USA Hockey’s goaltending development to be in spotlight at 4 Nations Face-Off

The Thanksgiving morning optional practice was sparsely attended, 10 or 12 players for the Lansing Spartans, an under-10 team in Michigan, gathering on the ice ahead of what promised to be a day of indulgence.

They had one coach with them, an assistant named Phil Osaer, who had spent the previous few months of 2015 traveling, talking to coaches about what seemed to be a near-universal truth.

No one had enough goalies.

On that day, though, Osaer had gotten lucky when both showed up, Zach Jaakkola and Reed Drouare, among a crew of forwards and defensemen. As Osaer watched, the goalies took off their gloves and handed them over to the skaters. Riley Fast, now a forward for the Maryland Black Bears of the North American Hockey League, was the first to take the handoff.

He stepped into the net.

“Kids are shooting normal black pucks and Riley has just normal player equipment on and goalie gloves and he’s making saves,” Osaer said. “Some are hitting him in the pants and some are hitting him in the gloves. And then Riley takes the gloves off and Cole [Hutchinson] puts the gloves on.

“It just dawned on me that we were overthinking goalie equipment and overthinking the position and we just needed to find a way to allow kids to be goalies for short periods of time.”

In addition to being an assistant with the Lansing Spartans, Osaer was the manager of goaltending for USA Hockey, which was six years into the American Development Model, a framework for developing hockey players launched in 2009. He knew the program was still struggling to recruit and train goalies. There was never enough equipment, it was far too expensive and, too often, parents were not at all interested in their kids being hit by pucks.

“I thought about it a little bit,” Osaer said. “If we got the coaches and parents out of the way, for kids, it would be street hockey where a player was goalie for a little while and then he took his pads off and someone else was goalie.”

But, to do that, he needed the right equipment. He needed goalie pads that could be changed out in a matter of minutes -- or less. He set out to create them.

A young goalie shows off Quick Change equipment, a key development in getting more kids to try the position.

That idea turned into Quick Change goalie equipment, allowing more kids to try the position, a sea change in USA Hockey’s burgeoning desire to do more and be more in the development of goalies from kindergarteners all the way up to the senior men’s national team.

The plan is aimed at the next generation, at the goalies who will grace the rosters of future international events, at the World Championships and the World Cup of Hockey and the Olympic Games. But it has also touched the three goalies on Team USA’s roster for the 4 Nations Face-Off in February, in the steps that USA Hockey has taken to increase its share of the goalie minutes at the highest levels, the commitment to a position that was often overlooked, filtering out and up.

“USA Hockey has done such a good job and I think it’s just getting started,” said Jake Oettinger of the Dallas Stars, one of three goalies named to the U.S. team, along with Connor Hellebuyck (Winnipeg Jets) and Jeremy Swayman (Boston Bruins). “Hopefully we can continue to pump out great goalies.”

It’s a grassroots effort that spans hockey rinks from Alaska to California to Massachusetts, as they hope to build on systems that have already produced current high-level NHL goalies in Swayman (Alaska), Thatcher Demko of the Vancouver Canucks (California), Joey Daccord of the Seattle Kraken (Massachusetts), Hellebuyck (Michigan), Oettinger (Minnesota) and Joseph Woll of the Toronto Maple Leafs (Missouri), among so many others.

“When you think about the upcoming 4 Nations and you look at the construction of the rosters,” said David Lassonde, USA Hockey’s national goalie coach. “I think many people would believe that we have the deepest pool of goalies of all the four countries, and we probably could have gone to our fourth, our fifth, our sixth goalie and maybe people would say the exact same thing if we went a little deeper in our pool. So that’s exciting for us, for sure.”

* * * *

In 2015, just before that spark of an idea from Osaer, Ron DeGregorio was ready to retire as president of USA Hockey, and the organization wanted to give him a gift. He demurred. What he wanted instead, he said, was goaltending. He wanted to focus on the goalies; he was a lifelong goaltender who played at Middlebury College in Vermont and did not stop until age 74.

They started with about $60,000.

