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Despite my full-time job as a goalkeeper, I often would practice with my team as a field player as well. This was especially true if we were playing some sort of competitive game. One of the most common games we would play involved two teams racing against each other to get all of the players (one at a time) to dribble a ball to some designated endpoint and back. The catch was that they had to weave the ball through a long line of cones the whole way there. The setup of this game looked like the picture I attached with this box. While dribbling was not exactly my forte, I learned a few helpful tricks to keep me playing at the same level as my teammates. Since it is a race, everyone is focused on going as fast as possible. For me personally, however, I knew that when I dribbled fast, I would almost always hit the ball too hard and miss a set of cones I had to weave through. This is due to Fitts’ Law regarding the speed-accuracy tradeoff. When I tried to increase my speed, my accuracy of weaving through the cones lowered. To avoid setting my team back and losing the game, I went as fast as I could while maintaining complete control of the ball.

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After a year of goalkeeping under my belt, I generally knew how certain movements should feel and how I would need to correct myself if something felt off. However, since my only real intrinsic feedback was whether I kept the ball in or out of the net, it was sometimes necessary to receive other feedback in order to better understand what I did wrong and how I should fix it. My coach was very useful in giving me augmented feedback. For instance, if I kept missing shots that were low and close to me, he would inform me that I needed to focus on getting my hand down first to block the ball before I worried about getting the rest of my body behind it. By telling me to focus on this cue, I could accomplish the main priority of keeping the ball out of the net. The picture I placed in this box is of me and my goalie coach during a scrimmage when I was younger (and apparently lacking a jaw line?). He often pulled me to the side during halftime to talk about what went well and what I needed to improve on for the next half. Other feedback that was very helpful was video feedback. One of my common problems was being stuck in “no man’s land.” This saying basically refers to an area in the goal box, depending on where the ball is, where the goalkeeper is caught out of position and has very little chance of stopping the ball if it is shot on target. Watching a video of this with my coach will allow him to specifically point out what situations are causing me to go into this position and how I can fix it.

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As I continued practicing and working with my coach, I began to perform very well as a goalkeeper- better than I ever had as a field player! I could dive, punt, throw, and punch balls away when necessary. Blocking the ball from going into the net was usually no problem; however, I seemed to have issues with holding on to the ball when it was kicked at me hard. This may not seem like a huge issue but letting a ball bounce off you means it’s still fair game, and there’s a chance it will bounce right back to the offensive team. In order to correct this during practice, my coach replaced my soccer ball with an egg. Yup. An egg. He literally threw eggs at me. But it turns out he had good intentions- he was using transfer! Let me explain. The reason I could not catch these fast-driven balls was because I was not absorbing the impact of the ball. I needed to work on meeting the ball with fully extended arms and bringing the ball into my chest to reduce the impact. Here’s where the egg comes in. If you do not reduce the impact when catching an egg, it will break and you will be covered in egg. No one wants to be covered in egg. So for the entire first half of practice, my coach threw eggs at me that I would then have to catch by bringing it into my chest slowly. I imagine I looked something like the picture below. After many broken eggs and a very smelly Maddey, I eventually had egg catching down. For the last half of practice, he swapped the eggs for soccer balls and we tested how well the task transferred. Not surprisingly, the transfer task significantly helped me improve at handling and holding on to the ball!

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Imagine being a goalkeeper inside the penalty box (that little 18-yard box surrounding the goal) with about 15-18 other players squished in that box with you. Now imagine it with a ball constantly being bounced off these players and dribbled around. Hopefully, you can see how hard it would be to keep your eye on this ball the entire time it's getting knocked around. This was one of my biggest issues when I first started goalkeeping. During times with the opposing team was on offense, their best strategy would be to get as many of their teammates as possible on the offensive side of the field. This also meant that almost all my teammates were also on this side of the field to defend. My picture from one of my soccer games below gives a small snippet of what the penalty box looked like at these times. With this amount of chaos, trying to track the ball at every moment was nearly impossible. The opposing team would often take advantage of this. I’d usually be able to at least see the ball right when the ball hit the player's foot, but the clear pathway of vision would soon be cut off as the ball passed through players. As a novice, I was very bad at detecting where the ball was likely going to go after I lost vision of it. However, as I progressed in my position, I became better at detecting where a ball will go when it leaves a player's foot. This scenario represents temporal occlusion- I could see the ball up to a certain point in time, and then I had to assume where it was going to go after that. I became better at determining this by the use of visual search, or more specifically, fixation. I learned what to look at, or fixate on, when the opposition is shooting in order to determine how to respond.

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Starting at the age of 6-years old, I fell in love with watching and playing soccer. I thought about it nearly constantly and could not wait for practice after school each day. As one of the taller and bigger kids on the field, I generally had an advantage over the other players despite not being quite as skilled as some of them. However, it didn’t take long for all the kids to start catching up to my size. This wasn’t much of an issue until I wanted to try out for the elite travel team. After the first day of tryouts, I knew that these other more skilled players were likely going to make the team over me. Then an opportunity opened up: a position as goalkeeper. I was very hesitant to even consider the position at first, but I knew that it was probably my best chance for securing a spot on the team since no one else seemed to be interested in it. My risk paid off. The following week I found myself standing in the net at practice quite scared of what I had coming. I was pretty confident my night would look something like the gif below- a never ending cycle of soccer balls hitting me in the face. Luckily I was introduced to a goalkeeping coach that would be there to help me get familiarized with this new position for the season. One of the first things my coach wanted to teach me was diving. Since diving is a rather complex skill, he thought it would be best to break it down into component parts so that I could learn a few parts of the skill at a time. First he had me practice diving on my knees. This was so that I could focus on how to catch and bring the ball down during a dive. Once I got that down, he taught me how to properly move my feet to prepare for a dive and how to land so that my impact with the ground was soft and pain-free… for the most part. After I accomplished both these components, he then began having me practice the dive as a whole. Little did I know he was utilizing segmentation to help me accomplish this skill!