Quick answer. Less than you fear, and more than target practice. Check the things you can see from the side: is the keeper set in a balanced base position before every shot, standing a step off the line, and on the right angle. Then fix the session around them: plan drills where the keeper gets lots of shots and real game decisions, stop smashing close-range balls at them in the warm-up, ask for their view of the game, and give them a few agreed calls to make. For the technical detail, talk to a goalkeeper coach or an adult keeper.
That is the short version. Here is how the goalkeeper coaches on The Hockey Site actually put it.
You are not the only one
Pirmin Blaak, a former Dutch international goalkeeper, opened his workshop on the basics of training your goalkeepers with a line that should reassure most club coaches: “many, many coaches in the world, they have no idea what goalkeeping is.” He is also honest about why it is hard: “you have to play the balls, you have to analyze and you have to talk and that’s not easy if you’re a field trainer.” None of that means you can’t help. It means you focus on what you can see.
Check the base position before every shot
Blaak’s starting point is stillness, not footwork. Movement, he says, “depends on the situation of the goalkeeper. And it’s not the most important thing of goalkeeping. The most important thing of goalkeeping is standing still. Standing still in the base position.” (In the same talk he gives stepping out the same billing, so take it as: everything starts from a good base.) And the base is something a field coach can check: “as a coach and a trainer in a team, you can always look to the to this base position.”
A couple of things to look for. Hand height is a trade-off: “When your hands are more down, it’s harder to save the high balls. And when your hands are higher, then it’s harder to save the low balls.” Mili Arrotea, a goalkeeper coach working in Australia, keeps her under-14 priorities short in Junior Goalkeeper Development: “making sure they know the way to how to kick… and the set position. So making sure that they are set before every shot.”
Blaak’s academy keeps returning to the same few actions however good the keeper gets: “they train always the basics. Because we see it as your toolkit.” And “if Your basics are not there. You cannot go to the next stage.”
Angles are something you can set up
Positioning sounds like specialist territory, but the tools are simple. Blaak’s rule of thumb: “always one step at least in front of the goal. Because then you can cover the angles of your goal easier.” Arrotea uses two ropes: “I get two ropes tied to the posts, and then I create kind of an intersection there where I place the ball.” Before a shot, she gets the keeper to check by turning their head: “am I in the right position? Where’s my left post? Where my right post?”
If you only have one tool, Blaak’s answer to the best single exercise for a young keeper is six tennis balls, thrown so they can only be caught with one hand, “Because if you do it with two, it’s not like goalkeeping.” Throw them just outside the keeper’s reach so they have to step out fully.
Stop using your keeper as target practice
This is where most field coaches can make the biggest difference without learning anything technical. Blaak is blunt about the hitting warm-up: “Close range shooting is something in not in goalie training. Because if you’re a goalie trainer, you know close range shooting is not like what happens in a game.” It also costs you keepers: “when you start with the younger kids and also not the top range, they’re getting scared from close range shots… And people are quitting being goalie if they are scared because then they think that they are safer on the pitch.” Arrotea’s fix for the warm-up is easy: “Just make sure for the first two minutes the main aim for those field players is to aim to hit at the goalie.”
Then plan the session with the keeper in it. Arrotea: “Plan the session. So take your time to plan a session properly… there’s nothing wrong with adding that that extra goalkeeper in that.” Asked for three tips for a coach who has never been a goalkeeper, she gave these: “make sure that there’s a drill that you plan that have a lot of shots”, set the keeper a challenge for the session, such as clearing the ball wide as often as possible, and “don’t be afraid of taking the goalkeeper outside the goal.” Blaak wants the same direction of travel: “bring a goalie in gameplay situations. You can only learn from making mistakes in gameplay.”
Give them a voice, and ask for it
Keepers who don’t talk often haven’t been given room to. Blaak: “a coach needs to grab his goalkeeper and ask him about the opinion, because every goalkeeper has opinion.” Start in training, by asking “how they see a situation”, and by asking what they want from the defenders in an exercise, from the keeper’s perspective. Arrotea’s practical version is a 10 to 15 minute sit-down before training with the defenders and the keeper, agreeing simple calls such as “Little Johnny number 10, left shoulder”, starting with “two or three cues and then build from there.” Keep expectations to the age: at under-14 her main aim is that the keeper understands how to mark inside the circle, and asking them to organise the outlet is, in her words, “a little bit too much for them.”
The mental side: let them decide, and keep it fun
Blaak would rather see a wrong decision than a hesitant one: “let them make a decision. Because a bad decision is also a decision. In that way you can learn from it.” Arrotea’s measure of success with young keepers is simple: “making sure they have fun if they want to come back the next week. So then that’s a win for us.” And if a keeper is backing away from the ball, start gently: “your goalie might be afraid of the ball. So what you can do is you can start throwing tennis balls at him nicely.”
Where to get help
You don’t need to become a goalkeeper coach. Arrotea’s advice, if your club has one, is to talk to them: “you actually don’t have to know technically a lot of things, but they might help you saying, okay, look, they’re struggling with the angles or they’re struggling with clearing the ball wide.” Javi Telechea wrote that a specialist course isn’t needed either: “it’s enough to approach any coach, or an adult goalkeeper, and ask them for some basic notions: correct posture, a few tips, anything.”
So, before your next session, the useful question is not “how do I coach goalkeeping”. It is “what does my keeper do in my session”. Watch the base position before every shot, swap the close-range hitting for game situations, ask them how they saw it, and send the technical questions to someone who has been in goal.
Two questions this usually raises
What is the best single drill for a young goalkeeper?
Pirmin Blaak’s answer is six tennis balls. Throw them at the keeper, who can only catch them with one hand, because catching with two is not what goalkeeping looks like. Throw them about 30 centimetres outside the keeper’s reach, so they have to step out fully to get there.
How do I get my goalkeeper to talk more?
Give them room first. Pirmin Blaak says many keepers don’t coach because they don’t feel the space to, so start in training by asking how they see a situation. Mili Arrotea sits the defenders and the keeper down before a session and agrees two or three simple calls, then builds from there.
The sessions below are where these coaches go into the working detail. Every masterclass opens free so you can see what it covers; the full session sits in the Coach subscription.
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Read next: Two sessions you can run with your keeper this week, plus a coach's case for planning around them: No GK coach? No problem!, Can Someone Please Think About Goalkeepers?.
More coaching questions: How do I build confidence in field hockey players that survives mistakes?, How do I keep juniors coming back without letting the standards slide?, What is the best field hockey warm-up to get game-ready and cut injuries?, How do I stop my defenders diving in and giving away free hits?. All of them are in Field Hockey Coaching Questions.
The experts mentioned in this article
Pirmin BlaakFormer goalkeeper for the Dutch national men's team. Olympic gold in Paris 2024.
Mili ArroteaBorn in Argentina. Coaching hockey and goalkeepers in Australia.
Javi TelecheaBorn in Argentina. Coaching hockey and football.
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