Podcast Segment for Goalie Parents – Episode 276

Hey. Part three of your three part series on stats, in the Mhmm. Stop It Goaltending U the app parent segment.

Before we get into the stats, we should probably tell you about one of the features on Stop It Goaltending U, the app. We touched on it last week. I wanna remind people, reports, game reports. You can order just go to the services section on the app. If you wanna sample it, you can order a single game.

You can buy a package of eight. You can buy a package of 24. You upload the video to a dedicated Google Drive folder in your name, and a Stop It Goaltending coach will watch the video. He'll track the stats for you. And I know Hutch is gonna get into that a little bit using their software, which gives you things like expected goals and save percentage, kinda give you a flavor for just what type of chances your son or daughter was actually facing in that game and what the expected results would be at that age level, at that skill level.

They make notes. They do a voice over, clip by clip breakdown of the video you submit. Basically, like a ProReads session, but with your own goalie coach, in this case, one of the Stop It Goaltending coaches. It's video game reports. It's available on Stop It Goaltending U, the app, exclusively and also available when you get a subscription to Stop It Goaltending U, the app.

Not just available. It's included. A one year subscription or as an ongoing subscription to InGoalmag, the premium product. So then you can take everything you've done with your video game reports and compare notes to how the NHL do it. Something Jake Allen's gonna talk about in our feature interview, how to watch video and learn from it.

You can do that yourself with Stop It Goaltending U, the app.

Alright. But he did a pretty good job there. He likes to give away the Christmas presents early. He only unveiled a little bit of today's talk.

It's called a tease.

I know. Not bad. Not bad. Not bad. We began this series, guys, talking about why I think that keeping shots on goal and save percentage for your kid isn't all that useful and more importantly, it doesn't give you any feedback that you can use to become a better goaltender.

Last week, I shared some of my thoughts on talking to your goalie after a game in a way that can be useful and is more focused on process than on numbers and doesn't really use stats. So this week, said I would come back and talk about what if you really really really want to take some stats but wanna do it in a more meaningful way. I've got a couple of ideas for you. Interestingly, guys, shortly after we published our show last week, quite by coincidence, we noticed on Instagram that Stop It Goaltending's Brian Daccord shared a similar concept to what we were talking about last week. That idea of looking at goals from the should have had, could have had, and no chance perspectives.

I would suggest you go check out Stop It's Instagram, see Brian's, video on that so you can learn a little bit more about how you can take that and then interpret it after a game. But as we said, shots on goal have no context. A breakaway from Connor McDavid is a shot, and so is a dump in from center ice that happens to hit the net. So simply counting shots isn't doing anything to help your goaltender become a better goalie. So what can you as a parent or if you're a goalie coach listening to this, you might be interested to know as well.

What can you do that could be a little bit better? One thing you can do is keep track of a bit more information than just shots, and we'll talk about a tool that Woody's already teased that's good for this, but you can also design your own system. Before that though, we also talked about having conversations with your child about what they're learning in practice, what they're working on, especially if they're lucky enough to have a goalie coach that they work with. But even if they're on their own, we want them to become their own best goalie coach. So what have you been doing this week?

Before a game, you can say, what would you like some feedback on today? And you don't need to be a goalie coach to do this, parents. There's a great book that, I came upon again today called the inner game of tennis, and it's subtitled The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance. What's cool about this book is it's based around tennis but applies to just about every sport using a method that can help your athlete even if you don't know the sport so well. And it's as simple as saying to them, what do you want me to watch for?

And maybe it would be your goalie telling you something like, I really wanna make sure my heels are on top of the crease when I'm facing a shot. Okay. I'm gonna count those for you today, and I'm also gonna count the number of times I think you could have done it, but you didn't. Now there's a lot more to the inner game of tennis's method than simply counting. There's a way of providing feedback and so on, and I'll I'll leave a link to the book if anybody's interested in reading it.

It's a it's a quick read. But it is a great way of helping. Simply having this idea of counting something that you're working on really will help you focus on it and become better and learn from that process. So that's one thing. You can also have your own system for tracking shots that's a little bit more than just how many were taken in a particular game.

