The Coach Who's Never Coached a Goalie

Almost every youth lacrosse coach played field, and almost none of them played goalie.

That isn't a criticism — it's arithmetic. One in ten players is a goalie, so the odds that the volunteer running your kid's team has stood in a cage are slim. Most of them know it, and most of them are slightly uncomfortable about it.

Which creates a real problem for your goalie and a real opportunity for you, and the difference between those two outcomes is mostly about how you approach it.

The short version

The problem isn't that the coach doesn't know goalie technique. It's that in most youth practices, nobody is running anything for the goalie at all — he's standing in the cage getting shot at by ten-year-olds with no aim, unwarmed, for ninety minutes.

That's not training. That's being a target.

And the fix is almost never a technical conversation about hand position. It's an offer of something practical that makes the coach's life easier.

What actually goes wrong

No warm-up. A goalie who takes his first shot cold is at real risk and he'll flinch, which teaches him the wrong thing. This is the single most common problem and the easiest to fix.

Shooting drills as goalie training. Being shot at by the team is useful for the shooters. For the goalie it's high-volume, low-quality reps at unpredictable placement, and a lot of it grooves panic.

No goalie-specific block. Twenty minutes a week of stance, footwork and hands would transform a young goalie's season, and it rarely exists.

No feedback. He finishes a season unable to name one thing about his game that got better, which is a program failing at its actual job — USA Lacrosse's own club guidance asks for qualified coaching and real development feedback at every level.

And no protection from the score. A coach who doesn't understand the position can drift into treating goals as the goalie's report card, which teaches the whole team where blame lives.

The offer that gets accepted

Here's the one that works, and I've watched it work repeatedly.

"Would it help if he did a goalie warm-up before practice starts? I can run it — it's fifteen minutes and it's written out."

That offer succeeds because it costs the coach nothing, it doesn't imply he's doing anything wrong, it solves a problem he already knows about, and it takes a job off his list rather than adding one.

The second-best version: "I've got a written goalie block if you ever want twenty minutes of something for him while the team runs offence." Hand it over and let him decide.

Notice what neither of those is: a conversation about technique, a suggestion that the coach is failing, or a request for special treatment.

Suggestions on what you can do

Ask before the season, not during. Everything is negotiable in January and nothing is in April.

Bring a page, not an opinion. A written warm-up he can hand to anybody is a gift. A verbal critique is a problem.

Offer to warm him up yourself. Fifteen minutes, before practice, on the side. Most coaches will say yes instantly, and it's the single highest-value intervention available to a goalie parent.

Use the leverage carefully. Programs need goalies, and a reasonable request about goalie-specific coaching is exactly what that standing is for — used quietly and in the preseason.

Put it in writing properly. A short, specific, easy-to-answer email gets a response; a long one gets filed — there's a whole article on the shape of it.

And ask what he needs from your goalie. What do you want him doing on the clear this season? is a question that makes a coach an ally, because it treats him as the authority he is.

By age: third and fourth grade, the ask is simply that nobody shoots hard at him and that someone warms him up. Fifth and sixth, this is the skill window, so a goalie block in practice matters more here than at any other age. Seventh and eighth, ask about practice design and about who's teaching him — and consider paying for outside position coaching. Ninth and tenth, high school programs frequently have a goalie coach, so ask at tryouts. Eleventh and twelfth, he manages this relationship himself.

A few things worth avoiding

Try not to coach from behind the cage during practice. It undermines the coach in front of the team, and it competes with whatever he's being told.

Go easy on the technical corrections by email. A coach who's told he's teaching the position wrong stops reading your emails, and then you've lost the channel.

Try not to make it about your kid specifically. "Could the goalies get a warm-up" lands better than "could my son get a warm-up," and it's true of every goalie on that field.

And don't assume he doesn't care. Most youth coaches are volunteers with eighteen kids and a job, and the ones who seem indifferent to the goalie are usually just out of their depth — which is worth remembering when you're choosing a program too.

The version worth remembering

The coach isn't the problem. The gap is.

Somebody has to warm your goalie up, run him through twenty minutes of his own work, and tell him one thing he got better at this season. If the coach can't, that's a job looking for a volunteer — and a parent with a written page and no opinions is exactly the right one.

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The program gives a goalie his own daily work regardless of what practice looks like, and the warm-up blocks are written out plainly enough to hand to anyone. 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