In his latest podcast, Coach Jonathan Edwards shares the concept of draw and dump with lacrosse goalies. Goalies with teammates who aren’t in formation and unprepared to protect the ball will benefit from the draw and dump technique. Coach Edwards gives goalies tips on how to draw in their opponent so that they can easily pass the ball to an open teammate.
0:14 – When a goalie leaves the crease, most people start to get pretty nervous.
0:37 – Coaches should treat goalies like any other player, and goalies should improve stick skills.
1:20 – Coach Edwards‘ experience coaching a goalie who always passed to covered defensemen.
1:52 – The right way and the wrong way for a lacrosse goalie to clear the ball.
2:43 – Keeping the team in formation during a clear is important. It’s not all the goalie’s fault if things go wrong.
4:14 – Coaches shouldn’t put goalies as backup after warm up, they should be learning stick skills with skilled offensive players.
Introduction
Coach Edwards here with LacrosseGoalieTips.com and LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com with another podcast. I want to talk about understanding the concept of draw and dump.
The Pucker Factor
For a lot of goalies, when they get out of the crease with the ball, everybody starts to get full on pucker factor. Everybody’s butt starts to clench up a little bit, especially the coaches. They’re thinking, “Oh my God, ahh, the cage. We’re gonna lose the ball, and then the ball’s going to go back in the cage because there’s nobody who is going to be in the cage.”
Develop Stick Skills
Listen. You’ve got to treat your goalie like every other player on the field. As a goalie, if you’re listening to this and you’re a goalie, you’ve got to develop stick skills that allow you to be confident outside of the cage as any other player would on a clear. We’re not talking about you need to roll dodge, bold dodge, split dodge everybody up the field, we just want you to have the confidence to be able to take the ball, draw an opposing team’s player, and then pass to your open teammate. That’s it. A lot of goalies I see, they get out of the cage and they pass the ball to a covered teammate and they let them go one on one and hope. Usually that ends up troublesome.
Passing to Covered Defensemen
A couple of years ago, I worked with a goalie in California. I do a lot of online coaching of goalies across North America, and this goalie was pretty decent, a good goalie, but he would make a pass to a defenseman who was covered. And that defenseman, who wasn’t really all that skilled, a lot of his defensemen didn’t have good stick skills – they were good athletes, they just didn’t have good stick skills – they would get doubled or they would get jumped and lose the ball and the goalie would get a pretty high quality shot taken on him. A lot of times they would score so this was really frustrating, obviously.
The Wrong Way to Pass Versus the Draw and Dump
What I see, and I see this a lot in the women’s game especially, is that the goalie will stand there. In the women’s game everyone is covered and the goalie will try to pass to somebody once they get open just a little bit and hopefully they make the pass, and then that player will run the ball downfield. That’s not how clears are supposed to work. When we get a goalie out of the cage, we’ve got an advantage. As long as we’re even strength and there’s no penalty, we get out of the cage and we draw an attackman and we pass to the next player. Or we draw a middy and pass to our middy, then down the field it goes. Draw, dump, draw, dump. Draw an opposing player, dump to the open man. Draw the opposing player, dump to the open woman. That’s the gist of it.
If the Team Isn’t In Formation,