“It was kind of like the secret nobody wanted to talk about: How important goaltending was,” said Terry Jarkowsky, a USA Hockey goaltending development coordinator. “But it wasn’t always a priority until you don’t have it.”

What had been the priority for USA Hockey was the American Development Model.

After the USA Hockey National Team Development Program, a training ground for elite American teenagers, was started in 1996, coaches had found that their preparation for the program was sometimes lacking. Thirteen years later, they started the ADM, with the hopes of ensuring age-appropriate training starting with younger kids, kids who might one day be selected for the NTDP.

But, under the ADM, goaltending got short shrift.

So, eventually, USA Hockey would come up with its big-picture goal, “51 in ’30,” getting 51 percent of all high-level minutes played by goalies from the United States by 2030. The plan began by targeting the NHL but has since expanded to include the Professional Women’s Hockey League and NCAA hockey.

Jeremy Swayman of the Boston Bruins will be one of the three goalies for Team USA at the 4 Nations Face-Off.

It’s a strategy that starts with the tiniest of mite goalies on up.

“Just seeing USA Hockey really take initiative in goaltending specifics and seeing now in the NHL, the ‘51 in ’30,’ what a goal,” Swayman said. “It’s my job to continue that and the next generation too. And you see, countries and programs that take initiative in goaltending have had success. I wouldn’t be here without USA Hockey.”

It's an ambitious goal, given that they started at 11.45 percent of NHL minutes in the 2007-08 season, a marker because it was the first time a full-time goalie coach was added to the NTDP. They’re now at around 22 percent and have never eclipsed 25 percent.

“I think it’s unapologetically American to shoot for the stars and to reach for something that everyone in the world points at you and goes, ‘That’ll never happen. It’s not possible,’” said Steve Thompson, USA Hockey’s manager of goaltending development since 2019. “But that’s what we love about this, is that it is ambitious.”

And though it is clearly about developing goalies for the biggest of stages -- the 4 Nations and the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics and beyond -- the plan is not just about final outcomes.

“Really, it starts with the under-14s, getting more goaltenders in the pipeline,” DeGregorio said. “That’s one of the issues we’re concerned with. We see that there’s a lack of enough goalies to go around in some situations, many more than we would like.”

There are now three prongs to the plan: Try. Develop. Master.

It starts with any 5-year-old intrigued enough to don what they sometimes call the “superhero” getup of the goalie and follows that kid up through the ranks. And while not every kid who gets a couple of shifts in goal at a U-8 practice is going to continue with the position, USA Hockey is hoping that more will, that they will fall in love and be hooked, that they will find a passion.

“When I was growing up, the weaker skater, the weaker player would be stuck in goal,” Jarkowsky said. “Now we try to get our best athletes into that position.”

* * * *

Nothing exemplifies the first tenet of USA Hockey’s goalie program, “Try,” like those Quick Change pads. They were revolutionary in being able to shuttle as many kids as possible through the net, with thin pads and Velcro straps and the ability to get the gear on in as little as 42 seconds.

When Osaer came up with the concept, he went to Mike Bruins, who was then the brand manager for the goalie department at Total Hockey, who went in turn to equipment people he knew in St. Louis and to a local goalie coach. They came up with leg pads and a padded jersey, picking and choosing the attributes that they liked from the youth pads already on the market.

Within months, after the creation of a prototype, the idea was announced at USA Hockey’s annual meetings.

Orders poured in.

“None of the current leg pads could be put over existing shin guards,” Bruins said. “Kids at the time, if you wanted to try goal, you’d have to get off the ice, take off a lot of equipment, put the new stuff on. It just took a long time. The response was great. … I still see a bunch of the models we created out there.”

They have spread around the world, from the U.S. to Norway and everywhere in between. Bruins was at a recent St. Louis Blues game when he looked up to see the kids in the intermission scrimmage wearing the Quick Change equipment.

And though they’re not perfect -- they aren’t always as available as needed, they’re not inexpensive and coaches sometimes complain about the Velcro not working as well as they’d hope -- they allow for the rotation of goalies in practices and games, for “Try Goalie” clinics, for more access to a position that was often inaccessible.

