stable and controlled.

The cat approves!