By Ottawa Sports Pages, for OSU Force Academy
For David Bellemare and Aaron Falsetto, coaching goalkeepers all comes down to relationships.
The Ottawa South United Soccer Club goalkeeper coaches want their young athletes to know that they’ll always stick with them, and that they’ll always be honest with them. Trust, confidence and open communication are the crucial pillars they focus on establishing early on with the students they work with over many years.
“It’s more than just stopping the ball,” underlines Bellemare.
Even more fundamental than the player-coach relationship, however, is the connection between the pair of coaches who lead the OSU Force Academy Goalkeeper Centre of Excellence for almost 100 OSU netminders.
“There’s two of us, but we’re really one,” smiles Bellemare, who’s worked with Falsetto for the past half-dozen years. “We complement each other.”
“We really finish each other’s sentences now,” echoes Falsetto. “Sometimes we’ll show up to the training venue and we’ll have the same idea in our heads without talking previously. It’s getting quite scary actually.”
Bellemare, a Laval university exercise science grad from Trois-Rivières, Que., has been a goalkeeper coach for over 25 years. He’s helped the University of Ottawa Gee-Gees and Ottawa Fury FC win numerous championships and he’s coached a pile of the region’s top goalkeepers in recent years.
Bellemare joined OSU in 2016, which is when he met Falsetto, an OSU Force Academy product who began coaching at his youth club after playing NCAA soccer at Earlham College.
“Part of what attracted me to OSU was the fact that there was more than one goalie coach. They weren’t asking me to just be the one guy to take over such a big club with so many teams,” recalls Bellemare, who isn’t a fan of providing a “fast food” service to everyone. “I value what we do and the impact a goalie coach can have.”
Falsetto was part of the Force Academy just as OSU was establishing itself as a powerhouse in the top provincial soccer leagues, and brought with him an appreciation for the high-performance culture and family feel present at OSU.
“Having gone through the ranks, I had an understanding of the position because I played it,” reflects Falsetto, a math and science teacher at Immaculata High School. “But learning how to teach and coach goalkeepers – it was really awesome for me to learn from someone with a lot of experience, and a very humble guy in Dave who was keen to share all of his knowledge, and then let me have the reins while still giving pointers.”
Bellemare and Falsetto work with roughly 80-90 players in total in OSU’s Goalkeeper COE, from the introductory level up to semi-pro. Generally, they’ll have a goalkeeper-specific session each week for between 10-15 keepers at a time. The six groups feature a mix of ages and levels to provide a good, challenging environment. With two coaches always present, Falsetto might lead half of them through technical skills training while Bellemare focuses on tactical play and game awareness.
In addition, the coaching tandem often work with goalkeepers for a half-hour before their team practices as well, and then support them during team training with tips on decision-making, ball distribution and making good connections with their teammates.
Classroom, video and online sessions are also part of the equation. Goal-setting, performance analysis and mental skills are among the topics discussed.
“That’s what I’m most proud of about the program – it’s not just about catching balls, it’s a holistic approach,” signals Falsetto. “We work with our goalkeepers pretty much like a university setting.”
University soccer is one area where the OSU keeper coaches aren’t aligned – Bellemare coaches with the Gee-Gees women’s team, while Falsetto has worked with the Carleton Ravens and Algonquin Wolves women. But boosting the capital’s soccer community is a larger goal they both share. That philosophy extends to their work at the OSU Goalkeeper COE, which welcomes keepers from other clubs as well.
“That’s important to us because not every club can offer goalkeeper coaching,” Bellemare highlights. “That raises the level, so it’s good for us and it’s good for the soccer scene in Ottawa.”
The OSU goalkeeper factory has been in high production mode in recent years. It’s stocked both local university women’s teams with Chloé Lachance-Soulard at Carleton and Juliann Lacasse at uOttawa, while current OSU keeper Laura Salgado will also join the Gee-Gees in the fall.
Down south in the NCAA, Kayza Massey recently capped her career at West Virginia University as the Big 12 Goalkeeper of the Year, while Sofia Cortes-Browne will soon head to the University of Arizona via the National Development Centre.
In the men’s professional ranks, Jonathan Viscosi’s most recent stops have been in Finland and Sweden, while Yann Fillion also dressed for numerous clubs overseas before joining the Halifax Wanderers of the Canadian Premier League last season.
“It’s fun to follow them, and it provides reassurance that we’re doing the right work,” notes Bellemare, while explaining that he’s been equally proud to see athletes leave top-level soccer and adapt their high-performance mentality to take on challenging university studies.
“For me, it’s not so much about the level they reach, it’s about the relationships,” he underlines. “When I still get texts from goalkeepers that I coached many years ago wishing me Happy New Year, and to know I’ve really impacted them, that’s what’s most important to me.”
Learn more about the OSU Force Academy Goalkeeper Centre of Excellence at https://osu.demosphere-secure.com/program-descriptions/goalkeeper-academy .