It was when associations in Canada started putting in orders that Osaer knew they had hit on something big, something necessary, something that would impact goaltending worldwide, putting USA Hockey’s stamp on the game -- literally and figuratively.

“The USA Hockey emblem was on the first set of Quick Change pads,” Osaer said with a chuckle, noting that it was because grants had been used in the pads’ development. “We all are so competitive. When the first orders from Canada came through and knowing that there would be little Canadian hockey players skating around with USA Hockey emblems on, there was an element of pride to that.”

* * * *

Mike Buckley, the Los Angeles Kings and Team USA 4 Nations goalie coach, shows some pointers at the National Team Goalie Camp.

At around 12 years old, “Try” becomes “Develop,” and the plan becomes more serious with more need for coaching and specialization. The goal, at this point, is to have one youth hockey coach with at least a bronze certification on every team in the country.

Which is why 40 people have just shown up to a call on a Monday in mid-December.

It is 6 p.m., a time when the kids aren’t quite in bed and the workday has barely ended, when there’s dinner to make and homework help needed. On screen, faces pop up in the now-familiar Zoom grid.

They’re from all over the country, head coaches and assistant coaches and goalie coaches. They’re parents who have taken on the task of instructing their kids, from little ones to teenagers, all of whom want to know how to do it all, better.

“All right, folks,” Rick Murray opens. “Why don’t we go ahead and get started?”

He kicks off the Bronze Goaltending Coach Education Course, a way for hockey coaches to learn how to better support goalies in practices and in games. The next three hours will be filled with information, on how to recruit better and retain better and coach better. There will be a TV package from “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” shown about Norway and its approach to youth sports, an inclusive and affordable strategy that includes a Bill of Rights for young athletes and doesn’t allow for keeping score until after kids hit 12.

It seems entirely foreign. But it’s something that USA Hockey would like to embrace, feels it needs to embrace, a way of changing the conversation and the acceptance of playing goalie, from the players to the parents.

“We kind of see it as rebranding,” Thompson said, citing the TV show “Mad Men.” “The entire time I’m watching that show, I couldn’t stop thinking about our goaltending position. The main character has a line at one point about how if you want to change, you have to change the conversation.

“The stigmas always were that you had to be crazy to play the position because the puck hurts and the position is so expensive and that’s it’s so much pressure. Those are the conversations that are being had about our product. How do we change that?”

They change it coach by coach, training course by training course, day by day.

The session ends with a homework assignment. Next class, bring a drill.

* * * *

Future goalies meet up with Anaheim Ducks mascot Wild Wing before going on the ice during an intermission for a scrimmage to bring awareness to and celebrate the position.

The prompt on the screen has an exclamation point: “Skating should be fun!”

It is two days later, on a Wednesday evening, and the faces are arrayed back on Zoom, watching a video of young goalies doing movement drills, while a voice in the background tells the goalies, “Keep pushing, keep pushing, keep pushing.”

Mike Gatzke, the USA Hockey associate coach-in-chief of goaltending, is making a point about drills, about how to avoid goalies dreading them, about how to make them enjoyable and engaging, with healthy competition.

“If you keep it fun and challenging, that’s the most important thing for the young ones,” Gatzke said. “Mix it up.”

There are realms in which it would seem that to build a better goalie, it would mean more time in net, more pressure, more goaltender-specific training, more focus. But that’s not the way that USA Hockey is looking at it.

It believes the opposite is key.

That young goalies should spend time at forward and at defenseman, that they should swap in and out of goal a couple of shifts or a period at a time, even as old as U-12, with a “starter” and a “closer” at U-14. The phrase that comes up, over and over, is “time under tension,” and there is a razor-sharp focus on limiting that, on not burning players out.

“My real vision in the long term is … it’s almost going to look more like pitching in baseball than the traditional model of goaltending in hockey,” Thompson said. “There’s the kid that comes in as the starter, then you’ve got the middle frame, and then you’ve got the closer and the closer’s got the music and you’re sprinting out of the bench and you’re shutting the door for 20 minutes.”

