353 Parents: Help: I think my goalie is burning out!

Pete Fry's coming up in just a little bit with our Sense Arena feature interview. But first, the parent segment segment courtesy of Stop It Goaltending U the app.

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Gentlemen, this week, we are responding to an inquiry from a parent who is worried about their child, facing burnout as a goaltender, but I wanted to address it, of course, to all parents. So if you are listening this week, maybe because something feels off with your goalie, maybe they're dragging their feet to practice, they've gone quiet in the car on the way home, or they've maybe even said out loud that they don't wanna play anymore, I want to start with two things. First, I'm sorry. That is a really hard thing to witness as a parent. We all want our kids to be happy.

Second, the fact that you noticed matters. A lot of parents actually miss it or maybe they just explain it away. You didn't. That's already the most important step here. Burnout is real and it's a lot more common than we tend to talk about.

We went it through it with our son, Matthew. The year he was going to try out for that vaunted brick tournament, he was just nine years old at the time. And, that spring, he was really actually quite clear with us telling he wasn't enjoying hockey anymore. Part of it was a coach whose enthusiasm had, tipped into yelling at young kids even when Matthew wasn't the target. He was absorbing at every practice.

But, clearly, there was, there was more to it. So we pulled him. No tryouts for the brick. Nothing after spring hockey ended. We stepped back from hockey entirely for the summer.

We had a lot of honest conversations and we made it completely clear to him. Come fall, this is your choice. Play goal, switch to playing out, try a different sport entirely, we'll support anything. We love you no matter what. In the end, he chose to come back but I'll tell you it was close.

What mattered most to us though was that he knew without any doubt that the choice was his. Goalies of course carry a very specific kind of weight. Anybody listening to this podcast knows this. It's different from what skaters go through. Every goal is on them.

They're isolated by position physically and emotionally. When the team is struggling, goalies absorb it differently than anyone else on the ice no matter how supportive you, the coach, and the team might be. And of course, often they aren't. A forward can have a bad shift and skate it off. A goalie lives with it.

If your kid is burning out, that dynamic may be amplifying everything else. So before you panic, learn to read what you're seeing. Not every tough stretch is burnout. Every player, every goalie goes through patches where the game feels heavy. The question is whether it's passing or whether it's a pattern.

I would suggest that you watch for them dreading going to practice. Not just a bad day, but maybe physical complaints before games, stomach aches happen a lot in young kids, irritability after hockey that bleeds into the rest of their day, maybe just going through the motions on the ice, pulling away from teammates, and maybe the most telling, they used to just light up when they were talking about hockey and now they don't. If it's touching multiple parts of their life and it's been weeks, not days, you're probably dealing with something real. So when you

have the conversation, lead with curiosity, not concern. I know that's hard when you're worried, but are you burned out puts kids on the defensive. Try something softer. What's your favorite part of hockey right now? Or just ask them, what's going on?

And then listen. You know the old adage about God gave us two ears and one mouth so you should listen twice as long as you talk? Don't try and fix. Don't try and problem solve. Don't immediately call the coach.

Just listen. What you're trying to understand, is it the position? Is it the team? A specific person? The schedule?

The pressure? From the game or, honestly, maybe somewhere closer to home? You need to know what's driving it before you can figure out whether it can be addressed or whether the right move is to just step back. It's okay if they don't wanna be a goalie anymore. Maybe they never really chose it.

Maybe they were just the kid who ended up in net. Even amongst our many pro guests on this show, that's one of the most common reasons they started. Maybe your kid loved it once and something's taken that from them. Maybe they just wanna be a player now. All of that's okay.

What you wanna get to gently without pressure or judgment is the real answer because I don't love this anymore is very different from I used to love this and now I don't. One's just a natural evolution. The other might be something you can help them fix. Now a word about sticking it out. Some people will tell you life is hard.

Kids need to learn to push through and to a point, that's true. Unless something is genuinely toxic, I wouldn't want a kid to quit a team mid season. There's something real to be learned in honoring a commitment to your team. But let's not confuse resilience with endurance. Making a child stay in a situation that's crushing their love for something they chose isn't character building.

It's just hard. There are also situations and parents you will know when you see them where mid season is exactly the right time to leave. Now, the bigger picture. Variety and rest are not optional. One of the things we come back to hear every year at InGoal is your goalie needs a full life and they need rest.

Sports, yes, but multiple ones if possible. Friends outside of hockey, family time, unstructured time where nobody is coaching them or evaluating them or asking them to perform. That variety isn't a distraction from hockey development. It's what keeps kids whole. For Matthew, that was always golf and baseball rarely at a competitive level, just somewhere he could have fun.

Even today in the middle of the BCHL playoffs, he gets out to play what is effectively beer league baseball once a week. And this one, can't say strongly enough, take time off every year. Again, something the pros have said on here repeatedly. It doesn't matter how much they love the game. Burnout doesn't announce itself.

It builds quietly month by month until it arrives all at once. By the time you're seeing the symptoms, it's been building for a while. The antidote isn't just a week off in August. It's building rest into the rhythm of their hockey life from the start. At the top levels, hockey becomes something very close to a job, not just at the National Hockey League level.

The kids who last, the ones who still genuinely love it at 18, 20, 22 are almost always the ones who had enough life outside the rink to keep coming back to it by choice. That's what we're building towards, not just better goalies, kids who love what they do.

Well done. I love the, advice in a challenging can be a challenging time for for people navigating that razor's edge of burnout.

Yeah. The razor's edge of burnout and and the razor's edge of knowing what to do as a parent because as as I talked about that, wanting your kid to learn how to how to deal with a difficult situation, how to persevere when the time comes and and where is that balance? Because we certainly don't wanna raise a child where every time something gets difficult, we ride in on our white horse and save them. And, so it is a tough time for kids

Perseverance. And

Right? Course you do. But there are times when when it's just become too much and and maybe because we as parents let it become too much and and we have to, we have to decide if that's the case.

I think of Jakub Dobes. Right? We're in the midst of this big run and all the pressure he's on. I think of his conversation with us last year. We talked about all the time he takes off at the start, you know, as soon as the season ends and and and he stays in St Louis, but he's not training with his old coaches there.

He waits till he gets back to Montreal, and, you know, clearly, that hasn't been a problem for him.