Shutout!

Monday night I played the fourth game of the year with the Whalers.  As you may remember the last game with them was a disaster, ending in an 8-5 loss.  I shouldered the bulk of the blame for that one and was feeling pretty down on myself for not being able to perform the way I know I can.  Going into Monday's game I was worried about my mental state, and worked really hard on getting myself focused and thinking positively before the game.  One of the things I decided was that I wasn't going to look at my GAA anymore, because I found that I obsessed about it during games, and was paranoid of letting in more goals cause it would ruin my GAA.  Enough I decided.  I was going to worry about one game at a time, one shot at a time.

I did a lot of stretching at home, and when I got to the rink I focused on warming up my reflexes by doing some reaction ball work and juggling.  I put my equipment on and stretched a bit, and then tried to think about making saves, tracking the puck into my body, and directing rebounds into the corner.

In the warmup things went well, I was seeing the puck well and moving nicely, and found that I was challenging a lot without even thinking about it.  When the game started I was ready to go.  The first couple of minutes we were trapped in our zone, and I handled a couple not too difficult shots.  A much better start.  After that my team turned it up a notch and most of the play was in the opposing zone.  I didn't have a huge amount of work the rest of the game, but a few shots here and there that I handled well with either no rebound, or just a rebound to the corner.  The one time I let a rebound out in front I was able to scoop it with my stick and cover it up.

Nearing the end of the game I started noticing some negative thoughts coming into my head, and was almost fearing any shots because they might be the one that broke my shutout.  I also started calculating how the shutout would affect my GAA before I stopped myself.  I quickly tried to shove all those thoughts aside, and started telling myself I dared them to take another shot.  It seemed to help as I made a few other saves towards the end to preserve the shutout.  Maybe it's a fluke, but I really feel like all this mental stuff paid off.  We'll have to see how it works out in later games.