The Wall Becomes His

My son and I built our wall this week, in our driveway, on Camano Island.

It took an afternoon. It took my wife too — the thing weighs about 154 pounds and there is a moment where you walk it upright and you want a third set of hands. Weston is in sixth grade. When it came up off the ground and he stood next to it, the first thing he said was how tall it was. The second thing, about a minute later, after the first throw: that it was as responsive as a concrete wall.

That was the whole design goal, said back to me by an eleven-year-old who didn't know it was the design goal.

And then, standing there, something else occurred to me that wasn't in any plan.

The short version

The wall is the center of a goalie's development, not an accessory. More reps pass through it than through any coach, any clinic, any team practice. It is the only training partner that is available at seven in the morning in February.

It is the most versatile thing you will own. Third grade through senior year, hands-only to full speed, targets, footwork, pre-game warm-up. One object, ten years.

And it is the only piece of his equipment he helps make. His stick came from a store. His helmet came from a store. The wall comes from an afternoon with you, and then it becomes his in a way none of the rest of it does.

That last part is what this article is actually about.

Why it sits at the center

A goalie gets better at stopping the ball by seeing the ball, thousands of times, arriving at a speed that resembles the real thing.

Almost nothing in a young goalie's week delivers that. Team practice gives him a handful of live looks and a lot of standing around. A clinic gives him a good Saturday. A parent tossing in the yard is wonderful and is not fast enough by fifth grade.

A solid wall gives him a hundred true reps in fifteen minutes, on his own, whenever he wants them. That is the whole argument. It is not a supplement to the training — for most of the year, for most goalies, it is the training, and everything else is a test of what the wall built.

Our program puts wall work in the week deliberately, every week, with a specific prescription rather than "go hit the wall." The wall is the assumption underneath the whole ten-year plan.

Why one object covers ten years

This is the part families underestimate, and it's why I'd tell you to build the grown-up version the first time.

A wall that survives a seventeen-year-old's shot is perfectly happy taking a nine-year-old's. The reverse is not true, and the family that buys small for a nine-year-old buys again in sixth grade. Build the one your kid will still be using in high school.

The same panel does all of this:

• Hands-only work with a tennis ball and no stick, which is where every goalie in our program starts
• Wall ball in every variation — weak hand, quick sticks, off the bounce
• Reaction work at ranges from eight feet out to twenty
• Targets, once he's ready to aim rather than just return
• Pre-game warm-up in a parking lot, because it rides in a truck bed
• Winter, in a garage, when the field is a swamp

Ours sets up in about five minutes and comes down in five. That matters more than it sounds. A setup that's a chore is a setup that quietly stops happening in November.

The part I didn't plan

Our family has always tracked our kids' growth on a chart by the front door. Pencil line, date, name. You walk past it every day for years without really looking at it, and then one day you do look at it, and there is the whole thing — the path you forged together, in lines.

Kids grow up. They move on. Life happens and people change. Those little artifacts are what remind you where you've all been.

Standing in the driveway, maybe two minutes after the wall came upright, it hit me that this thing was going to be in our lives for the next seven years, and that it had a perfectly good blank edge on the side of it.

So the first thing I marked on our wall was Weston's height on the day we built it, with the date next to it.

I'd suggest you do the same, and keep going:

• Height, every spring. One line, one date. That's the spine of it.
• A championship. The date and who you beat.
• A new personal best. Most catches in a minute, longest plank, fastest pipe-to-pipe.
• A save he'll never forget. He'll tell you which one.
• Anything he wants to remember. It's his wall. He gets to decide what goes on it.

Ten years from now that edge is going to be the single best thing you own from this whole era, and it costs you a pencil.

Every one of them is different

Here's the other thing about building rather than buying: nobody else's looks like yours.

Ours is white, which was a deliberate choice. My wife is an artist, and Weston has caught it from her — he's into graffiti art at the moment, and a four-by-eight white panel in the driveway is, from where he's standing, the best canvas that has ever appeared in his life. He's going to practice styles on it. We'll paint targets on it too, and those will get repainted as he gets better and the targets need to get smaller.

So our wall is going to change every few months for years, and it will never look like anybody else's. That's not a side effect. That's the point.

Your goalie might want it in his team colors. He might want it plain. He might want his number four feet high on the back of it. Let him choose the color and let him hold the roller — it takes the thing from equipment your dad bought to mine, and that difference shows up in how often he goes out there.

There's no LAX Goalie Hub logo on this wall, by design. It isn't ours. It's his.

If you're the goalie reading this

That wall is going to see more of your work than anybody else ever will.

Nobody is watching when you're out there. No coach is going to tell you that you did a good job on a Tuesday in January when it's thirty-eight degrees and you went out anyway and got your hundred. The wall doesn't care and it doesn't clap.

It keeps score in its own way, though. In a year the face is going to be covered in marks where the ball has hit it, and the densest patch will be exactly where you've been working. That's your work, made visible.

And the marks on the side are going to show you something else — that you got taller, and better, and that somebody was keeping track.

Paint it however you want. It's yours.

Where we got it wrong

I'm going to tell you this because you'll see it in the build video, and because it matters.

We forgot the glue.

The design is a sandwich: plywood face, a 2×4 ladder stuffed with sound batts, a thin back skin. Glue and screws are what turn those three separate layers into one stiff slab. We ran all the screws and skipped every bead of adhesive, and only noticed afterward.

Our wall feels solid, and it is not going to fall apart — there are a couple of hundred screws in it and the stability comes from the legs and the sand, not from the glue, but the glue is doing two jobs we've now given up:

1. It's what keeps it stiff for ten years. Screws work loose over seasons. Glue doesn't. Without it, expect "dead spots" sooner, where the face has let go from the frame behind it.
2. It's part of what makes it quiet. Layers that can move against each other ring more than layers bonded into one. The quietness is the entire reason this design can go to a park.

So: don't skip the glue. It's four tubes and twenty minutes.

We're going to pull our back skin off — it's only screwed on — lift the batts out, run a fillet of adhesive along both sides of every stud and rail where they meet the face, and close it back up properly. About an hour. I'd rather do that than hand my son a wall that's good for three seasons instead of ten.

I'll report back on how much quieter it gets.

The build guide

The whole thing is written up: every part, every cut, every step, with drawings. The lumber yard makes all nine cuts for you, so the only tool you genuinely need is a cordless drill. Two people, one afternoon, and everything on the list ran about $325 before tax this fall.

Download The Wall build guide →

It's free, and there's nothing in the way of it — no signup, no email, nothing to join. If you want to send it to another goalie family, please do. I'd rather more kids had a wall in the driveway than put a gate in front of a plan for a plywood panel.

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The program puts wall work in the week every Wednesday, with a specific prescription rather than "go hit the wall." 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

General information from a coach, not construction or engineering guidance. Anything you build or buy for your athlete to use is your decision and your responsibility — make sure it's stable, supervise its use, and consult someone qualified if you're unsure about a structure. Follow the safety rules in the guide, and never let a child climb on, hang from, or lean anything against a free-standing panel.