Rick Wamsley

Rick Wamsley grew up in Port Dover, Ontario — a town of 3,000 people — and traced his desire to play goal back to age seven, when an admiration for Boston Bruins goaltender Gerry Cheevers pushed him toward the crease. When a local Timbits program started the following year, he sat by the door and begged his coach, Mr. Barker, to let him play goal. After that first game, Barker told him he was the team's goalie for the rest of the year. Wamsley has been a goaltender ever since.

Born May 25, 1959, in Simcoe, Ontario, Wamsley was selected by the Montreal Canadiens in the third round (17th pick) of the 1979 NHL Draft. He went on to play 407 NHL games across stops with the Canadiens, St. Louis Blues, Calgary Flames, and Toronto Maple Leafs, finishing his playing career with 204 wins, 131 losses, a 3.34 goals-against average, a .881 save percentage, and 12 shutouts. He retired in February 1993.

His early development unfolded without the benefit of goalie coaches. In Montreal, his first coach was Jacques Plante — a figure Wamsley had followed since buying Plante's book *Goaltending* at age 10 or 11. Later, in Calgary, he worked under Glenn Hall. It was Hall who introduced Wamsley to the concept of weight transfer on two-on-one plays, instructing him to stop on his inside foot to shift weight to the outside before pushing laterally. Wamsley described the moment he first applied that advice — in a third-period relief appearance in Minnesota — as a revelation. "I'm 28 years old," he recalled on InGoal Radio ^[1]. "You're not too old to learn if you're willing to listen." Hall also helped Wamsley articulate what became a central principle of his approach: protecting the net rather than chasing pucks. As Wamsley recounted, Hall told him, "You don't play a big net" — meaning he didn't overplay east-west passes to the point of widening the angle against himself ^[1].

A separate turning point came even earlier in his career, around 1980 or 1981, during his first or second pro season in the American League. New York Rangers goaltender John Davidson was sent down to the New Haven Nighthawks for conditioning following back surgery. Wamsley, then 21 years old, played against him. "We shot him forty-five, twenty right away," he told InGoal Radio. "He didn't move. He just stood there. Let the puck come to him. Let the play come to him." Despite the shot barrage, Davidson's team nearly won. Wamsley took that lesson — less is more — into practice the next day, and said it turned his career around ^[1].

Wamsley spent 15 seasons as an NHL goalie coach after his playing career ended. He transitioned almost immediately: he retired in February 1993 and was working with Felix Potvin and the Toronto Maple Leafs by the spring and the following 1993–94 season. His coaching stops included Columbus, where an injury to Ron Tugnutt prompted Wamsley to develop goalie-specific skating workouts — the first time he had incorporated that kind of work with a goaltender. "After a month and a half of that," he said on InGoal Radio, "to watch Ron Tugnutt play the last three months, my eyes were like, oh my God, this is so good. He actually said, 'Wommer, my feet feel so good after doing this'" ^[1]. He also served as goaltending coach for the Ottawa Senators, where he worked with Craig Anderson, Robin Lehner, and Andrew Hammond.

A Hockey Canada coaching trip to Finland — which Wamsley said took place approximately twelve years before his 2025 InGoal Radio appearance — reshaped how he viewed and taught the position. Finnish coaches presented a framework built around ten recurring ways to score, with corresponding defensive responses for each. "I haven't watched a game the same way since coming home from Finland," he said ^[1]. That philosophy became the foundation of his GoalieU program, which delivers daily video breakdowns of real game clips, primarily from the OHL, walking young goaltenders through situational reads, footwork, and decision-making. "I would have died for this information when I was their age," he said of the 13- to 15-year-olds he aims to reach ^[1].

InGoal Magazine has covered Rick Wamsley in one podcast appearance and twelve InGoal articles. The ongoing "GoalieU: Read & React" series ^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]} documents Wamsley's clip-by-clip breakdowns of OHL goalies working through each of the ten most common scoring situations — east-west passes, backdoor plays, breakaways, low-high outs, net drives, and more — with Wamsley's own voice and analysis guiding each sequence. One installment ^[8] turned the lens on Wamsley himself, using footage from his 1992–93 season with the Toronto Maple Leafs to show how the positional principles he teaches today were already present in his old-school save mechanics, even when the technique looked nothing like the modern butterfly game.

Wamsley currently holds an amateur scouting role with the Colorado Avalanche while continuing to run GoalieU. His stated goal for the goalies he coaches has always been the same: "My goal is to have you coach yourself at the end. When I come in and I say, 'Hey, what happened here?' if I hear the right answer, we're done" ^[1].