Most goalies either build these habits early or spend years compensating for not having them. Here's what they are, why they work, and how to reinforce them at every practice.
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If your goalie builds just three habits, they will be fundamentally ahead of most of their peers. You don't need advanced technique or specialized coaching to establish them — you just need to know what to look for and reinforce it consistently.
Goaltending is a position where bad habits form faster than good ones — because the natural responses to incoming pucks (flinching, dropping, guessing) are all wrong. Every rep your goalie takes either reinforces a good habit or a bad one, and the reps add up fast across a season.
The good news: technique is coachable at any age, but habits formed early are the foundation everything else is built on. A young goalie who tracks the puck, uses their stick, and challenges the shooter will make progress regardless of how refined their technique is. A goalie without those habits will plateau — and may actually get harder to coach as they get older and those patterns become more ingrained.
Roughly 80% of a youth goalie's practice time is spent with non-goalie coaches. That means you — the volunteer coach — are the single biggest influence on whether these habits get built. Knowing what to look for and reinforcing it consistently is the most valuable thing you can do.
Tracking the puck from the shooter's stick all the way into their own equipment is the single most important habit in youth goaltending. A goalie who tracks the puck well will find a way to get their equipment in front of the shot regardless of their formal technique. Nearly all soft goals — the ones that go through the five-hole, off the skate, or through the body — trace back to a goalie who stopped watching.
The problem is that flinching is a natural response to incoming pucks. Young goalies flinch involuntarily — not because they're afraid, but because the brain is doing what it's supposed to do. The habit of keeping your eyes open and tracking all the way through contact has to be built deliberately over time, through repetition in a controlled environment where the shots are manageable and the goalie has time to succeed.
Good tracking also gives the goalie control over what happens after the save. A goalie who watches the puck into their equipment knows where it went — into their chest, off their stick, toward the corner. A goalie who closed their eyes has no idea, and scrambles to find a puck that's already creating a second chance.
Most shots in early youth hockey travel along the ice. The stick is the most direct, most reliable tool for stopping those shots — and getting your goalie in the habit of using it to save and steer pucks accomplishes more than just stopping the shot.
A goalie who uses their stick to stop a shot has to track the puck all the way through contact. You can't steer something you're not watching. This makes the stick habit a direct reinforcement of the tracking habit — the two are inseparable. Every shot stopped with the stick is a rep of both habits at once.
The stick also gives the goalie the best control over where the puck goes after the save. A puck deflected with the stick can be directed into the corner, absorbed into the body, or redirected behind the net. Compared to a save made with the pad or the chest, stick saves give far more options. This is how young goalies start thinking past the shot — not just "did I stop it," but "where is it going now."
In the absence of this habit, young goalies default to dropping into a butterfly and hoping the puck hits them. That's not goaltending — that's hoping. The butterfly has its place, but it should follow the stick, not replace it.
When a goalie stands on the goal line, the shooter has the most possible net to aim at. When the goalie moves off the goal line — to the top of the crease or further — the shooter sees far less. This is called challenging the shooter, and at the youth level it's a simple, effective trade: shots are more likely to just hit the goalie or miss the net entirely.
The tradeoff is leaving more open net if the shooter makes a great pass or dekes. That tradeoff becomes more significant as players get older and more skilled. But at the youth level, most plays end in a shot — not a deke or a backdoor pass — which means a goalie who challenges aggressively will be in the right position far more often than one who plays deep.
A useful way to demonstrate this concept: place a puck near the bottom of a face-off circle. Have the goalie sit in a butterfly position behind the puck, facing the net. Then have someone stand on the goal line and point out how much net they can see — then move to the top of the crease and do the same. The visual difference is immediate and striking. Goalies who see this once tend to remember it.
You don't need a dedicated goalie session to build these habits. The most impactful things happen during ordinary team practice, in how you structure shooting drills and what you say between shots.
Give your goalie a heads-up before drills start so they can get into their ready position and know what's coming. Don't let skaters shoot back-to-back — give the goalie time to reset after each save. Watch specifically for eye tracking and stick position, not just whether the save was made. A goalie who made a save but closed their eyes learned the wrong lesson.
When you give feedback, keep it specific and limited to one thing at a time. "Great — you tracked that all the way in" tells the goalie exactly what they did right. "Good save" teaches nothing. A list of five corrections overwhelms and none of them stick. Think of it like a golf swing: give someone five things to fix and the next swing will be worse.
Three things consistently get in the way of good habits forming: shots that are too hard and too fast for the goalie's current level, poorly fitted equipment that limits movement and forces compensation, and correction overload that leaves the goalie thinking instead of reacting.
Shots that are overwhelming cause flinching. Flinching breaks tracking. If a goalie is flinching regularly, the shots need to slow down before technique can improve. End on a save every session — even if you have to make it easy. Confidence is part of the habit loop.
Equipment that doesn't fit — pads on the wrong legs, toe-ties that slide, skates that aren't tight enough through the ankle — introduces movement problems that look like technique problems. Before correcting technique, spend five minutes confirming the equipment is on right and doing what it's supposed to do.
And keep feedback to one or two things per session. Pick the most important habit to reinforce that day and stay on it. Over a full season, consistent reinforcement of three things beats scattered correction of thirty.
Key Takeaways
The full Goalie Guide training walks every coach in your association through these habits and more — in ten short modules, one flat fee, no goalie experience required.