0:11 – Get a stick in your hands that’s about 40 inches long to improve your hand strength.

0:55 – If a stick is too heavy, you don’t develop the right muscles in your hands to control it.

1:31 – Find a wall and a ball and get yourself in the ready position to throw with.

2:07 – Using tennis balls is a great way to practice without your gear in athletic stance.

2:43 – Coach Edwards advises goalies to look for nice, flat walls to bounce balls at yourself.

3:15 – Not having good stick skills can come back to haunt you, so improve them before it’s too late.

3:51 – Keep a stick with you in the car and bring it out whenever you can to practice.

Introduction

Hey there. Coach Edwards at LacrosseGoalieTips.com and LacrosseGoalieUniversity.com and we’re going to talk about the #2 thing you can do to get better faster.

Get a Stick in Your Hands

The #2 thing you can do to get better faster is to get a stick in your hands. I recommend it doesn’t have to be your goalie stick, it can just be a short stick. For girls, you want to have a short stick with a 40 inch length. Unless you’re tiny, then you can go shorter, but you want basically an immense pocket in that stick. You want a pocket that’s going to help you get your elbows up away from your body. It’s going to improve your hand strength and things like that. Don’t worry about jumping to a goalie stick.

Develop Your Hand Muscles

The goalie stick is really heavy. What I find is that if a goalie stick is really heavy for you, you don’t develop the right muscles in your fingers and your hands that really help you control that stick, so I’d like to see you have a short stick in your hands. The same is true for the boys. I would say 99% of the boys that I coach can benefit from just using a short stick. Like a 40 inch attack shaft, unless they are, again, young and small. You can go shorter, 38, 36 inches. You name it.

Find a Wall and Throw

What you want to do is you want to find a wall and a ball and you want to basically throw with and cradle with your hands in your ready position. So if I said get in the cage and get your stick in your hands, you would have your top hand up at the throat and then you would have your bottom hand, depending on your size, about 12 to 16 inches apart. What you want to do is you basically want to get in your ready stance and you want to be close to that wall. You want to be like 10 feet away.

The Benefits of Tennis Balls

Tennis balls work great. I used to do this in my parent’s kitchen against the silverware drawer in their kitchen. I would take a tennis ball and my stick and I would just watch tv and throw the ball. I would basically throw. I wouldn’t worry about stepping too much, as much as being in athletic stance and just moving and just being used to the ball. I would throw the ball so that it bounced back at me at different positions so I would have to adjust and move accordingly.

Practicing With Equipment

If you can get outside and get a wall, like near where I live there’s a middle school that has a really flat, nice, brick wall. There’s also a grocery store and a gas station. There’s a gas station that I used to go to right across the street from my mom’s house where I would throw lacrosse balls to it. But when you’re throwing lacrosse balls, you really need to get a helmet on and get a cup on and your gloves. Tennis balls are nice because you really don’t need anything and you can stay pretty safe, and you can start to really rifle that ball.

Practicing Alone to Improve Stick Skills

If you don’t have someone to shoot on you and you don’t have that advantage then get your stick in your hand and get working on the wall and improving your stick skills. As I mentioned in an earlier podcast,