You can see we have our demo goalie here. She’s in her stance. She’s holding her stick. What holding your stick does is that it actually helps stabilize your upper body. What we want to be able to do is have the goalie hold a tire or hold their holder stick, and do something so their hands are not moving as much.
We want to focus on how we’re using our upper body and how we are dropping into our butterfly. Mostly being able to track that puck in and out. So you’re going to see your head move down and you see your head move out with the rebounds. This is a great drill.
We just have a shooter in the slot area and then really focus on how we want to downward-track. If you remember, downward tracking is being able to move our body forward and down over the top of that puck and then bringing our knee stacks together. You can see our goalie here. Ella is able to activate her upper body before she drops. So you can see, her body is going to start moving first. That’s going to allow her eyes to get over the top of that puck and then watch that puck hit her pads and move out into the corner.
We’re not worried about rebounds. A common problem with goalies is that their initial reaction is to drop. We want to get her head and her eyes moving. You can see her hands are staying steady and her eyes are on top of that puck. Watching that puck hit her body, you can see her knees are squeezed together. This helps create a good base. She also has good forward lean. Her hips are elevated to a good butterfly. She follows that puck into her body, and then you can see how she tracks that puck out.
This core of her body is not moving, and she has a good reaction to it. She just gets back up on her feet. This is a good habit to build. A lot of the different things that we’re going to do is going to have to do with how we activate our upper body and using that downward-tracking motion.