I have a daughter who started playing goalie for her team last fall at the age of 12. She has always been a field player since she soccer in Kindergarten but since our regular goalie was on vacation last year, the coach had my daughter play as goalie. Well, to our surprise she did pretty darn well and she loved it! Since then she has been playing in the goal majority of the time and has been attending our clubs soccer training. She has grown a lot since then but she would like to keep her skills up over the summer. I signed her up for a camp over the summer but was thinking of perhaps having someone work one on one with her. Does anyone have any suggestions for goalie coaches that do one on one? We are located in northern Illinois. I am a mom with little soccer knowledge so any help would be appreciated!! Thanks!
When my son was that age we looked at the same thing. We are fortunate to live near 2 div III colleges both of which field men's and women's soccer. We were able to get a sophomore keeper from one of the schools to work with our son and they worked together until he graduated. It is nice extra money for a college student, he had access to practice field, balls, etc. any time and as time went by his college teammates would drop by to hang out, shoot, play defender, etc. In the end my son became almost a team mascot and it worked out great for both parties. I know we hooked up another family with a striker from the team for some personalized instruction and that worked out as well.
I am not from Your state. I hope the coach lets your daughter take part in the regular attacking part of your practices. The keeper of the future is the sweeper/ keeper. She needs foot skills and ball control to do it. It means less shots on goal against her. The old sweeper took away a lot of the opponents through pass opportunities. That is also what the sweeper/ keeper is supposed to do. It is like having 12 players on the field instead of eleven. I think the club should have a current keeper as their keeper trainer. I know the game and I was a trainer for a college D1 team. But I knew we would be better off if we had a keeper to train our keepers. There are keeper camps during the summer. Not just soccer camps. Might call USSF they are located in Chiago to find out the nearest and the best to your location and send her there. When the team over shifts its backs to the pressure side. The sweeper/keeper should direct that movement. So there is a lot more to the position now
Until they hit high school...look at a local college and ask their GK coach. They just can't train them when they hit high school.
If you have access to Chicago, Drive Goalkeeping is really good. They train in the winter months at the Chicago Fire Pitch, near Lane Tech High School. It's a smaller organization than Big Cat or Paws, but the Director, Tom Paparounis, does a great job working with the kids. www.drivegk.com