Interview with Dr. Bill Steffen - Part 1

Dr. Bill Steffen talks about how to develop young goalkeepers, strengthen their mental resilience, and how to help them develop leadership skills on the field.

Dr. Bill Steffen has 27 years of experience coaching in the NCAA in both men’s and women’s soccer. He has five years of professional playing experience as a goalkeeper, won two National Titles with Anson Dorrance at the University of North Carolina where he worked with USWNT greats like Mia Hamm, Kristine Lilly and Briana Scurry. Along with those accomplishments, Dr. Steffen also coached alongside Tony DiCicco, started the University of Oregon Women’s Soccer program, and was a coach educator for United Soccer Coaches. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Wingate University in their Sports Science program and designs United Soccer Coaches’ Sports Psychology curriculum.

Dr. Steffen, thanks for taking the time to chat! With your experiences as a coach and professional goalkeeper, how would you go about developing a youth goalkeeper?

Well I’d say that at least through U11 or U12, nobody is strictly a goalkeeper. If you want to play in goal, that’s great, but we also need you on the field. And I say that for a couple of reasons.

First, it’s important for goalkeepers to understand the game. If they never play on the field then they just can’t read the game as well. In other words, I can tell that this player is going to play the ball to his right by how they’re standing or by how the other players are moving. If goalkeepers have field experience then they know that, but I find that even college goalkeepers struggle with reading the game.

If we limit the goalkeeper to just being a goalkeeper, especially at the youth level, we’re doing them a disservice. They can become a good shot-stopper so to speak, but they won’t be able to play at higher levels because they don’t understand the flow of the game and aren’t able to anticipate things correctly.

In the World Cup we saw a lot of breakaway situations. And every time I see a breakaway situation I’m seeing how well did the goalkeeper read it, how early did they assess a breakaway was going to happen, how did they decide when to advance and shut them down.

At the younger ages, if you want to be a good goalkeeper I would make sure that you play baseball, softball, basketball, other sports. Think about rebounding in basketball. You’re jumping, trying to catch the ball when there’s a bunch of other guys around you. That’s pretty much what happens on a regular basis at a decent level of soccer.

One of the biggest things that I train, and our goalkeepers are much better now than we were even 10 years ago, is tracking the ball. I grew up playing catch with my dad. We’d go out in the street in front of my house and throw the baseball back and forth and you can track the flight of the ball. And you just learn that by seeing thousands of balls being thrown your way. I would work with goalkeepers at the University of Oregon and I’d say “Stand anywhere you want. I’m going to stand behind you, our assistant coach will knock the ball in, and I’m going to get it before you.” And they’d say “No way. You’re old, you can’t do that.” And I would do it, but it’s only because I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of those balls floated in and those goalkeepers had only seen a few thousand. So it’s not anything special about me, you just have to learn how to track the flight of the ball.

At the earlier stages, around the ages of 12 to 14, I’d emphasize catching — and diving to an extent, but mostly a collapse dive, not a big extension dive. You want kids to take a ball that’s outside of their body line, catch it, and put it to the ground safely. When you teach kids that, they’re really learning how to roll out of the dive and fall without doing damage to themselves. So those are the two prerequisite skills there.

And the last thing I’d emphasize is breakaways. You need to get a certain amount of proper instruction for breakaways for a couple of reasons. One is the safety of the goalkeeper. If you don’t make a breakaway save correctly you run a risk of being hurt by the oncoming forward. When I work with young kids, I’ll make sure they know how to go down and how they’re going to be safe.

And the second point, you want to be effective. You want to be safe but you also want to make the save — and you can do both. With proper technique players will learn “I’m going to make the save and I’m going to be safe. I’m going to protect myself.” Those would be the primary technical skills I’d work on with the youngest age groups.

I’d also want to emphasize to the young goalkeepers that there’s going to be goals scored against them. And as a coach you can’t say “Oh don’t worry about it, forget about it,” or give an immediate coaching response of “No, you shouldn’t do that.”

It needs to be “Okay, you got scored on. How?” Then they’ll say “Well those shots were low and really fast.” So you say “Well okay let’s work on making low and really fast saves then,” because getting scored on at younger ages is not that big of a deal. What is a big deal is that they learn how to deal with those kind of setbacks. And if you do that then you’ll have goalkeepers who won’t become frustrated and quit.

It’s important for them to understand that their success is generally not appreciated as someone who scores. When somebody scores everyone is jumping around, patting them on the back. If the goalkeeper makes a big dramatic save we usually have to immediately get set for a corner or there’s a counter attacking situation. There’s no time to stand around and pat the goalkeeper on the back. And kids need to understand that a goalkeeper impacts the game tremendously.

