336 Parents: Preparing like a Pro: How much is too much?

And it's a forward defending. Come with that. Yeah. Alright. Stop It Goaltending U, the app, a great partner of InGoal Magazine, with the parent segment, presentation with David Hutchison.

Let's, get the latest from Stop It Goaltending U, the app.

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This week, Daren, we're gonna talk about thinking less and and not more and our role as a parent to, to make sure that we're supporting our child in that. Before we get into it, I wanna frame it, though. This isn't about effort or commitment, and it definitely isn't gonna be a talk about being underprepared. It's about a mistake that I think a lot of well intentioned parents, probably including myself, make all the time, especially when we're exposed to a lot of pro level examples of preparation and how that mistake can quietly add some pressure instead of confidence. If you've ever wondered whether your child should be studying opponents more, remembering more details, or preparing like the pros, this segment's for you.

Because at most youth levels, the advantage isn't in knowing more. It's needing to think less. And start with a little story. Our son's third game in major junior hockey guys was a really good example of the dangers of over preparation. He'd played two games, already, and he'd done quite well.

But in both cases, he learned he was playing the morning of the game. The team was in a playoff hunt on the outside looking in, and in his second start, he helped the team get a key win. And with their starter injured, the coach was even heard to refer to Matthew as the starter. That didn't last very long. It meant he knew he was starting the next game with a full week to prepare against a team not just fighting for a playoff spot but for a championship.

And here's where things shifted. Instead of getting a few reps in practice, he got all the systems reps. And this coach was a details guy. He walked the team through multiple breakout scenarios, different scenarios on the forecheck and the coverage, how the team that they were playing played different situations. And there was a lot going through his head there.

And then believe it or not, something I'd never seen before. He even did video right before they headed out onto the ice for the for the warm up. He's a well respected coach and for 19 and 20 year olds, that level of preparation may might make sense. But for a 15 year old, it had to be overwhelming. And all that preparation ended up being for less than ten minutes that, the poor guy lasted in the net that night.

What's tricky here is that as parents, we don't mean to create pressure. We often inherit it. We hear stories about NHL goalies, and, of course, one of them quite recently was Samuel Montembeault and the fact that he knows every shooter's handedness in the National Hockey League and even the detail of what color tape they wear. And those stories are cool. They're impressive and they're meant to show professionalism.

But here's the problem. Those examples are rare and when they get amplified through the media, they start to feel normal. And without realizing it, we start wondering whether our own kids should be doing the same thing, whether they should be studying opponents more, remembering more, preparing more. And that's where expectations start to rise. The key thing parents need to understand is that there are two very different mental jobs at play here.

One is pattern recognition. The other is memorization and recall. Goal tending at every high level runs on pattern recognition. It's fast. It's automatic.

It's built through experience and repetition. The goalie isn't thinking in words. They're reacting to shape, spacing, timing. Memorization though is different. It's slower.

It's conscious. It uses working memory. And under pressure, it's fragile. Performance research has shown this over and over again. When skilled athletes start to consciously control or recall information during action, performance drops.

Reaction slows, anxiety rises. This is the same mechanism behind what people often call overthinking or choking. So when a young goalie is asked to remember key details during a game, who's shooting, who's passing, what team likes to do what, they're being pulled out of the mental mode that allows them to perform best. And even though young kids don't get formal scouting reports, parents still do the same thing in other ways. It might sound like, watch out for that kid.

He's really good. This team really likes to shoot glove. This team really likes cross ice plays. Oh, remember you struggled against this team last time. The intent is to help, but the effect is the same.

Now as the play develops, the goalie isn't just reading what's happening. They're checking expectations. Is this the player they warned me about? Am I supposed to expect a pass here? Did I miss something I was told to watch for?

It's not game sense. It's mental clutter. You'll hear goalies in our ProReads, of course, talk about checking hands early or knowing who's a one timer option, but notice something important there. They're not consciously thinking number nine's a right handed shooter. They just register that side of the ice as a shooting threat.

There's no different than really a shoulder check-in traffic. It's quick awareness. It's not recall. And that kind of awareness doesn't come from studying lists. It comes from experience.

It comes from seeing the same situations thousands of times. It's embedded. It's not memorized. In age guys, it matters here too. A 12 year old's brain is still developing.

Working memory, attention control, stress regulation, even adults struggle when they're overloaded with too much information. NHL goalies, they only get away with it because their detailed preparation is in a game that is highly structured, where systems are consistent, and their experience base, of course, is massive. Youth hockey is the opposite. Systems break down, players miss assignments, lines change unpredictably, execution is inconsistent. So when we over prepare kids for a game that's inherently less predictable, I think we're often adding adding some noise instead of clarity.