It could be a tough sell for uber-competitive kids. It brings up mixed feelings for goalies didn’t have to share earlier in their development, with the Florida Panthers Spencer Knight acknowledging how mentally taxing it can, but also valuing the full games he got to play, the experience and the minutes.

It also could turn down the temperature.

“I think we put too much pressure on the goalie,” DeGregorio said. “If you have pressure on goalies early on -- when I say early on, under 14 -- that really hurts their development. Because part of the development is wanting to do more, can’t wait to get back on the ice and stop a puck and I’m going to try this and that.

“We have to understand that youngsters are youngsters.”

As USA Hockey takes players through its “develop” tier, the goal is to ensure that they have age-appropriate training, supported by coaches that have some idea of how to teach the position, getting away from the idea of “You’re the goalie, just stop the puck,” as Thompson said.

Having a certified coach -- bronze, silver or gold level -- on every bench would help, though not so they can comment on goalie edgework or understand the specific angle of the RVH position.

It’s more about management, about giving breathers and lessening pressure and making sure that kids who drove an hour each way to a game actually get to play. It’s about planning a practice so it’s not just set up for the shooters, but also so that goalies get a representative game sample with a variety of shots and angles, which helps ensure that an easy shot to save is actually an easy shot to save.

“You want to make sure your goalies aren’t getting torched for a two-hour practice,” said Trey Augustine, the Michigan State goaltender who helped the U.S. win its second straight gold at the 2025 IIHF World Junior Championships. “It’s managing that where you’re doing drills and mixing drills in where the goalies can get good work and benefit from the drills that the players are doing.”

They’re working on making the position more affordable, on educating parents about asking supportive postgame questions, to focus on the fun the goalies had and the saves they made, knowing how mentally draining the position can be. They’re reimagining the Gordie Howe Hat Trick, in which, traditionally, a player records a goal, an assist and a fight in the same game.

The updated version has replaced the fight with a save.

* * * *

Sometimes getting players to succeed, even at the highest of levels is, as Thompson said, “literally just somebody that believes in you.”

Oettinger thinks about that. He wonders whether it all could have been different, had he not been chosen for the NTDP.

“I’d be a U.S. history teacher right now if I hadn’t made that team, I think,” Oettinger said. “So just the opportunity that they gave me there, I’m forever indebted to them.”

Dallas Stars goalie Jake Oettinger, who will be part of Team USA for the 4 Nations Face-Off, says he would not be playing hockey today if he did not make the United States National Team Development Program.

The path from youth goalie to high-performance goalie is not easy, but it’s not impossible, even for goalies not traveling a traditional path. Swayman, for instance, was cut from his NAHL team, the Kenai River Brown Bears in Alaska, at 16 and forced to scramble for a spot behind two other goalies on a team in Colorado.

That both Oettinger and Swayman have ended up here, at the highest level of hockey and the highest level of USA Hockey, is a testament to the belief that no one should fall through the cracks.

“Our early developers, we want to make sure we support them, but we also want to make sure we support those that maybe hit a growth spurt at 17 or maybe just decided that they liked hockey more than football and put a little bit more focus into it at 16,” Thompson said. “There’s so many different factors that go into when these kids pop.”

For those goalies who do end up at the NTDP, Lassonde is looking to mold them into players who epitomize, as he put it, “being elite competitors, being elite movers, being elite thinkers of the game."

But as Thompson and the rest of USA Hockey work to ensure that “our country’s best are the world’s best,” they’re now looking to the “51 in ’30” generation, the kids who are only now reaching the “Master” stage, having been 8-and-under in 2016 when the program started.

They’re the ones who will prove that it has all been worth it.

And as the red, white and blue comes into view for them, they have so many goalies to emulate.

“It’s really nice to see when you check the stats online,” Jarkowsky said. “I always count how many Americans are in the top 10, top 20. I think our time is definitely coming. We’re making progress. I think it’s because the sport is growing so much and I think there is a fundamental focus on goaltending, I think you’re really going to see it take off in the next couple of years.”

