We are continuing our discussion of the Goalie Stance and moving on to Key 3 or how you should position your basic Goalie Stick and a few extra points about how you should be holding it.
Key 3
First let’s define a few terms that will be used to make sure we are all on the same page. The stick is actually got a few parts that are sometimes called different things depending on where you are. The blade of the stick is the curved part on the bottom end of the stick that normally is in direct contact with the ice. The paddle is the next part up on the stick that continues the width of the blade and rises up along the shaft of the stick until about midway up the length of the stick. Then the shaft continues up until the end or cap of the stick. Most goalies will also wrap a bunch of tape around the end of the shaft so that there is a big knob on the end.
Almost all the time on the ice and especially in your ready stance you need to keep that blade down on the ice and out in front of your feet. Most importantly the blade should be far enough in front of your feet that the face of the blade should be at least 15 degrees from vertical. This does a couple of things. First it positions the blade in the very edge of the goalies peripheral vision so you know where it is. Second it also helps you to be ready to absorb the energy of a shot in almost the same way a skater would receive a hard pass and keep the puck on their stick. When in the goalie stance the blade should be centered between your feet as well.
All of this minimizes the distance you’ll move the stick for it to do its job, minimizing space and time to move it. And as always in hockey, keeping space and time to a minimum is probably the most important factor to the game.
Now to get the stick to be handled comfortably in the proper position you need to carefully consider the dimensions of the stick that you use. Sometimes if you are of average size, you can get lucky and just pick a good stick without much effort. But if your not you’ll need to consider some concepts of the stick dimensions.
There are three things to consider. The first isn’t really a dimension, but the pattern of the blade. This is a really personal selection that is really, just a matter of personal preference. The overall length of the stick is one of the critical dimensions. This one is another personal preference. To make this selection in your local hockey shop, stand up straight and hold a variety of sticks vertically in front of you. Note where the cap of the stick is in front of you. It should range between being even with your chin to your eyebrows when your standing with the stick straight up and down right in front of you with the tip on the ground. This dimension has more to do with what you can do with the stick rather than the helping your goalie stance. The shorter stick will allow for more precise stick handling at the expense of the amount of power you can exert. The longer sticks allow you to have a leverage advantage to impart more power to the puck with less precision.
And finally, you need to consider the length of the paddle of your stick. This is most important for a strong and comfortable goalie stance. It helps make sure that you keep the stick on the ice, your hand at the top of the paddle and that your Blocker is in the correct position when you are in your goalie stance. Back in the day, you either had to just deal with what you could get or had to make modifications to your stick, especially if you were a short guy. A lot of guys would cut a small part of the paddle off of the stick so they could position their hands further down on the shaft. Or if you were a tall guy, you’d have to have your hand off of the paddle which makes it hard to have a repeatable form. To address this some goalies would wrap an extra amount of tape where they wanted their hand to ride on the shaft. Now you should be able to take the time to get the feel for a particular length of paddle when trying on a new stick by either add or subtract to the paddle length to get a stick that helps you get in the right position. It has to be comfortable and maintaining the proper positioning of the blade in front of you with the proper minimum 15 degree angle from vertical.
Finally a lot of goalies will make a knob on the cap of their stick with a bunch of tape. There are a couple of reasons to do this. Most importantly it gives your hand a hard stop that you can use to know when you’ve thrown your stick out as far as you safely can without loosing your grip. The other is that this knob helps keep the handle end of the stick off the ice if you do loose your stick. This allows you to grip the stick with your gloved hand a little better because of the Blocker keeping you from easily picking it up.
Keeping all this together will help your game significantly as the stick is pretty important part of your game.
In the next post we’ll talk about Key 4, the overall positioning of your legs.