Pro Tips (and Drills) with Thomas Speer
- Use BlazePods to train reactive lateral pushes: goalies skate backward and push to whichever light appears in their peripheral vision without anticipating direction.
- Avoid c-cutting during breakaway lateral movement — Speer coaches goalies to drift and push from a balanced two-skate stance instead.
- Separate age and experience levels at skating stations to allow coaches to tailor feedback and progression for each group.
- Breakaway management requires three distinct skill sets: timing and speed-matching, forward hand protection on the lateral push, and balanced reactive skating.
- Thomas Speer, a three-season Sharks goalie coach and 2024 World Championship gold medalist with Team USA, led this three-drill breakaway session at a Pacific Coast Goaltending camp in Seattle.
InGoal Magazine spent a morning with San Jose Sharks goalie coach Thomas Speer and his team at Pacific Coast Goaltending at their recent camp in Seattle for what turned into a three-drill session focused on being able to better manage breakaways and shootouts.
The focus for this three-station session was born out of goalies at the camp struggling during a shootout competition in the second on-ice session the previous afternoon. It started with Speer, who has been with the Sharks for three seasons and recently was part of the American team that won gold at the World Championships for the first time since 1933, walking the kids through his keys to managing breakaways before rotating through three drills, each with a different key and focal point related to the skills required.
You can watch the overview in Part 1, which included the first drill focused on timing and matching speed. From there, we moved onto the second drill, which was all about getting good rotation and forward hand protection on the lateral push.
This third drill was all about skating. There were no pucks.
Instead, instructors used BlazePods controlled by an App: one the goalie tapped with their stick to initiate each rep, and two more to the sides behind them that lit up randomly. Goalies started their backwards skating, then pushed across to whichever side lit up.
“The whole point of this drill is basically start moving backwards and evenly on both skates and you’re not looking until it comes into your peripheral, and then when you see that light, you’re just pushing to that light from a balanced stance,” Speer said. “You don’t want to be c-cutting. You want to just get some drift, see the light and push. That’s all it is.”
There were two skating stations using the BlazePods out near center ice: one had younger goalies and the other had slightly older, more experienced goalies, which allowed guest goalie coach Darin Campbell, who is the Pacific District Goalie Coach for USA Hockey and the Goaltending Director for the Sno-King Association in Seattle, to make the work more dynamic, adding a second push to the far pod after reacting to the one that lit up:
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