Specializing Keepers

[lanesra]

At what age do you start speciailizing goalies? I don't have any kids on my team who really want to play keeper, so everyone plays the position, and of course, we have some really horrendous scores, which in turn leads kids to feel insecure about playing the position. I'd prefer to have a couple of kids who play regularly so they could get confident. But every other team in our division has a fixed, regular keeper. I used to think it was too early for this (U12) but seeing how the the other defenses feel confidence-wise, makes me think that maybe I'm doing something wrong. If I had a keeper, we could actually work on some skills, rather than just repeating the same thing with a new keeper every week. Plus, I wouldn't have to "recruit" a new keeper every week.

[Val]

I'm not a fan of specialization too early, either, but if I had a U10 or U12 who liked to play goal, I would see that they got to play a majority of the time. Since you don't have anyone who wants to play, it sounds like you've got the right approach. Last thing you want to do is force someone to play a lot of keeper. The game's supposed to be fun...