Coaching From the Sideline

Here's something that took me years to understand.

Put two hundred people around a field, let them all shout at once, and a twelve-year-old goalie will pick his own parent's voice out of that noise every single time. Instantly, without trying, from sixty yards, with a helmet on.

I used to think that was sweet. It isn't, particularly. It means that whatever you say from the sideline goes straight through everything else and lands, and it lands during the half-second when he's supposed to be doing something else entirely.

The short version

During live play, say his name and nothing else. Cheer after the whistle.

Instruction from the sideline — even good instruction, even correct instruction — arrives while your goalie is mid-decision, and it does three things at once: it splits his attention, it tells him you're evaluating, and it competes with his actual coach. None of those help him make the save.

The general shape: noise before the play and after the play, silence during it.

Why it works against him

It arrives at the worst possible moment. Goaltending is a sequence of very fast decisions — read the shooter, step to the line of the ball, commit. A voice he's tuned to, arriving mid-sequence, doesn't add information, it interrupts processing. Step! Step! shouted from the sideline usually reaches him a beat after the moment it's about, which means he's now thinking about the last shot during the next one.

It competes with the coach. He can only follow one voice, and if yours is louder or more familiar, he'll follow yours — which puts him out of position relative to what his defense was told to do. Coaches notice this faster than parents think, and the kid pays for it, not you.

It tells him he's being graded in real time. A young athlete who knows a running commentary is coming from the sideline starts playing to avoid the commentary rather than to make saves. That's the beginning of a goalie who plays small, and playing small in this position is fatal — the whole job is stepping toward something everyone's instinct says to step away from.

And it's usually late anyway. From the sideline you can't see what he sees: the shooter's hips, the traffic in front of the crease, where his defense actually is. You're reacting to the outcome, and he's living in the half-second before it. That gap is why even genuinely knowledgeable parents give bad sideline instruction — the information isn't wrong, it's just arriving from the wrong vantage point at the wrong time.

Where your coaching actually goes

This is the part worth being clear about, because "don't coach from the sideline" sounds like "don't coach," and that isn't it at all.

You do coach him. Five or six days a week, you're the tossing partner, the timer, the one who notices he skipped Thursday. In this program that's the real coaching, and it's most of the reason he'll be good on a Saturday.

Game day is where you stop and become something else. He already has a coach out there, plus nine teammates and a crowd watching every mistake. What he doesn't have — unless you provide it — is one person in that field whose regard for him doesn't move with the score. That's the job: not the second coach, but the support that comes underneath him at exactly the right moment, so that the risk he took was survivable.

The driveway is where you tell him about his feet. The sideline is where you just let him know you're there.

Suggestions on what you can do

Use his name as the whole sentence. Shouting his name after a save, or after a good clear, or frankly after nothing at all, carries everything you want it to carry and instructs nothing. It's the highest-value sound you can make out there.

Save the cheering for dead balls. After the whistle, between quarters, on the walk to the bench. Same enthusiasm, different timing, none of the interference.

Cheer the process, not the result. Great step! is worth ten times great save!, because one of those is about a thing he controlled and the other is about a thing that partly bounced his way. Over a season this is how a young athlete learns what he's actually being measured on — and it's the same message the program gives him six days a week.

Cheer somebody else's kid. It's genuinely good for the team, it takes the spotlight off your own, and it tends to lower your heart rate, which you'll be glad about.

If you can't stay quiet, move. Stand at the far end, or behind the bench, or take a walk along the far touchline. It isn't a failure — it's a very reasonable adaptation, and half the parents I respect most do exactly this.

By age: with third and fourth graders, sideline noise is mostly harmless as long as it isn't technical, so cheer freely and instruct never. From about fifth grade the instruction starts costing him, because that's when he's building the decision-making the position runs on. By high school, treat the sideline as his workplace — you wouldn't call out advice in his classroom.

A few things worth avoiding

Try not to instruct during live play, even when you're right, and especially when you're right. Being right is what makes it tempting, and it doesn't change the timing problem.

Go easy on the refs from the sideline. Your goalie hears it, and it teaches him that the result is somebody else's fault, which is a slow poison for a kid in a position that requires ownership.

Don't correct the coach's instruction from thirty yards away. If you genuinely disagree with something being taught, that's a conversation for a Tuesday evening, in private, between adults.

And be careful about the audible sigh. He can hear that too. Most goalie parents have no idea how loud they are on a quiet field.

The trade you're making

You'll get about forty games a season. In every one of them there'll be a moment where you know exactly what to shout.

Swallowing it costs you a few seconds of discomfort, and it buys him a game in which nobody in the world is grading him except the person actually assigned to. Over ten years that's the difference between a goalie who plays free and one who plays looking over his shoulder.

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If you want the sideline quieter, put the coaching where it belongs — into the week. 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