It’s a good time to be a young goalie.
Without wanting to harp on about them “not knowing they’re born”, it wasn’t anything like this in my day!
A lot of the young goalies you see attending specialised goalkeeper training sessions, or even weekly camps for that matter, will take it for granted because they’ve never known anything else. In my lad’s case, it was only in his first year of playing, at under 8’s, that he didn’t have some sort of goalkeeper training but just trained with the outfield players. When the under 9’s pre-season training was underway, his new manager had told him one of his contacts was going to come in each week to do specific goalkeeper training with him. The team’s training sessions went by, week by week and nothing happened.
Although the role of the goalkeeper has changed a fair bit since I used to play back in the 90’s and it is now vital that keepers use their feet with about as much skill as outfield players, I started to worry that the goalie specific training hadn’t materialised and he was just doing exactly the same drills as his team mates – with all the other players lining up at the end to have shooting practice at him.
Although I had never done any coaching before, whenever I had played, it was always as a goalkeeper and so I put myself forward to help. I thought, something’s better than nothing. It wasn’t a totally selfish gesture either. Although I would be training my own lad, I would also be training the team’s other goalie, as their team played in the double team league.
When I played, I was lucky that the Dad of one of my mates had been a good keeper in his day and said he’d help out by training me. Maybe he’d seen me play and realised I needed all the help I could get. This was well before the days of the internet, so the training he gave me was very much based on the training he’d had and the drills and warm ups he’d done. I don’t know for certain but I’d guess in the early 90’s that being in this situation, I was in a very small minority of junior league keepers that had their own coach. I was an OK standard when I played but something like that must have given me an edge, a slight advantage over other keepers in the teams we were playing against.
Things have moved on since then, as have the training methods (and the ease of access via the internet to download training plans or drills) but I’ve always been thankful for the time and effort Pete gave, to try to improve me as a goalie. He was my one and only coach really.
These days in junior football, I would think you might be in the minority if as a keeper, you don’t have your own coach, whether that’s for your grassroots team or at specialised training sessions such as CYG Goalkeeping. Since moving clubs a couple of years back, my lad was in a similar situation to the one he was in before, so again I offered to help but was well aware of how times change and how I should too. So I decided to complete my first coaching qualification, the FA level 1 goalkeeping course. I wanted to be a proper coach for my lad and help him as much as I could.
Since completing the course, I’ve become even more obsessive about goalkeeping and more structured in how I approach our sessions. The most important thing is and will always be, that he enjoys playing and training. But in recent weeks, there’s been a change in his attitude, possibly linked to the imminent move up to 11-a-side and he seems to really have got the bit between his teeth, to push on to be as good as he can be. Another likelihood is that over recent weeks and months, he’s seen quite a few of the other lads he knows or trains with, spend time with either development, or shadow squads, whereas he hasn’t.
It’s a possibility that he thinks that somebody’s saying he’s not as good as them but he’s never been bothered about going to open trials, he’s always been more than happy with his grassroots team. If I’m honest I don’t know enough about the system to make an informed choice and I’ve always been a bit concerned about him doing too much and it leading to him losing interest. Also, you hear good things about academies and the like but also plenty of horror stories, where lads are left feeling demoralised because they’re deemed as not good enough.
I always think if he’s good enough, somebody will see it on a Sunday. And if it doesn’t happen and he’s happy as he is, then so be it. He’s getting top quality goalkeeper coaching at CYG, from coaches with a wealth of experience that would be hard to match anywhere else. And I take something away from every session that we can use at his grassroots training.
Whatever happens, 
I’ll just keep the faith.
Keeper of the faith 