Parents: How anger affects our goaltender–and our role as parents in supporting our goalie.

Hutch. Daren, last week, I really enjoyed getting into a little bit of science again. I don't know if you remember, but my academic background is a graduate degree in sports science. And last week, I was responding to a question from an individual goalie parent about, people talking to their goalie before the game. And I dug a little deeper and got into what happens when you're cheering, for your goalie, whether it's positively or negatively during a game.

And, enjoyed so much of that digging into science that this one popped into my head for this week, which is, talking a little bit about emotion and anger specifically with with young goaltenders. Few people shape a young goalie's mindset more than their parents, especially in minor hockey. And, today, I wanted to talk about one of our emotional responses and how it affects our young goalies. I wanna talk about anger and what it does to athletic performance with some research back points for you to consider. First, anger hurts decision making.

It tends to make you decide faster but less accurately, which, is not very good for a position built on split second reads. Anger narrows our focus. It, creates a a threat tunnel that shrinks peripheral awareness, and goalies rely on that a lot to scan and track for multiple threats. Anger creates muscle tension. Your heart rate goes up, your muscles tighten, and your fine motor control drops.

Fluid movement and timing are going to suffer. Anger drains your working memory. Your attention shifts to the trigger point instead of the play. Pattern recognition and adaptation are shown to have declined. Anger disrupts your anticipation.

Goaltending thrives on controlled intensity, not anger. Precision sports constantly break down when your arousal gets too high, like when you're angry. Anger also increases risk taking, so it'll lead to overcommitting, chasing plays, abandoning structure. In short, anger almost never helps a goaltender.

It leads to impulsive reactions instead of patient reading, exactly what a goalie can't afford. Goal tending thrives on controlled intensity, not anger. Precision sports constantly break down when your arousal gets too high, like when you're angry. Anger also increases risk taking, so it'll lead to overcommitting, chasing plays, abandoning structure. In short, anger almost never helps a goaltender.

Might help somewhere like a weight room for one immediate rep of something, but not in the crease. So what does this mean for us as parents? Well, too often we carry anger around the rink about tryout results, ice time, referees, screens, other teams poking at covered pucks, shots to the head, you name it. And most of the time, we express that anger right in front of our young goalie. It's well intentioned, of course, because we want them to be happy.

We want them to be safe. We want them to be successful, but we're setting an example. We're modeling for them. And in the short term, we teach them to blame, to react and to get worked up. Over time, we teach them that anger is the default response to adversity.

Then we send them onto the ice with that mindset. And that mindset makes performance worse. The exact opposite of what we'd hoped for. The truth is these frustrations happen to every goaltender and every goalie parent. We can't control most of it, but we can control our example.

We need to learn to let go. We need to learn to accept the things that we can't change as goalie parents. A calmer goalie parent will build a calmer goalie, and a calmer goalie will perform better, will feel better, and will enjoy the game more.

It's hard because you wanna support your child. You wanna show them that you're supporting your child.

Yeah. No. Absolutely. They're completely normal ways to be, but, they're also counterproductive. And I I think we need to work on our mindset as parents as much as we, you know, parents invest a lot into mental skills, mental training for the young goaltenders.

I would argue that some of that money invested in our own mental preparation might help our kids just as much.