A goalkeeper can be very influential on the outcome but it’s not always appreciated in the same way. So goalkeepers need to be smarter. And coaches need to teach them “Here’s how you get appreciation, here’s what you did, here’s how it impacted the game,” and then it becomes really fun.

Going back to the first part of your question when you’re coaching U8.U9, U10 – how do you get a kid to be a goalkeeper? Well you should bring a pair of goalkeeper gloves. Start out by asking “Who wants to be a goalkeeper?” and no one will raise their hand. Then you say “I’ll tell you what. You can wear these gloves if you do.” You’ll immediately find players who want to try. Some kids will play goalkeeper for one practice and that will be the end of it. But some kids who try it just to wear the gloves will go “You know what? That was pretty fun. That was challenging.” Then you’ll have a kid who has the right disposition, who can appreciate the position, and will stick with it.

You alluded to this in your answer, but it’s said that forwards and goalkeepers are the positions that come under the most pressure. What are some strategies you’ve used to help goalkeepers rebound from mistakes?

When I speak to goalkeepers I say “Your mistakes are going to go in the newspaper, or the website, or whatever social media.” So they have to understand that right away and be prepared to deal with that.

But the biggest thing is that I want to keep it developmental. If the ball ends up in the back of the net, I’m not concerned about where the ball is. I’m concerned about what you did. What behaviors, what actions did you do. And let’s see if we can tweak those, add those, prune those, to make sure that ball doesn’t end up in the back of the net again.

When you emphasize that development the player will pickup on that. But if I’m outcome oriented “Oh you gave up the goal, we’re down one nothing,” well now the kid only thinks about the outcome as well. So the emphasis on the process of development is the most important part.

Goalkeepers need to be leaders to some extent. How much of that is inherent in a players’ personality and how much can it be trained?

People have a certain amount of introversion or extroversion, and sometimes you have to rein them in a bit. If the goalkeeper’s constantly chattering then it becomes like white noise to their teammates and they ignore it.

And there’s the opposite end of that spectrum. We actually had a young lady when I was at the University of Oregon who had a great frame for goalkeeping, technically very sound, but was quiet as church mouse. She wouldn’t say anything and this was one of the hardest coaching tasks that I had.

It’s really difficult to coach being vocal because you’re looking at altering a personality to some degree. Off the field, I don’t care if goalkeepers don’t say anything at all, that’s fine. But on the field goalkeepers need to speak, they need to be a leader. They have to make decisions and communicate how deep the line drops, where the line sits, where the line holds.

And generally people want to help their teammates, right? So I went to this goalkeeper and said “Okay, your teammates want you to speak. They want to hear from you. It’s okay if you tell someone to move. It’s not an imposition. If you want to help your teammates then you need to speak. If you don’t speak, you’re not helping them.” And you could see the lightbulb come on for her. Eventually she became much more vocal, much more of a leader during the run of play, and ended up getting about 40 caps for her international team. She was able to develop that part of her personality as a goalkeeper. I’m not saying we changed her whole personality, but definitely her personality as a goalkeeper.

She came to me as a college student, and it took tremendous effort and a tremendous amount of time to get her to that stage, but I would hope that someone at an earlier point would develop that extroversion.

Was it just changing her perspective that she’s helping her teammates when she uses her voice or were you giving her specific phrases and words to use?

Well there’s always the technical piece that goalkeepers should communicate to their teammates. So field players need to hear “Drop!” when the ball isn’t under pressure, “Step!” when the ball is under pressure, and so on.

But one thing that needs to be asked is does the goalkeeper really want to help their teammates or do they want to prove themselves as a goalkeeper? Sometimes it’s both and it’s important to touch on both. You want to help your teammates so that’s why you speak. You want to be a better goalkeeper so that’s also why you speak.

In the situation I described, she really wanted to help her teammates so she needed to talk. And it did take some prompting at certain moments. I would have to tell her “Here’s when you should speak” or “You should have told them to hold their line there.”

And to coach that properly you have to know your goalkeeper. If I’m playing in midfield and my goalkeeper is not talking then sometimes I would shout “We need to hear from you there!” But sometimes that’s not the most effective way to communicate.

With most of the goalkeeper coaching I do, I’m usually very close to the goal and I’ll have a conversation with the goalkeeper. So I’m not shouting across a field – I’m usually 10 yards behind them saying “Hey, tell them to step.” “Hey, tell them to drop.” So you have to understand the nature of who you’re working with and it falls back on one of the great statements about coaching: You have to know your players. Is this a player where I can stand back and shout “Hey, we need you to speak up a bit!” or will that message not be as well received as if I was standing next to her saying “Hey, that was the kind of situation where you talk to your teammates about where to drop or where to hold.”