Progressive Skill Development is Next Evolution in VR Training

It’s been almost five years since we first introduced Sense Arena and the idea of stopping pucks in virtual reality as a legitimate training tool for goalies right up to the NHL.

Perhaps the best part of working with the company since those early days has been seeing the constant advancements. Like the position itself, Sense Arena never stops evolving.

Which brings us to the latest offering: the Goalie Advancement Program, or GAP for short, a significant enough step forward that we felt the need to write another overview.

While most of the improvements in Sense Arena over the past five years have focused on giving goalies more tools to train their game, eyes and brains when they don’t have access to ice, they never really structured a progressive training program that guides you through how to use those tools. Much like InGoal Magazine, they simply presented the tools for improvement and left goalies to decide which ones they wanted to put in their toolbox.

Until now.

With guidance from long-time NHL goalie coach, scout and director Brian Daccord, they created GAP, Sense Arena’s first comprehensive training program, designed for two months of structured activities to optimize development and skill refinement.

The first three focal points are Angles, Managing Traffic, and Reading a Release.

Each of these three skills includes eight levels ranging from basic to advanced and each level includes three training days to ensure progressive development, with daily sessions of 6-8 drills and 8-10 minutes of focused work per drill. There are also three difficulty levels — easy, medium and hard — to ensure that goalies can progress at their own pace.

Daccord, who consulted his son and Sense Arena user Joey Daccord of the Seattle Kraken, helps guide you through each stage with specific tips and advice. It’s like having the Boston University goalie coach directing your summer training – without having to pay for ice.

LEARN HOW TO READ A RELEASE

Over the coming weeks, InGoal Magazine will deep dive all three elements of GAP, starting today with the “Shot Release Mastery Course.” We have to admit the idea of watching shots — and different parts of the shooter’s bodies — without trying to make a save as the starting point made us smile thinking back to similar advice from retired NHL goalie Craig Anderson about working to get better at reading releases by not watching the puck.

“At the end of practice, at the beginning of practice, stand on your goal line, don’t even watch the puck, watch the body and just see what the body’s doing,” Anderson told InGoal for a Pro Tips published almost exactly five years ago. “If you don’t stop any, it doesn’t matter. You’re not trying to stop the puck. If he shoots glove-side high, you obviously know because it just went by your high glove, but you weren’t watching the puck, you were watching their body, watching their eyes, watching their hands, was the puck back in their skates, or forward, and that stuck with me since I was 20-21 years old. That is how you learn, how you understand, and when you go back to watching the puck, you’re still picking up those cues in the background as opposed to the foreground.”

That’s the same thought process behind “ghosting” in the first drills in the Sense Arena Shot Release Mastery plan, all part of learning to read a release based on shooter cues.

As you work through the various training plans, Daccord tells you to watch different parts of the shooter’s body: from the eyes to the lead shoulder, to hands, knees, hips, skates and finally the stick blade. With each one, you do through a progression of shooting options, some from the slot, some with passes to multiple options or from behind the net, as well as players skating into the middle from off the wall before shooting. Each time, you watch a body part for the first run through of a drill, paying attention to the cues Daccord outlines and where the puck goes before then try to make a save second time through.  

According to Daccord, this is something regular Sense Arena user Devon Levi does. 

“He’d sit on his couch and spend hours just watching players release the puck,” Daccord said. “This is where he became really good at anticipating where that shot was going.” 

And that’s just the first of six levels in the GAP Shot Release Mastery Course!

As you work up through the levels, you will focus on different aspects of reading a release, including the handedness and positioning of a shooter, with Daccord walking you through some of the same drills he uses to hone the skills of his goalies at Boston University, including having them call out where a shot is headed before it leaves the blade.

See if you can do it successfully watching this screen capture from one of our sessions:

In Level 3 you work with Sense Arena’s Shot Predictor, which has the puck disappear as the shot it taken, testing your ability to predict the path using all that information you’ve been learning to interpret instinctively, and then see the path after to know if you got it right. 

We screen-captured a sample session below. See if you can predict where the shot is headed based on the shooter’s tells after the puck disappears:

In Level 4, they add a high tip option, continuing to layer the complexity of reading releases with the option now of a pass or shot-pass to a player in the high slot, as well as reading how that player is positioned, what hand they are, and how the angle of their stick blade changes the direction of a deflected puck. Like the entire program, it’s progressive, adding depth as part of the decision making in terms of cutting off a puck or having time to react.

Level 4 also includes the use of the shot predictor as part of building those recognition patterns and ability to anticipate where the puck is going without seeing it: 

Level 5 digs into different shot types, from slap shot to pull-and-drag snapshots, wrist shots and more, focusing on anticipating a player’s intent before the shot by teaching you to identify the key indicators from the hands to the shoulders to the stick blade. Using game-like situations, the drills in Level 5 are designed to reinforce quick decision making.

Level 6 continues to build on earlier progress. stressing the importance of trying to keep your head level through the shot reading and save process, urging you to avoid unnecessary head movement or eye shifts that can be linked to adjusting from a high to a low stance, all while continuing to add more game-like complexity. This includes adding awareness of non-shooting players in a drill, both in terms of where they are and what hand they shoot with, and making sure rebound control keeps it away from them. 

This last level brings everything together in an increasingly dynamic, game-like situations, but it was interesting to note that the introductory video for Level 5 included a reminder to go back and work on earlier skills from lower levels to continue refining your ability to read shooters and their various releases. That point was driven him creating this review. 

The first time we reached the Shot Predictor in Level 3, we’d just come off all the previous “ghosting” and shot release reading drills and found our ability to properly anticipate where the shot was headed without being able to see the puck came naturally. 

But when we went back to do the screen-casting and captures a few days later, without going through the “ghosting” exercises immediately beforehand? Well, you can probably see how often the wrong glove appears to be reacting in the videos above. And while some of that is tied to our aging reviewer being a very “mid” goalie (it’s also true that the feed in the headset isn’t as smooth when screen-casting), a lot of it was the progression.

No wonder Devon Levi sits on his couch watching releases for hours.

All of which brings us back to Craig Anderson, who was widely regarded by his peers as the best pure release reader of his generation, and the fact that he was still doing his own version of “ghosting” deep into his 20-season NHL career. Of course, Anderson warned us to tell a coach in advance so they didn’t wonder why you aren’t stopping anything. He also played in the NHL, where practice ice and shooters are never in short supply. 

For the rest of us? Thanks to Sense Arena’s new Goalie Advancement Program and it’s Shot Release Mastery Course, you don’t have to worry about either problem. 

You can improve your release reading ability from the comfort of home, without paying for extra ice, and with Brian Daccord guiding you through it step by step. 

Even better? There’s still two more programs – Angles and Managing Traffic – to work on. 

Look for deep dives into both in the coming weeks. 

In the meantime, let us know below what you think of the Shot Release Mastery Course if you have a chance to try it out. Our one criticism was the appearance of a “score” for saves made during the ghosting sessions but expect that to be resolved in the future. 

Because, like the Goalie Advancement Program itself, Sense Arena is always evolving. 

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