So grab yourself a piece of paper and write down some of the things that you'd like to track in that game for your son or daughter. Now one of them might be that thing along the inner game of tennis lines that your goaltender has said that they would like to be working on in that game. And then you can have a couple of other boxes that you might wanna track, like how many puck handles did they have that resulted in the puck going to their own team, or how many rebounds did they control, or how many times did they catch a puck cleanly. Those sort of things you can put on your piece of paper and just little tick marks. How many times did they happen?

And if you really, really wanna track shots, I would suggest that you create a few categories. One of them, maybe we call them grade a's, include things like breakaways. Shots that begin with a a pass across the middle of the ice, shots with a screen or a tip or maybe a two on one. You don't have to be a goalie coach to recognize these sort of things. You might have another category that you're gonna keep track of for shots that we all know are are really tough shots.

Shots in the house, that area between the dots, right above the crease. Those are difficult shots. So maybe you've got another one for shots that are fairly simple. Clear sighted long shots, shots from the corner that really had no chance of going in. And with those three boxes and maybe those other pieces of information you're tracking, you can give better feedback to your goaltender because a grade a shot like that at just about any level, those breakaways, those tips, those screenshots, you should be stopping something more like two thirds of them, not 90%.

Those long distance ones, you should be stopping 95% of them or even more. But by simply having those little boxes that you're keeping track of, you can give some feedback from with your stats that's a little bit more realistic to what's happening in a game. Now back to Woody's Tees. If you want an option that has a system built in that is much more sophisticated, that gives you game reports, that get emailed to you, that lets you report not just on save percentage, but an expected save percentage. What would a an average goalie at that particular level have done in that game?

Or an expected number of goals based on the type of shots that you faced. Again, different depending whether you're a pro, you're a junior goaltender, you're a minor hockey goaltender. All based on the type of shots, then Stop It Goaltending's game day app is a great way to go. You work with a phone or an iPad, and you track every shot that your goaltender faces. They've categorized them into four major types, and then each of those have subtypes as well.

You just have to click on a on a little box as each shot happens, and then they will create that game report, the expected goals, the expected save percentage based on the input that you've given. They also track things like rebound retention, glove performance, playmaking, and so on. The reports that they give you give you a much better idea of how you performed in a game. So, you know, if you're on a team that's given up a ton of grade a shots, the app is gonna know what percentage of those should go in at your level. And instead of simply deciding that 900 isn't good enough, you can learn that, no.

You know what? In that game, an 850 or an 800 might have actually been a a pretty good expected save percentage. Or maybe you gave up five goals and you're feeling a little bit depressed, but based on the shots you faced, the game day app's gonna tell you, no. An average goalie in that game would have given up 6.2, so great job. Or sometimes we have to face the negative side of those two things.

I've used the app for my son. I've used my app for junior a goalies I've coached. I've used it for goalies at other levels, and and I think it's great. And I'll be honest though, I I don't use it every single game. The feedback chats I talked about last week, think are much more of what I use when I'm working with a goaltender because I wanna focus on the process.

I don't wanna focus so much on the results. But sometimes you have a goalie whose mental picture of their performances just doesn't fit what you're seeing. Or if you're a goalie coach, please not if you're a parent, but if you're a goalie coach and you work with a head coach whose own view of what's happening on the ice doesn't really line up with yours, that Stop It game day app and their reports that they create for you are super helpful. I've literally sent those reports to head coaches at the junior a level to say, you know what? Your goalie is actually playing pretty well here and here's why.

And and they've been super, super helpful. So I still believe that you should focus more on the process than the results and and even expected goals or results. But if you want to keep track or if you've got a specific instance where you think it's going to be helpful, doing so with a bit of context is highly recommended. Whether you use your own system, whether you use the system from Stop It or another, just a couple of options that you could work with. Love getting feedback on this series from people as we have.

If you have any feedback on this or anything you wanna chat about, hit me up parents@ingoalmag.com.

Just wanna look at the the entire idea of stats for your son or daughter.

Mhmm.

It's not like any stat is better than no stat. It really does it really does have to have some more fine tuning than that. Right?

100% agree with that. I've I've been in conversations with people where they say that same thing. No. But it but it's the only thing we have, so we need to use it. No.

