Playing For Keepers: Advice to Keepers
Author: Erik Bergland
Editor: Izzy Sangaline
Erik Bergland, playing for RPI Quidditch at Northeast Regionals in 2018 against NYU
Image Credit: Teri Wilson Moseley
About the Playing for Keepers series
Playing for Keepers is a three part series from guest author Erik Bergland. Bergland has formerly played for RPI Quidditch and Revolution Quidditch and is a current member of the Boston Pandas. In this series, he discusses the keeper position, offers insight to new keepers, and advises coaches on developing talented keepers.
As a keeper first learning the position, there’s a lot of pressure on your shoulders. Keeping is one of the two positions in the sport where you have no counterpart or partner on the field. Teams usually carry far fewer keepers on their roster as a result, which makes it difficult to reach out and discuss your development with another player. There’s also often another tendency at play: teams tend to lump keepers entirely in with chasers, despite the fact that there are many distinct skills keepers need to learn. I’ll try to address that last point in my final article, but first I’d like to discuss what you can do as a keeper to improve.
My first piece of advice probably comes across as obvious, but it’s surprising how often it goes unheeded. As a new keeper, your best bet to learn comes from watching other sports. For now, we don’t have many dedicated resources for teaching keepers the fundamentals. This means that you have to find guides where possible. In my opinion, three sports serve as the best proxies for keepers: hockey, handball, and soccer. Each has something slightly different to teach you, and they’re all probably worth breaking down as a separate skill.
The first and most important lesson to take is from hockey: the notion of a positional save. This refers to a situation where a goalie has absolutely no idea where the puck is, but it bounces off them purely because they correctly anticipated roughly where it was going and made themselves as big as possible.
Look at 2:20 - 2:34 on the left. Notice that the save doesn’t come from the glove or the stick. It comes from taking up a lot of room in the area where you know the shot has to go. With that many players near you, you need to be big because a tiny deflection will get around your glove.
This kind of understanding has a number of consequences in Quidditch. One of these is a slogan that I repeat all the time, and which I don’t think many people believe when I say it: keeping is educated cheating. What I mean by this is that there isn’t a goalie alive in any sport who is actually covering their entire goal at any one time. The best ones give the illusion that they do because they recover so quickly from guessing wrong that sometimes they still get to balls that they should by rights never touch. This doesn’t change the fact that human beings simply aren’t big enough to cover a whole goal. That means that anytime you’re in hoops, you are already making a decision about what’s worth covering whether you want to or not. You owe it to yourself to make it the best decision possible! If you don’t know anything about a shooter, you can usually cover two hoops. The general rule is that you want to be between the two hoops that they are closest to, with your shoulders facing towards the shooter. Solid positioning like this often forces shooters to try to make a difficult shot on the hoop you aren’t covering. If they can make that shot, more power to them. Just making an opposing player take a low-percentage shot like that is already pushing things in your favor. Remember the positional save! Sometimes it’s just about being in the right place at the right time, and letting the offense try risky things to get around you.
The other big takeaway from the idea of a positional save is the “making yourself as big as possible” part. The easiest way to do this as a keeper is to keep your hand up!
Look at 4:41 - 4:47 on the right. Notice that my hands are by my sides here, and the ball scoots right over my left shoulder and behind the hoops. This could have very easily turned into a goal without good teammates supporting me.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen younger keepers get good positioning, only to have a shooter blast a ball past them because the time it took them to pick their hand up from their side after they realized a shot was coming was just a second too long. We already take up so little room as keepers, so it’s absolutely worth using what you have. My suspicion is that keepers think this doesn’t look very cool. To that, I say check out handball goalies! On a penalty shot, handball goalies are literally dancing in net, just hoping to throw something in the way of a shot. There’s a certain point where you have to realize that looking good as the ball sails past you doesn’t really get you anywhere. It’s worth pointing out that as we mature as keepers, sometimes we choose not to do this. Playing goalie is a mind game between you and the shooter. Sometimes we deliberately try to make it look like we aren’t prepared for a certain shot to bait the offense into a trap. But this kind of cat-and-mouse is only useful once you’ve mastered the basics; you’ve got to walk before you run.