That doesn't mean that preparation is bad. It just means there's a sweet spot. Good preparation removes uncertainty. It simplifies the game. It calms the nervous system.

Things like a consistent routine, knowing the start time and expectations, a familiar warm up, maybe one simple focus on the ice. Bad preparation adds decisions. It adds reminders. It adds comparisons. And if a goalie has to think about it while the play is unfolding, it's probably too much.

Those stories about elite preparation at the NHL level describe exceptions, not templates. They're interesting, but they're not instructions. At most youth levels, the advantage isn't knowing more, it's needing to think less. And if your preparation makes the game feel bigger, not simpler, it's worth pulling back.

So the parent takeaway here today is quite simple. Those stories about elite preparation at the NHL level describe ex exceptions, not templates. They're interesting, but they're not instructions. At most youth levels, the advantage isn't knowing more, it's needing to think less. And if your preparation makes the game feel bigger, not simpler, it's worth pulling back.

Calm isn't under preparation. For young goalies, it's often the biggest edge they can have.

Is there a age or a level where you should start going from just playing to preparing?

I mean, that's a it's a good question, Daren. I don't know that it's, it's age dependent. I think it's gonna be individual, but I am just really urging caution here.

Like, I wouldn't want my 12 year old preparing for the opposition. I just want them to play. Maybe maybe thinking in the back of their mind, oh, you know, Stevie scored three on me last game, so I gotta be ready for that.

But I I even think that's a problem. Like, because then you're not reacting. I think I think you need to be able to react even at a fairly high level of the game. I think the difference on those things, as I was saying, is coming from experience rather than looking at a list of things. And and I know Kevin knows this side of things far more than I do, but I I remember him, telling me a number of times that those detailed scouting reports that they get even at the National Hockey League level, and I'm referring more to players in this case, but there are guys that do like to go over those.

But there are guys even at that level that just want to react to the game and and don't give me too much information.

Goalies too. There are some. Like, it's funny. I've had this discussion recently with a couple of guys about what they wanna know and what they don't wanna know. Tendencies on power plays is something they tend to want to know versus, you know, a lot of guys on a shootout, they don't a lot of guys don't wanna know what the what the a move is.

Some of them wanna know just what the a move is so they can keep but they worry about cheating towards it. Like, it's a it's a fine line. It's a fine balance. At the end of the day, so much of what we present in ProReads, don't forget, is them looking back at the video, sometime later and telling you what they were thinking as opposed to in the moment. A lot of them have said this.

Like, in the moment, you're not thinking about all those things. You just identify them and you react to them. They're all part of that built in subconscious knowing what tendency is likely to come from that situation because you've seen it thousands of times. But in the moment, you're not calculating it consciously in your head because that would be quote unquote overthinking. And what's the the funnel?

Like, the number of thoughts and things you can have, like, funnels pretty quick at the pace of the game, so you have to be out there reacting to it. So the things you've learned, you can't go out there. You can watch a peroids and ProReads and be like, oh, yeah. Like, if I go back to my post here in this situation, I know that that's that's the best move here cause I've been working on it, and and I recognize the situation. But it's gotta be instinctual and innate.

It can't be like, oh, hold on. What did Connor Hellebuyck say last week? And it's like, you're fishing the butterfly.

And and don't forget we need to separate practice and games here. Like, all those details you're recalling, you wanna think about it during a practice as you're dealing with different scenarios, then by all means, go ahead. But you need to check that at the door when you step onto the ice for a game.

One thing a coach told me, was the difference between practice and game, is challenging because a lot of times you know what your teammates are gonna do, and it it it's there. And then you go to a game, and you you are just flying, loose and fast, with it.

Isn't that on the coaches too to an extent though to create a practice environment where it isn't just repetitive flow drills where we know exactly what's gonna happen every time?

Yeah. Or where they have enough time and space to go outside of the structure that you're gonna see in a game and and and present a whole bunch of stuff to you that's not realistic. I mean, both both things are sort

of true.

And that's on you to beat, stay competitive and battle through that kind of stuff instead of going, oh, you didn't do the drill right. I get so many times, I I will see that, around the minor hockey level where, something will go awry and the goaltender will go, just just give up because or quit because the the drill is broken down. Stay with it. Challenge yourself in that situation and deal with the x factor of unpredictability. Good stuff, Hutch.