Greg Sicotte
Founder and head coach of LAX Goalie Hub. A goalie coach at Stanwood Youth Lacrosse and the club’s Vice President, in Snohomish County, Washington.
USA Lacrosse certified coachI am not really in the business of making better goalies.
I am in the business of making better adults. The crease is just where we do it.
Why the crease
Goalie is the only place in youth sport where a child is defeated in public, unambiguously, several times an hour — and has to be ready for the next shot immediately. There is no teammate to point at and nowhere to hide. The scoreboard keeps the record.
A ten-year-old who learns to let that go and play the next ball is learning something that has almost nothing to do with lacrosse. Show up on the days you don’t feel like it. Keep an honest number on yourself. Let the bad moment go. I have never met an adult who was worse off for having those three habits.
That is why this runs every day for ten years instead of as a weekend camp. You cannot install a habit in a weekend. You can only build one a day at a time, for long enough that it stops being a decision.
The position nobody coaches
Most lacrosse coaches never played goalie, so it is the one position on the field being taught by someone who is guessing. Every other kid gets coaching. The goalie gets encouragement.
What I brought to it
I should say this plainly, because it matters: I never played goalie. I came to the position as a coach and as a parent and had to learn it deliberately, in order, from the beginning — which turns out to be exactly the right preparation for writing it down for somebody else. A person who has always been able to do a thing is rarely the best person to explain it.
I build people for a living
I do not coach for a living. I built and run DAPrDAN, a service company with two branches — Western Washington and North Central Washington — covering eleven counties and serving some of the most discerning households in the state. A company like that does not run on talent. It runs on systems, skill development and individual character — which is the same problem as a goalie, in different clothes.
I know what ten years of daily work does
I raced velodrome cycling at national and world-class level, including two summers in Australia, and came home with a handful of national and state titles. Nobody wins on a track because of one big effort. You win because of a small, correct session repeated for years. That is the entire thesis of this program, learned the hard way.
And a year spent studying what lasts
I studied history and architecture for a year at Oxford. It is not a coaching qualification and I would not pretend otherwise. What it gave me was the habit of looking at something that has stood for a long time and asking why. A ten-year curriculum is an architecture problem before it is a lacrosse one.
The formal work is done too. I am a usa lacrosse certified coach, and the curriculum follows the USA Lacrosse Athlete Development Model — the governing body’s framework for what is appropriate at each age — rather than my own opinions about what a nine-year-old should be able to do.
Written before a single family paid for it
Nothing here is generated the morning it sends, and nothing waits on someone finding the time to write it. The whole ten years existed before the program was released. It took a lifetime of experience and months of writing.
Where I actually coach
I am a goalie coach at Stanwood Youth Lacrosse, and the club’s Vice President. Everything in this program has been run past real kids on a real field in Snohomish County before it went anywhere near an inbox.
That is also the honest limit of it. I am a club coach in Washington, not a college program. What I can promise is that the work is age-appropriate, that it is written down properly, and that it arrives every single morning.
Questions go to me
Whether the program suits a particular goalie, which grade to start in, anything at all — write to coach@laxgoaliehub.com and I answer it myself.
There is a contact form if that is easier.
What I am actually building
A goalie who does this for ten years will be a good goalie. Honestly, that is close to beside the point.
What I want is the twenty-five-year-old who still shows up on the day they don’t feel like it, still keeps an honest number on themselves, and still knows how to let a bad moment go and play the next one. Those three habits are the whole program. Lacrosse is the excuse to show up 3,640 times.
Keep your eye on the ball — Coach Greg
The fairest way to judge any of this is to read a week of it. It is published in full, free, with nothing to enter.
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