The lad’s first 11-a-side game, in the form of a Summer league on state of the art, 3G pitches, to get the team used to playing next season’s football – under 13’s, 11-a-side on a much bigger pitch.
As a grassroots parent, sounds like a good plan doesn’t it?
The worry for me as the goalkeeper coach, since the end of the under 12’s, naturally, has been the changes for the keeper, mainly the size of the goals in comparison to the height of the goalie.
To be fair, it was the same worry 2 years ago, going from u10’s to u11’s, only this time, the difference between the last man and the target is big. And I mean huge. This is not helped by the fact that the u13’s goal dimensions are only recommended, not compulsory. As it’s only a recommendation, many grassroots clubs don’t have this particular size, as these goals will only be used during u13’s and u14’s. At u15’s the goals are full size anyway. It means that this season, the young keeper in question can ‘look forward’ to moving from u12 size goals to full size goals, if not every game, then plenty of times over the next season.
The keeper in question is not only the lad I coach but also my son. He is about the average height for a lad of his age. To give you an example, he can just touch the crossbar, if he’s standing on the goal line and jumps with one arm fully extended above his head. When he’s a yard or two off his line, any shot dropping a foot to 18 inches under the bar will most likely beat him, especially if its either side of him.
I know this is likely to be the case for a high percentage of keepers at the same age as him and some parents/coaches and their keepers will worry more than others but it raised a lot of concerns from the point of view of the goalkeeper, as well as the coach and the parent.
As he walked over for his first proper warm up in the goal, you could read his mind.
He had trained in full size goals for a good deal of the previous season (again because of a lack of the right size ones) but had always had the safety net of them being much bigger than the match day goals he’d be facing shots in. The common theory is that if you can keep shots out of a full size goal, you can keep them out of smaller goals, can’t you. Anyway, shots just below the bar or just inside the post that beat the keeper in training don’t matter too much because they’ll go over or wide on a Sunday, or he’ll at least have a fighting chance of saving them.
Just for the record, he hates being beaten by any shot, whether it’s in training or during a game. Absolutely hates it. As much as I’ve reasoned with him – either as his dad or his coach – over the last few years about no keeper being able to keep everything out, it annoys him, angers him even. Not a bad attitude to have I suppose. The only danger is him dwelling on it, while the game carries on around him, leading to a lapse in concentration.
But it had dawned on him that these size goals were for real now.
It had dawned on me weeks, even months ago. The odds were going to be stacked against him I thought but I was thinking this possibly only a matter of minutes after the full time whistle on the final day of last season. I tried to come up with a plan, as his coach, to work on things which could help as we moved towards the new season. I was also panicking, as his dad, at the thought of the new season later in the year and the ball whistling past him quite a lot. It’s the hardest position on the pitch and it’s about to get more difficult.
To be honest, I think he’s a decent goalie, with a certain amount of natural ability but unless he can grow about 18 inches in the next 3 or 4 months, I know he’s going to be picking the ball out of the back of the net with a fair bit more regularity than previous seasons, regardless of how much training we do. We’d had a few chats about working on the usual fundamental goalie stuff – that’s a given – but agreed that his footwork was going to need some major work to help him as much as possible with his movement across goal.
Apart from me coaching him once a week, he also does an hour of specific goalkeeping training at CYG Goalkeeping. He’s been going for nearly a year and there’s no doubt in my mind that the experience and dedication of the coaches there has helped him greatly. I also take away quite a lot from these sessions as I can see what we can use in his grassroots training, as well as trying to train him specifically in areas where he needs to develop. He enjoys going and is keen to learn, which helps a lot.
Because of all my worries about the goal size, his height, the need for specific training and because he wants to, we’ve done a couple of 1:1 sessions, just him and me. A lot of the things we do are the key fundamentals taken from CYG and previous training sessions, drills and practices from clips I’ve watched on YouTube and things I was taught at his age. I always add something to try to make it enjoyable for him as well.
I guess that last bit sums up my worries – I don’t want him to stop enjoying being a goalkeeper – and I see this season being as big a test of his mentality as it is his physicality.
I plan to keep adding more to this blog as the weeks go by, to show how he (and me) copes throughout the Summer league and into the new season. Keep the faith.
Keeper of the faith 