MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2026 · THE FACEOFF · VOL XIII

NOT A GOALIE SHORTAGE, A COACHING SHORTAGE

Refereed a Peewee team that did it right 🏒

Saw a goalie with no guidance and became the coach he never had 🥅

Now Nick D'Errico is building PointShot, the connector for coaches who care 🤝

Episode 7 on YouTube · Spotify · Apple Podcasts

This week's FACEOFF 🤼 puts our seventh guest in the chair, and our first from the crease.

Nick D'Erricohas spent 15 years coaching goalies, from Learn to Play through NCAA and professional hockey. He owns D'Crease Goaltending, coaches the goalies for Worcester State University's women's team and is a USA Hockey Gold-certified goaltending coach from the very first class to earn it. At a youth club in central Massachusetts he built a goalie program from scratch, from nine goalies to 40. Now he's the co-founder of PointShot, an online athlete development platform and coaching marketplace, built across hockey, basketball, soccer and more so any kid can find a coach who will invest in them.

Paul sat down as a team coach whose bench had seven skaters and no goalie, fresh off USA Hockey's Bronze goaltending course. Thirty-two minutes with Nick. Five takeaways below, then Nick's goalie drill library, as promised on the episode; the full conversation is one tap away above.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS FROM EPISODE 7

1. You don't have to be a goalie to coach one.
   It's a line USA Hockey uses too, and it's Nick's first instruction to every team coach: your job is to teach the game, not technique. Teach the goalie to read the play, what to anticipate and what to look for in shooters, and design every drill around a scoring opportunity so the goalie knows what they're getting out of it. Technique can come from a goalie coach once a month or on the side, and even that he'd limit, because a goalie's decisions should be their own, not something they did because coach said to. The habit he hears far too often is the prescriptive one, like asking a goalie to play the puck and then yelling when they cough it up. Ask a guided question instead, and let the kid figure it out.

2. Nine goalies to 40, one clinic at a time.
   When Nick arrived at a youth club in central Massachusetts, it had less than one goalie a team: kids who would rather score, and parents with a fixed idea of the position. He started with one clinic a week and made it fun, then built the structure around it: a loaner gear library that has outgrown his garage, quick-change gear and rotating goalies at Mite and Squirt, no full-time goalies before Peewee, Bantams and up mentoring the younger goalies, his college kids coming back to work with the older ones, and a goalie station at Learn to Play. A month into this season the club is at almost two goalies a team across 18 teams. Every year some of them level up and move on, everybody panics about where the goalies will come from, and they just build more.

3. Goaltending has a branding problem, and parents own the brand.
   Borrowing a colleague's line, Nick says the position has a branding issue. Parents picture the most dangerous spot on the ice, when the goalie is actually the most protected player out there, by gear and by rule. Then come the cost and the loneliness of the job, a bit like pitching in baseball. His fixes: lower the barrier to entry with quick-change gear, secondhand gear and equipment help like GearGiver, and make the goalie part of the team, with a tap on the pads after a big save and an “it's okay” on a rough night, because kids repeat what parents say. Paul knows the hard version from Westchester County, where some parents have their kids sign written contracts promising not to play goalie. Nick's answer for them: you can't argue with the smile on a kid's face when they come off the ice.

4. Quality reps, not more reps.
   Nick calls over-specialization one of the biggest risks to a kid's love of the position. North American hockey puts kids on the ice five days a week, then again in the spring and summer, and a goalie needs breaks: time to skate out, to miss hockey and especially to miss goaltending. His frame is self-determination theory: relatedness (I belong on this team), competence (I know what I'm doing, and a mistake is a learning moment, not a flaw in my character) and autonomy (I make my own decisions in the game), all three kept in balance. The same goes for private lessons: find the right coach, take the guidance one week, then give it a week, two or three to stick. Growth, in his words, is 1% better every day, and it won't show up in this week's save total.

5. PointShot, a connector for coaches who care.
   His co-founder, Lou, has coached for 35 years and built a video review platform almost a decade ago for schools and youth organizations that couldn't afford the big ones. When the two met through USA Hockey, while Nick was writing his thesis, they decided the real gap wasn't software but quality coaching and parent trust, and rebuilt the idea from scratch as PointShot. Athletes get the video tools free; coaches get what they need to start, run and grow their own business, background-checked and certified for their specialty; and next come organizations, which can bring vetted specialists in position coaching, mental performance, nutrition and strength to their kids, partly subsidized or at an org discount. Rapid fire: Marc-André Fleury is the goalie he'd pay to watch, and his Russian street dog Floki would make the better goalie. His Monday-morning ask of every club director, team coach and goalie parent: check in with your goalies.

That's the short version.
The full thirty-two minutes, with the Peewee team he refereed in Allston-Brighton that made him want to coach, why his program has no full-time goalies before Peewee, self-determination theory in two minutes, the drill he'd ban from every youth practice and the one piece of goalie gear he says you never skimp on, is on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and every episode of THE FACEOFF lives at thecoachsboard.com/podcast.

SPECIAL SECTION

NICK'S GOALIE DRILL LIBRARY 🥅

Paul promised on the episode that Nick's drills would go out with it, so here they are. Nick keeps an open-source goaltending drill library on his D'Crease Goaltending site, free for every ice hockey coach, mixing his own drills with ones from the likes of Steve Valiquette, Kendall Coyne Schofield and the USA Hockey NTDP. Every drill is built for the goalie with the team in the play, which is the episode in practice: design around a scoring opportunity. Nick is still building the page out, so bookmark it: the link stays the same as the library grows.

FOUR TO RUN AT YOUR NEXT PRACTICE

• The Timeout Corner · Small-area game, 2 goalies, 4 shooters. Two nets at right angles facing the boards; shooters can shoot, pass across, stuff it or bank it off the wall, and goalies can cut off passing lanes. Keep score, goalies against shooters.

• Bumper Read · Unopposed, 1 goalie, 3 skaters. Low-to-high plays and one-timers from the slot, for tracking the puck and reading the shooter.

• Reading the Half-Wall · Opposed, 1 goalie, 5 skaters. Plays off the half-wall into the slot, clean looks and broken plays, for reading more than one threat.

• Back to Back 2-on-1 · Small-sided game, 2 goalies, 6 skaters. Screens, deflections, rebounds and one-timers at both nets, for battle and net-front scrambles.

What to cut, from the episode: three shooters firing from the top of the circle with no time to reset, and flow drills that send the same shot from the same spot. Build in variation so the goalie learns to adapt to where the play is.

Drills are shared under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) unless noted: run them and adapt them with credit, just not commercially.

FIND NICK AND POINTSHOT
pointshot.com · D'Crease Goaltending · Instagram · Facebook · LinkedIn · D'Crease on Instagram · Nick on LinkedIn

FOLLOW THE COACH'S BOARD
YouTube · Instagram · X · TikTok · thecoachsboard.com

LOOKING AHEAD ⏭️

THE FACEOFF 🤼 is two a week now. Thursday, November 5: Diyana Georgieva, founder of CUGGO, on building a zero-sugar hydration mix for active kids, sweetened only with monk fruit, as a family business with her husband and their two kids, and what really belongs in the cooler after practice.

Know an operator, founder or coach we should feature? Just hit reply.