Podcast: Goalie Gurus founder Patrick Wallace on a changing position

On this episode of New England Lacrosse Journal’s “Chasing The Goal” podcast, hosts Kyle Devitte and Owen Hart are joined by Goalie Gurus founder Patrick Wallace.

Wallace currently serves as the director of Goalie Gurus LLC, a goalie training business that he founded in May 2022. He has also recently been named as the assistant coach at Phillips Andover after a coaching stint with the Boston Nor’Easters box team, which competes in the NABLL.

Previously, he coached at the college level for Gordon College, Wheaton College and Amherst College. 

Wallace played four years at St. Sebastian’s School and completed a post-graduate year at Avon Old Farms. During that time, he was All-ISL honorable mention, a senior captain, a Skip Flanagan Award Winner, and a Founders League Champion. Wallace played college lacrosse at the University of Richmond and Boston College.

Watch the full podcast below on YouTube. It’s also available on all major podcast platforms. If you enjoy it, please leave a rating and a review. Watch more episodes on the Chasing the Goal podcast channel.

Here are some excerpts from the pod.

Owen Hart: With goalies, there are so many things that maybe we don’t notice. What are the small things that people can look out for that separates one from the field?

Patrick Wallace: Great question. I just recently stepped away from college coaching, but for the last three or four years I was recruiting players. There are the three main boxes a goalie has to check: You have to be able to lead the defense as the communicator, you have to stop the ball and you have to start transition the other way. Those are the three main boxes you need to check. When I was at Amherst, we would look for goalies who had all three. If you couldn’t check all three boxes, you weren’t quite up to that level of play.

Kyle Devitte: Do you think the position is moving towards more athleticism or … I don’t want to say less. Do you think it’s moving towards coming out of the cage more?

Patrick Wallace: Oh, 100 percent. So I started at Sebs in 2010 or 2011. Eighteen-year-old me would not start today. I’m just not athletic enough. The goalies are so much more athletic. I still have the hand-eye (coordination), probably, that you need, but like everything else, no. I can’t make the plays out of the cage that kids are making routinely now. And kids’ IQs are honestly a lot higher. Some of my fifth-grade goalies, they sound like college goalies when they’re leading their defense. It’s kind of scary.

Owen Hart: You mentioned the concept of platooning, goalies swapping in and out. There were a couple high-level teams in Mass. that did play multiple goalies in every game or swapped them out. What’s your thought on how successful that can really be?

Patrick Wallace: It hinges on a couple factors. One, the guys have to be best friends and teammates. If the goalies that are rotating in and out, whether it’s two goalies or three goalies, aren’t supporting each other, it’s gonna create a toxic team environment, especially for the defense. And that’s not gonna work. But if they all recognize like, ‘Hey, we just have to play the best half of our life and then we’re done,’ and then another guy comes and plays the best half of his life … then it works.

The second thing that’s really important is getting them (to use the) same terminology. One guy can’t call slide and the other guy calls fire, and that just switches every game at halftime. You need to be really intentional as a coach about getting uniform terminology with your goalies and with your defensemen.

@TheKyleDevitte
kyle.devitte@laxjournal.com

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