Goalie camp day five draws the ire of the bobcat

so as good as the fourth day of goalie camp was, day five took a nosedive in quality of equal amount. for the most part this was due to the fact that our goalie coach, well, was not there.

"in Utah" was the succinct response from our temporary coach to inquiries as to the whereabouts of the goalie coach best suited (and appropriately paid) to teach us.

i can understand an emergency absence; hockey does take a backseat at times to family and business. what i'm less willing to tolerate is having to show up for a session painfully short on goaltending theory discussions, whether old or new topics, and long on being fed through the same old drills we learned in weeks prior.

maybe Wilkie, due to the Utah business, didn't have time to talk through the day five lesson plan with his helpers; i hold that as a possibility so no points deducted there.

even without any new material, though, i would have expected the assistant coaches to put at least some thought into the activities for the day. the biggest evidence of unpreparedness came when the temp coach split us up into four drill stations; no big surprise there except that stations one (which I started at) and four were exactly the same drill.

now, we have been through enough days and enough different drills that a number of options were open for #4 to avoid making us run through the same drill twice within the hour. when it came time for my squad to hit #4 i took the liberty of requesting that we run through the butterfly slide drill (an exercise from last week that i personally wanted to work on). after a moment's pause the guy in charge found no reason why we couldn't do just that.

all in all, i was a little pissed off at the situation and was a little surprised that i was the only one that seemed to take notice that we got hosed this time around on our netminding educations; we basically did goalie study hall for an hour.

Wilkie might offer us another week to make sure all of his planned topics are covered but i'm not really holding my breath, just look to make some gains in the next two sessions.