Camps and Clinics: Which Ones Are Worth It

Camps are the one place a goalie family can genuinely buy development, and they're also where a lot of money goes nowhere.

The difference isn't price, and it isn't the name on the banner. It's whether anybody is actually going to teach your kid anything — which is knowable in advance, from four questions.

This article is about instructional camps and clinics. The recruiting kind is a different product with different rules, and it has its own article.

The four questions

One: how many goalies, and how many goalie coaches? This is the whole thing. A ratio of six goalies to one goalie coach is a real camp. Twenty goalies and a guy who played attack is a shooting session with spectators.

Two: what does the daily schedule look like for a goalie, specifically? Ask for it. A good camp can tell you: warm-up, technical block, footwork, live work, film. A weak one describes what the field players do and says goalies are "integrated."

Three: who's teaching, and did they play the position? Named, with a background. This matters more in goaltending than in any other position, because the teaching is technical and unintuitive.

Four: what does he go home with? A good camp sends a kid home with two or three specific things to work on. If nobody can tell you what the feedback looks like, there probably isn't any.

Four questions, one email. The answers sort the market almost completely.

What each kind actually delivers

A small goalie-only clinic. The best value in the sport. Six to fifteen goalies, one or two position coaches, half a day or a weekend. Your young athlete comes home with corrections he'll use for a year.

Private or semi-private sessions. The highest-return spending available in fifth and sixth grade, and the thing I'd point most families toward over any camp — that window is worth spending properly on.

A college program's summer camp. Good teaching, a real facility, and at the older ages a look at a school. Ratios vary enormously, so ask question one.

A general skills camp. Fine for fun and teammates. Not goalie development, and shouldn't be bought as such.

And a "elite exposure" event for a fifth grader. Skills camp with a marketing budget. Fine if that's what you're knowingly buying.

What good instruction looks like

Worth knowing so you can tell afterward whether it was any good.

Technique before volume. A good goalie coach spends the first session on stance and hand path, not on shots.

Corrections he can repeat. One or two cues, in plain language, that he can still tell you a month later.

Soft balls and controlled speeds early. A camp that opens with hard shots at close range is building flinch, not skill.

Some video. Even a phone. Seeing his own arc once beats being told about it five times.

And a goalie coach who talks to him by name. Sounds small. It's the clearest signal there is.

Suggestions on what you can do

Email and ask the four questions. A camp that answers them properly is already a better camp than one that doesn't.

Ask a parent whose kid went last year. More reliable than anything on the website.

Buy one good thing rather than three adequate ones. Two days of real position coaching beats a week of being shot at.

Go local first. A good clinic forty minutes away beats a famous one that costs a flight, particularly before high school.

Follow it up within a fortnight. Whatever he was told, work on it while it's fresh. A camp with no follow-through is a weekend, not a development.

And compare the cost honestly. Four hundred dollars is about eight private sessions, and for a fifth or sixth grader the sessions will usually do more — the same arithmetic applies to tournaments.

By age: third and fourth grade, skip the camps and spend the money on making it fun. Fifth and sixth, this is when position instruction pays the most — one good clinic or a run of private sessions is the best money you'll spend all decade. Seventh and eighth, a goalie-specific camp each summer, chosen on ratio. Ninth and tenth, college program camps start being worth it for the teaching. Eleventh and twelfth, camps become recruiting decisions and the criteria change entirely.

A few things worth avoiding

Try not to buy on the name of a pro or a college coach on the flyer. They're frequently present for an hour and a photo.

Go easy on the week-long residential camp for a young kid. Long, expensive, and most of the value is in the first two days.

Try not to book three in a summer. Fatigue, cost, and diminishing returns all point the same way.

And don't treat a camp as a substitute for the daily work. A weekend produces corrections; the following six weeks produce the change.

The version worth remembering

You can buy coaching, and coaching is the one thing that reliably makes a goalie better.

What you can't buy is a shortcut. The camp that's worth it is small, taught by somebody who played the position, and sends your kid home with two things to work on — and then he works on them for six weeks.

Four questions before you pay. That's the whole method.

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Whatever a camp sends him home with, the program gives him somewhere to put it — a daily session with a specific target, every day of the year. Three real days of a fifth-grade week are open on the site, no signup. Take a look at the free week.

Coach Greg — LAX Goalie Hub