Goalie week 2025 at Shap Shots

Well every week for me is goalie week, but this week we've got even more

Happy Monday, everyone.

We talk about goaltending quite often in this space, but this week, much to my excitement we will be talking about it even more than usual.

See, last week I spent three days observing and talking to goalies at USA Hockey’s National Goalie Development Camp — an annual event held in Plymouth, Michigan for the top men’s and woman’s goalies between 17 and 22.

I’ve got a handful of stories coming out of that ranging on topics from how goalies should or shouldn’t be developed as kids, the degeneration of a certain goalie skill, to how goalies have to look at recruiting, especially in the new college NIL world.

It’s going to be a fun week and I’m going to nerd out a bit, starting with my first piece in this series tomorrow morning.

In the mean time, I wanted to drop a couple video clips in here to both spark some conversation and maybe offer some free drills for anyone looking to coach goalies at their next practice.

I also want to use this piece as a call for mailbag questions, which I’ll tackle on Friday or Saturday, depending on how the week goes.

First a pretty straight forward drill, which isn’t really straight forward anymore because of how much discourse that pops up nightly about goalies and post play/plays developing down low.

And here is video from the other corner, with a defender also part of the drill.

I think it’s important to look at plays like this isolated in practice, how goalies are taught to play pucks out the corner, where they are supposed to be tracking and telescoping out. These foundations, for me at least, give better context when watching the corner plays develop in the chaos of the game.

Another drill I wanted to put in here was this fun one where goalies did one-on-ones with a shooter, but with a stick sawed off on the bottom, so there was no 5-hole seal from the blade.

The point of this drill here is to put emphasis on how important sealing the ice is with the pads, and how the stick is a tool, but it can’t be the only tool to seal the middle.

Here’s an example on video.

Anyways, between this and the start of the Conference Finals, it’s going to be a busy week here at Shap Shots.

Adding to that, we’ll do a mailbag on Friday or Saturday, depending on how the week goes. So drop your mailbag questions in the comments of this story or on the call for questions that I’ll published on Wednesday morning.