Coach Edwards gives coaches advice on how to train their athletes in position specific ways to up their chances of winning and help them work better together as a team. He explains why it’s important to address every athlete individually and gives tips on how to best train lacrosse goalies at the start of the season.

0:50 – A team’s pre-season habits make a difference on the field.

1:35 – Treating all players the same during training is the biggest mistake a lacrosse team can make.

2:21 – Athletes should be trained individually if teams want to succeed.

3:15 – Coach Edwards explains the issue with training all athletes the same way.

4:14 – Common mistakes coaches make trying to prepare lacrosse goalies at the start of the season.

5:05 – The best way coaches can train lacrosse goalies to succeed.

6:08 – Teams should consider position specific training to up their winning.

Introduction

Hey everybody, it’s Coach Edwards at LacrosseGoalieTips.com and LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com, and I got an email this week from a coach at a high school in upstate New York. They’ve got a big game coming up their first week in March, and the question was how to get the team into the best shape possible prior to that first game, because this is a rival. They really want to give them a hard time. Last year when they played this team, they kind of petered out at the end of their third or fourth quarter. They gave them a good run in the first half, but then the wheels just kind of came off in the second half, and the coach is really attributing this to fatigue.

0:50 What The Team Does Pre-Season Makes A Difference

My question, when it goes to something like this, is what is the team doing before lacrosse season even starts? I emailed this coach, and just confirmed that sure enough, this team is pretty much what a lot of other high school teams are like. Half the team is playing a winter sport, so for his guys, a majority of them are playing basketball, so they’re coming off a tough basketball season. And the other half of the team isn’t really doing a whole heck of a lot. They’ve got their sticks in their hands like once a week, and within that group there are some guys that are just getting off the couch in the winter. They’ve been playing a lot of Xbox, a lot of DS, getting their thumbs in shape for the season.

1:35 The Biggest Mistake A Lacrosse Team Can Make Before The Season

Here’s the challenge that I find most teams really have and the mistakes they make coming into the season. When lacrosse season starts, and that first day of practice comes and either you’re maybe in the gym and there’s still snow on the ground depending on where these guys are, they’re in upstate New York obviously. The coaches are thinking, “We’ve got to get our team in shape for the season.” The challenge there is they then treat everybody the same.

From the guys that have been playing DS all winter to the guys who were playing basketball, they’re all running the same drills, they’re running the same amount of gassers, they’re running the same 3 mile runs or whatever that a team uses to kind of whip their team into shape prior to the season. And that, I feel, is the biggest mistake a team can make.

2:21 Athletes Should Be Trained Individually For Team Success

You really need to train your athletes individually in order to have team success. Whenever I’ve been involved in team programs, my usual fallout with those programs comes when the program is program specific and not athlete specific. I actually have a website called AthleteSpecific.com, where I talk about athletic training type principals. If you want to check that out, go check that out and get the free audio I have over there.

In this case, it requires a little bit of extra work, a little extra thinking,