The Best Mix of Drills and Videos for Aspiring Lacrosse Players

Ten minutes a day, every day, will do more for a player than one long Saturday session ever will. This is what to do with those ten minutes.

Every drill on this page can be done at home. Most of them need a wall and a ball. Every one comes with a video, because reading a description of a drill and watching someone do it are not the same thing.

It is organized the way a player should actually work: hands first, then shooting, then athleticism, then position. Skip around if you want, but that order is the order for a reason.

1. How to use this page

Pick two or three things. Do them daily. Add more when those are automatic. A player who does fifteen minutes of the same four drills every day for a month will be visibly better. A player who does forty different drills once each will not.

2. Stick skills — start here, always

There is no faster way to build stick skills than a wall and ten minutes a day. Nothing else on this page comes close, and every other skill is downstream of it.

We wrote out five complete wall ball workouts — first-timer through expert — in a printable library. Start with Workout 1 and stay there until you can run it clean.

• The GAL Wall Ball Library — five workouts, printable, free. Linked from our wall ball article.
• POWLAX — excellent free wall ball and stick skill content
• Train with a girls stick. Shallower pocket, far less forgiveness, faster hands required. John Zulberti — who invented wall ball and was a four-time All-American at Syracuse — still hits the wall with one.

3. Shooting

Shooting practice needs volume. Sixty to 120 balls is what turns a session into rhythm instead of a walk. Our backyard setup guide covers the goal, the balls and the backstop.

• John Danowski’s Foundational Skills Set — the Duke head coach, on the fundamentals underneath everything else
• The Jim Berkman 2-Pack — Salisbury. The winningest coach in the history of college lacrosse at any level: 588–62 and thirteen national championships.
• Add a target. Shooting at an open net is not practice. A corner target turns it into a game with a score.

4. Dodging

• Denison midfield dodging — the single best free dodging breakdown on the internet. Watch it twice.
• Lacrosse Film Room — real tactical breakdown of how good players actually beat people
• The four dodges to own: split, roll, face and bull — all four are defined in the glossary. Learn them both-handed or they are worth half as much.

5. Athleticism

This is the part families skip, and it is the part that separates players at fourteen.

• Agility ladder. Any ladder works, and the training tools guide covers the rest of the at-home kit. Basic patterns build body control and the opposite-arm/opposite-leg pattern that one-handed cradling requires.
• Lateral movement. Defenders live and die on it, and so do goalies.
• Wall sits and low stance holds. Free, boring, and they work.

6. Goalie

Goalie deserves its own section because almost nothing written for the field positions applies, and because every team in America is short one.

6.1 The three styles — know which one your kid is

6.2 Six drills to run at home

• Quick hands — Brian “Doc” Dougherty’s drill. Ten minutes, two parts.
• Blind reaction — with Scotty Rodgers
• Turn and save. Goalie faces the goal, back to the shooter. Shooter yells “turn” and shoots immediately. Tennis ball is fine. Use a short stick instead of a goalie head to make it harder.
• Rebounder routine. The same rebounder the field players use.
• Stance holds. Low athletic stance, just hold it. Build from one minute to ten. Can be done in front of the TV.
• Agility ladder. Lateral patterns especially.

6.3 Where goalies learn

• Goalie Evolution Academy — Trevor Tierney. The first person to ever put goalie drills on video. Start here.
• Bill Pilate, The Ball Stops Here — the original goalie instructional, and the reason Pilate is considered one of the best goalie coaches in the sport’s history. Available here · goalieschool.org
• Lax Goalie Rat — Goalie 101 and their warmup routine
• IMG Academy’s Fundamentals of Goaltending — 30 minutes, six parts
• Goalie Smith

6.4 The video every young goalie should see

Brett Queener scoring goals. A goalie, running the length of the field, shooting.

And the player to point at: Blaze Riorden plays attack in the indoor league and goalie in the outdoor league. He has been a PLL MVP and a Team USA captain. Do not let a kid think of himself as “just a goalie” — he is a lacrosse player who happens to play the hardest position.

The goalies worth studying: Blaze Riorden, Trevor Tierney, Brian “Doc” Dougherty, Liam Entenmann, Sal Lacassio, Brett Dobson, Brett Queener, Greg Cattrano, Quint Kessenich and Dillon Ward.

7. Faceoffs

The most specialized job in the sport, and the one with the clearest daily routine.

The Faceoff Academy is the standard. Founded by Greg Gurenlian, with Trevor Baptiste on staff — the best faceoff man in the world teaching at the best faceoff school in the world.

7.1 The daily routine

• Chops — 2 × 10 seconds
• Snaps — 10 reps to a visualized cadence, 10 to a whistle. Plunger, quick clamp, power clamp hands-only.
• Ape walks — 1 × 5 forward, 1 × 5 back
• Screw drill — 1 × 5 each direction. Start in screw position, first whistle go, second whistle self-pop.
• Moves — pinch and pop, plunger back door, defensive draw, power clamp and pull, fish hook
• Varied pops and wing pops — randomize between self-pops and space pops, and practice popping to both the draw side and the non-draw side

8. Film — watching is training

Watching a game with a job attached is practice. Watch one player, one position, one situation. Not the ball. If the game itself is still new to you, start here.

• The Great American Lacrosse YouTube channel — built specifically for our players
• Championship Productions — the deepest instructional library that exists. Their free section is worth an hour.
• USA Lacrosse coaching resources
• Duke’s coaching clinic series — search “Duke Men’s Lacrosse Coaching Clinic”

9. Build the week

Here is what a real week looks like for a player who is serious and still has homework.

That is about ninety minutes a week, and it is more focused training than most players in this city get all season.

10. The part nobody tells you

None of this requires a coach, a field, a team or a dollar beyond a stick and a bag of balls. Every single drill on this page can be done in a driveway before dinner.

The players who show up to spring tryouts looking different are almost never the ones with the most expensive summer. They are the ones who did ten minutes a day while everyone else waited for the season to start.