Finally, we should talk about soccer. The best thing to pick up from soccer is that your goal is pretty large. Because of that, it’s important to know where you are at all times. Nothing is more unhelpful than thinking you’re covering the angles, only to find out that you’ve been covering those angles from a foot to the right of your hoops. However, you don’t want to be looking back at your hoops right when a shooter might be making moves that indicate where they’re going to shoot. As such, it’s important to understand exactly where your steps are taking you. Over the years, I’ve figured out that it takes about a shuffle and a half to get from one side of the hoops to the other (I’ll need to recount with the rules change, of course). When I’m warming up before a game, I’ll try to verify that on the hoops I’ll be defending. As you do this more and more, your brain gets better at understanding where you are without having to constantly look. You’ll learn to be able to tell from your periphery and other clues. This is an important skill to develop. I wouldn’t recommend trying to guess your position with your eyes closed or anything like that. You don’t have to be able to tell your position from no information at all. The key is to be able to use the information you have in front of you so you can continue to track the shooter.
Let’s talk about lessons that aren’t as obvious from just watching other sports. Easily the most important of these is how crucial it is to know the shooters. This brings us back to our point about educated cheating. If you know something about which shots a shooter is most comfortable with, it would be foolish not to use that information when you position yourself. You might be slightly “out of position” for an average shooter, but so what? Always play for the situation that you’re in. As an example, consider the following shot from 2:51 - 2:54 from Teddy Costa.
Here, Costa fakes the keeper off the short hoop, and shoots as soon as he moves in anticipation of a pass. While I can have sympathy for this player, it would be much less forgivable for me to fall for this fake after being subjected to it for years in practice. Trying to force yourself to respond to every shooter from the same position means trying to make every save purely on the basis of your athleticism. While there’s no denying keepers need good reflexes, they shouldn’t be the be-all end-all. Let your brain make some of these saves. You’ll certainly notice that good shooters will see your adjustments and try to change their tendencies to compensate. Your job is then to try to figure out new strategies as you go. However, you’ve already achieved something important. Players have tendencies and go-to moves for a reason: it’s what gets them results. Forcing them to change means they have to beat you in a novel way, and that’s difficult for anyone. Remember that goals are scored much more often in Quidditch than soccer or hockey, which are traditionally much more goalie-dominated. You should expect to get scored on fairly often. Making your opponent miss just one extra time because they need to adjust for your gameplan can be critical. Just like before, making players take high-risk shots is a win by itself. It won’t show up in your stats, but it will affect the score.
While you can think about this advice as much as you want, there’s ultimately no substitute for practice. You need to face as many shots as is humanly possible. Even if you’ve played a goalie position before, you’ll need to observe the typical trajectories that shots take as they leave players’ hands. You’ll need to feel how certain shots deflect off your hands, so that you can control the rebound. This point in particular is useful: there’s nothing more heartbreaking than making a fantastic save only to have the ball bounce a few feet away to an opposing chaser for an easy putback. Sometimes that’s unavoidable, but as keepers we often have a surprising amount of control on how we deflect a ball. Again, the only way to find out how much and what works for you is to face shot after shot after shot. Face shots from a dedicated starting position, face shots after tracking the ball through a few passes, face shots in situations where you don’t know whether you can expect a shot or a dunk. Every single situation that you encounter in practice is one fewer situation you can be surprised by in a game. Great keepers are the ones who combine their natural reflexes with the kind of pattern recognition that comes from experience. Nothing is more frustrating to an offense than a keeper who knows what they’ll do before they do it!
In order to get this level of exposure to shots, you may need to advocate for yourself. Don’t be afraid to remind your coach that keeping is a unique position, and it needs to be treated that way. You won’t be able to develop nearly as fast as a keeper by only doing chaser drills. While those drills are important as well, the extra responsibilities that come with keeping merit extra training. Ultimately, you help your team by helping yourself. In my next article, we turn to how coaches can help new keepers find their footing in a challenging position.