Your Goalie Hit a Wall. That Might Be Good News. (Parents, Ep. 376)

Kevin, we're into November. Most minor hockey teams now, their season's a quarter. Gosh. In some some areas, maybe close to half done. Something tends to shift around now.

That excitement of a new team, new gear, new teammates, that's worn off. There's enough games that have been played that the results, they start to feel like a story. One goalie has a few more wins. Someone save percentage is sitting somewhere they don't like. And without anybody saying it out loud, the season starts to feel decided.

Who's having a good year? Who's struggling? It starts to feel as though the season story's already been written, but I'm here to tell you it hasn't. There's a lot of hockey left. Most of the season is still ahead.

Practices, tournaments, a playoff run, games nobody's even thinking about yet. There's a lot that's gonna happen between now and spring that nobody can see coming, good and bad. A goalie who looks stuck in November can look like a completely different player in February. What usually happens in between, it's pretty dull. The goalie keeps showing up.

Same routine, same work in practice, and for a while, nothing seems to change. That's the wall. Here's what the science says about it. Two researchers at UCLA, Nicholas, Soderstrom and Robert Bjork, reviewed decades of studies on how people learn. One of the big findings they point to is that real learning can be happening even when the performance isn't improving at all.

What you see on game day and what's actually being built are two different things. Other research suggests that some skill development happens between practices as the brain consolidates what was learned even during sleep. So a flat stretch round about November isn't necessarily wasted time. Sometimes the work is just settling in before it starts showing up in games. That same UCLA review also found that practice conditions where athletes struggle and make more mistakes can sometimes produce better long term learning than conditions where everything seems to go smoothly.

If that's true in practice, a tough month against good teams doesn't necessarily mean a goalie is falling behind either. They may be learning things that won't show up in the results for some time. Now, of course, that doesn't mean every plateau is productive or that we should simply ignore genuine problems. Sometimes a goalie needs more help, a different approach, maybe just a break, but there's a difference between responding to something our child actually needs and trying to make ourselves feel better about the results, and that's the hard part for us as parents. A flat stretch looks like a problem, and we as parents, of course, are wired to try and fix problems.

So we start shopping for solutions. It's more lessons. It's a different goalie coach, more ice, new gear, maybe a conversation with the head coach. All of it comes from a good place, but a lot of the time, we're not reacting to what our goalie needs. We're reacting to our own discomfort with the plateau.

So think about what we ask of our goalies in tough moments. If they give up a bad goal, what do we want? Reset. Get back to your routine. Don't chase the last one.

A tough first period? Stay patient. Trust your game. Keep competing. A great game?

Enjoy it, then show up to practice Tuesday and do the same work. Don't ride too high. Don't sink too low. We ask goalies to be the steadiest people in the building. Persistence and determination are a big part of what makes the position and not overreacting either way after a great night or an awful one might be the most important mental skill a goalie can have.

So we have to model it. If our goalie watches us panic over a three game stretch in November, what are they learning? They think that a flat stretch is an emergency, that you change everything when when results don't come. That's the opposite, though, of what we're trying to teach them in the crease. If instead they see us stay calm, still enjoying the games, still asking what they worked on rather than what the score was, they learn the lesson we actually want.

So we have to model it. If our goalie watches us panic over a three game stretch in November, what are they learning? They think that a flat stretch is an emergency, that you change everything when when results don't come. That's the opposite, though, of what we're trying to teach them in the crease. If instead they see us stay calm, still enjoying the games, still asking what they worked on rather than what the score was, they learn the lesson we actually want.

Keep going. Trust the process. Don't let a few games define your season. Oh, what about those stat lines? I think you know where I stand on save percentage anyway.

In minor hockey, that number tells us as much about the quality of chances a team gives up as it does about the goalie facing them, and it tells us almost nothing about whether that goalie is developing. So if your goalie is getting better and the numbers aren't showing it, that's not a contradiction. The numbers were never measuring the right thing. So this month, be the steady one. Keep the routine.

Be patient. Keep showing up. The season isn't decided, not even close. And if we want our goalies to learn how to handle the inevitable ups and downs of this position, November is a pretty good time to show them how.

Well said. Don't buy into the narratives. Narratives suck.

And be patient. And be patient. Yeah. Hang in there.

It... I I love... Like, it'd be one thing to have you preaching it to me. Mhmm. But when but when you put it in the context of this is what we're asking them to do Mhmm.

Like, it's exactly. I... I've had to have some of these reflections myself with my kid and playing sports recently. It's like the narratives that... Yes.

We can attach them ourselves. We attach narratives to things that don't actually mean what we think they mean. We get way too way too wrapped up in it. Okay. Maybe just me.

No. No. Oh my gosh.

We all do. Oh gosh. Narratives, like, don't get me started. You you you look at people scouting players and they they watch something happen and then you hear them say, oh, that kid's got a bad attitude or or that kid isn't really motivated or... Like, you don't have no idea what's going on between their ears.

But we build these narratives based on what we think we see happening on the ice. I'm off on a different tangent and a different rant, but, yeah, narratives. Narratives. Narratives. Narratives.

Narratives.