If it's flawed, it's worse than using nothing. So I absolutely agree with you. And look, the truth is most goalie parents, at least in my experience that are doing this, want to use those stats because they want to give their kid better feedback. Because quite frankly, the other people in the stands or on the team who only watch NHL games where announcers tell you they needed to have a nine twenty that game or oh my gosh, that was an eight fifty. What a terrible game.

More often than not, we're coming to the defense of our child. Not so much saying to other parents, yes, but that was a 70 shot game, but just for our child. We wanna help them through this experience. But I think that if we can help them with more context, if we can help them with more on process, that ultimately we're gonna get them much further down the road of becoming an elite goaltender than if we just make excuses for them. And and I don't mean excuses in in the negative sense.

I simply mean give them reasons to feel okay based on numbers. I think if we can give them some real context to evaluate their performance and their progress, it's gonna be much better for them in the long run.

One more on the Stop It Goaltending, idea of game reports for your son or daughter. We don't limit it to just children. Right? If if you are an avid rec leaguer, you can subscribe to that if you if you really want to know where you are. Like, the market's not limited there.

Yeah. If you happen to be like the 19, 20 year old kid that played against me a couple of years ago and at the end of the game came down, shook my hand, and asked me how you played. And when I said I was so exhausted, wasn't watching, he said, that's okay. My dad was tracking it from the bar upstairs. He'll give me a report after.

This is for you.

Awesome. That's awesome. I hope his dad's using game day and not just giving him a save percentage.

I loved

it. Because the wide open looks you get in beer league. Look. One thing game day does is, they ask you at the beginning of the game, what level is this? Is it junior?

Is it college? Is it pro? Is it minor hockey? They don't have a category right now for beer.

Oh, it's pro. That's okay. Or or

rec league, high high caliber rec league.

Brian Daccord and team, I think you need to get out there and figure that out for for Darren and Woody. And I'm What? If you're a goaltender

People will use it in rec leagues.

Yeah. And if you've got a a spouse or a partner who is kind enough to sit there and track it for you, good on you. Otherwise, you could put the GoPro behind you, and then you could track it yourself afterwards. Because that's actually what I do often with goalies I work with is you're just watching the video afterwards. It is sometimes tough, especially when you're just beginning to use game day and understand the system.

It's tough to track it in real time because you have to learn about all those shot types and so on. But after a couple of games, it becomes pretty fluent and pretty quick.

Where would you put the camera? Serious question. On the side or behind? Behind.

I I mean, most of the most of the video I've used it with is not behind, and it's just fine. I don't know that it matters to figure this out. Does it, Woody?

I have no idea. I just instinctively said behind. Because I love that view. I wish we had more of it. We see it on power plays in the broadcast where they sort of have that fish eye from behind above the glass.

I love that view for reading plays and figuring things out.

Do call it?

Fletcher? What is it? Fletcher?

I don't know why. Yeah. Don't know why it's called that. But but if you're gonna put it behind that, it's gotta be higher, and that's tough to do if you're just

don't I think it matters from the the the context of stats, but I think Woody's right. If you wanna see how the play developed in front of you, it's it's a good great way to

Oh, it doesn't matter. Okay.

Behind the net. Yeah.

Fascinating stuff.

Matters as long as you can see what happened.

And if you wanna participate in the in the app, the game reports, the game day app, how do you go about that?

I just go to the App Store, whatever type of device you happen to use. It's on the App Store, but we'll provide a link in the show notes for sure.

I was just gonna say link in show notes. Thank you very much. But one thing to be clear, guys, just so you know, Stop It Goal Tending U the app. If you go under services, that's where you can order a video game like a game day report. But the app that Hutch is talking about for tracking shots, which is called the Stop It Game Day app, is actually a separate app, from this it's not included in Stop It Goaltending U, so we should make that clear.

It's actually a completely separate app.

Okay. So three different things. You've got Stop It You. You've got Stop It's GameDay app, and then you can also get the game reports. Those are all

And the game reports are different things. Under services in the Stop It You. Stop It Goaltending U, the app.

Clear as mud.

That's good, though. When we're explaining it, it that's how it goes.