Welcome to the Goalkeeping Newsletter. Today I will introduce a drill
that will allow a keeper to work on footwork as well as catching.
This drill requires two people. Either this could be a keeper and a server or two
keepers. Let's assume we are working with a keeper and a server. The keeper
should be approximately 5 yards away. The server would start with the ball and throw the
ball underhand just to the outside of the keepers left knee. The keeper must move
her feet to get her body behind the ball. The rule in this drill is that the keeper
can only catch the ball with her opposite hand. Since the ball was thrown to the
outside
of the left knee, she must use her right hand to catch the ball. This drill works on her
moving her feet to catch the ball as well as keeping her head down in order to watch the
ball into her hands. As soon as the keeper catches the ball, she would pull it in
and then throw it back to the server. The next ball would be played to the outside
of the right knee and the left hand would be used to catch the ball. Done quickly
for a minute, this drill will really do a great job of encouraging the keeper to come
forward to catch the ball since they will fine it much easier to receive the ball this
way. If there are two keepers, they can either alternate as server for minute and
then switch over to being the keeper. The other way to do this would be to have both
keepers serving at the same and they would both be working at the same time as well.
The next progression is to have the ball served head height but approximately a foot to
either side of the head. Same rule applies where the body must be behind the ball to
catch it and only the opposite hand can be used. Not only does this work on catching
and footwork but also it gets the keepers in the habit of getting the top hand over in a
way that a keeper does when pushing a high ball. This ball is much harder to hold
and will require a lot of concentration in order to do this right.
The last progression is to have the server alternate between balls served to the left,
right, high and low where all balls are only caught if the body is behind the ball and
with the opposite hand. Each of these progressions are done for one minute at full
speed.
After doing this series of drills, a keeper will find it much easier to get behind the
ball and to hold onto balls since they are in the habit of really concentrating.