Many of those goalies gathered in late May in Saint Paul, Minnesota, at the inaugural USA Hockey National Goaltending Symposium. The brought together more than 1,000 goalies, had former NHL stars Mike Richter and Ryan Miller as speakers, goalies coming out of the woodwork to do what they could to help build the next group they hope will succeed on the biggest of stages as best-on-best hockey returns.

United States goalie greats Ryan Miller (l.) and Mike Richter were speakers at the inaugural USA Hockey National Goaltending Symposium.

“It’s my job and it’s [Spencer Knight’s] job and all the other USA goalies’ jobs to keep pushing that level and that bar and representing where we came from,” Swayman said. “It’s definitely a pride factor when you see another USA goalie on the other side or even on your team.”

Kids want to be what they see, wanted to be Mike Eruzione after the “Miracle on Ice” in 1980, wanted to be Miller when he brought the U.S. to the gold-medal game in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, wanted to be T.J. Oshie when he was tapped again and again in the shootout in the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

Thompson wants kids to turn on the 4 Nations Face-Off and be dazzled by the play in net by the Americans. He hopes they idolize and emulate Hellebuyck and Oettinger and Swayman, that they see the superheroes they want to be.

It is, after all, his best advertising.

“It’s such a time to become patriotic and to want to be that person, to have that person be your hero,” Thompson said. “It’s been a long time. I think for the kids it’s going to be exciting, for them to have their heroes to look up to, seeing them in their country’s colors instead of their NHL club’s colors.”

* * * *

Boston Bruins goalie Jeremy Swayman with some future netminders at an event where kids could try playing goalie for free.

It all came full circle, years later.

Osaer’s daughter was playing U-6 hockey in Plymouth, Michigan, alongside the daughter of Seattle Kraken assistant general manager Jason Botterill. Osaer was helping coach.

“His daughter is a good little player,” Osaer said. “He joked, he said, ‘Don’t put her anywhere near that goalie equipment, Phil.’ I was like, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it.’”

But no one left the locker room as goalie and, when the coaches asked for volunteers, Botterill’s daughter, Annika, now 8, shot her hand up. She had always had a fascination with the position, whether in soccer or hockey. Botterill, though, wanted her to have as much time as possible skating out.

That wasn’t Osaer’s problem.

“I’m like, ‘Get over here, you’re the goalie,’” Osaer said.

It was an example of everything they see, everything that always happens. As Thompson said, “If it’s street hockey, kids want to raise their hand to be goalie. If it’s knee hockey, they want to be goalie. If they’re just screwing around at the rink, they want to be goalie.”

The kids are eager, thrilled, to put on the gear, to see the pucks flying at them. The parents? Not so much. It is a continual fight, to embrace the enthusiasm of the kids, while convincing their parents to buy in.

Even a hockey lifer like Botterill.

“At that age she was just learning the game,” Botterill said. “I wanted her to have as much time out as possible. Didn’t want her to get too involved with goaltending and find a love for goaltending.”

She didn’t -- she’s now a defenseman -- but she could have. And that’s what matters to Osaer, to USA Hockey.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone up to a kid -- I’ve got some sweet Jeremy Swayman pads on -- I put them on the kid and then I’ve got Mom and Dad sprinting down to the Plexiglas, banging on the glass to let me know that their kid is not a goalie and I chose the wrong athlete,” Thompson said. “And the kid’s looking at me like, ‘I volunteered for this.’

“I’m like, ‘I know, Mom and Dad, this isn’t a full-time thing. It’s going to be for five minutes. Please just go back up there and I’ll tell you why it’s great in a minute.’”

For the first 15 minutes of that practice, as Osaer felt Botterill glaring over at him, his daughter took to the net before handing it over to the next in line.

“We were able to take the parents out of it and allow the kids to be kids and have fun,” Osaer said. “They all get that chance to play. That’s what the game is about.”

NHL.com senior draft writer Mike Morreale contributed to this report

Group photo of National Team goalie camp.