Fixing Hip Rotation on the "Underneath" Movement to the Off-stick Side

A really common technical issue we see with goalies at all levels is the tendency to get their hips rotated and losing their ability to keep their body square to the shooter. This makes it tougher to get your nose on the ball, makes you smaller in terms of how much of the net you’re covering and reduces athleticism. All of this leads to more goals and rebounds. We’ve put up a couple of drills that work on this (long pole drill being the biggest) but is there one thing we can focus on that will finally fix this issue? In short, YES. Where our toes go, our hips and body will follow. When a goalie “rotates”, it is usually initiated with the front foot turning it’s toes out to the sideline. This then rotates the hips, and everything flows down a bad path from there. IF we can keep the toes pointed upfield, or better yet towards the shooter, it becomes almost IMPOSSIBLE to rotate the hips to the sideline. Go ahead and TRY to have a bad finishing position with your hips when you start the toes upfield; you can’t! We've slowed down some work on this with one of our goalies, and you can see on all POOR reps in the first segment, the toes initiate by turning to the sideline. On the 2nd set of shots, you can see that he finishes square every time, ALWAYS started by getting his toes upfield/square! This is an example of why we spend so much time at Foundation Lacrosse hammering away at our footwork. Everything that happens during a save starts from the ground up, and if the feet are solid, everything else tends to fall in line. But if we have bad habits at our base, all of the drills, reps and coaching in the world won’t be able to overcome this.