Coach Christopher
Coach Christopher is from Winthrop, Maine and grew up playing youth hockey in Augusta for the AAA Maine Hurricanes and did a year with the Maine Moose midget program there. In high school, Austin was the starting goaltender for Saint Dominic Academy and led his team to a Maine Class A Championship final. His senior year he won the Hobey Baker Award for men’s high school ice hockey. After Saint Dominic’s, Austin went on to play for Franklin Pierce University, a Northeast-10 NCAA Division 2 school where Austin completed one red-shirt year and four years of varsity hockey while graduating with his MBA in 2018.
Austin began The Mental Goalie School in 2018 and has coached with Goalie Academy Boston and the Goalie Academy of Virginia, and has done private lessons and small group training, something he started while in college during the summers home in Maine. He’s also been a staple instructor at the Rousseau’s Goalie Clinic in Falmouth, Maine with John Racine since 2016. In New York, Austin has been the goal-tending coach for the AAA CP Dynamo, coaching the 13U-18U goalies. Austin has coached mites to college players, the latter while still training as a college hockey player himself!
Outside of hockey, Coach Austin is an avid tennis player (a great sport for you young goalies!), enjoys picking his guitar, and is a big history buff!
The hockey world is changing, and so is the understanding of the goaltending position. As little as ten years ago it would have sounded absurd to dedicate a portion of practice to goalie training. Now, it is becoming expected. However, the goaltending position is still one often misunderstood, and Austin’s approach to goaltending is to reinforce and help ease the mental toll on today’s goalies. There is no “right” or “wrong” style of goaltending anymore, but there is a way to approach the mental training of the goalie game. This, along with coaching and reinforcement of fundamentals, properly save selection, and positioning can help goaltenders develop the most important skill of all in today’s hockey game: patience.
