CJ Boiss

Are you referring to the radius, or rocker? The radius is the hollow ground into the blade, and the rocker is the heel-to-toe curvature of your blade. I use a 3/8 hollow on my goalie skates, and a 100/75 FBV (maximum bite and glide) on my player skates (though I used to get a 3/8 hollow, before switching to FBV). Whether I'm in net or out, I want as much bite as possible. If you're using a 3/4, 5/8, or 1/2 hollow in your goalie skates then I'd recommend using a slightly smaller radius in your player skates. The rocker is a different matter entirely. Player skates have much more pronounced rockers than goalie skates, which lets players accelerate more quickly, change direction more quickly and at higher speeds, and also reach much higher speeds, as compared to a goalie skate. The longer, flatter goalie blades (particularly at the toes) prevent us from maintaining maximum blade contact while extending in our strides, which hurts our acceleration and lowers our top speed, and having more of our blade in contact with the ice makes it more difficult to turn. These things do make us much more stable in our stances, and allow us to really load up on our legs for explosive lateral movements, but goalie blades really aren't designed for skating out. Player skates do have much more ankle stability than goalie skates. The sides of the boots come up much higher and, of course, they include a tendon guard which should (when paired with a properly fitted shinguard) fully cover your Achilles (I still wear cut-resistant socks, because tendon guards don't lean forward when you bend your legs). If you wear cowling-less goalie skates then you probably won't notice that much of a difference in weight. Like bunny said, player skates also have much taller holders, which give you a better angle when you're getting really low in a turn or stop. Most player skates come with a stock 9' or 10' rocker. If you feel like you're pitching forwards and backwards too much you might feel more comfortable with something like a 12' rocker, but I would very strongly recommend against a 30' rocker like you have on your goalie skates. You can also have your rocker profiled to induce a natural forward or backward lean, but I'd stay away from that until you're more comfortable with a natural, mid-point balance. If the guys who sharpen your skates know what they're doing then you shouldn't ever have to get your rocker re-profiled (especially if you let them know you have a custom rocker profile), but realistically it is something that you'll want to get touched up every now and then (probably at the start of the season, depending on how often you get them sharpened). If all you're doing is stick-and-puck then you probably don't need to bother with getting player skates. But for everything else? You should get some player skates and try to adjust to the smaller rocker, because it will pay massive dividends in your skating.

My older brother took some pics of a game I had last year. I've changed some gear out since: new pants, new chestie, helmet got painted, proper goalie jerseys arrived (the Sunnyvale jersey is an XXL player jersey that worked well enough, and was always good for some laughs). Need to get him to come out to another game.

Everything is removable if your knife is sharp enough.

Kenesky also has their Vintage Pop's Pro Series (https://kenesky.com/vintage-pads.php). Old-school design, modern materials.

Oh man, that's some classic 80's goodness! "I'm wearing about forty pounds of equipment..." And check out the player he sends flying at 2:45. XD [EDIT] AND IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE TO NOT TALK ABOUT THAT GLORIOUS 'STACHE!? NO! IT IS NOT POSSIBLE!

Elastic bootstrap? Depends on how tight your toes-ties are, and how snugly the rest of the pad is strapped. Tight toes and snug straps would make any kind of bootstrap extraneous. Loosen either of those up and you might see some benefit from an elastic boot strap.

True. But those aren't typically the kind of low/ice-level shots one would need to worry about.

You have to change the way you shoot on a stand-up goalie. Most guys - if they never made Junior, or started playing as an adult - just shoot on muscle memory. They don't so much look at a hole and try to hit it as they do see the guys around them, gauge how much time and space they have, and then take the same kinds of shots they do during warm-up. Modern goaltenders are really good at taking away the bottom of the net, so players practice shooting high, and stand-up goalies are great at taking away the top half of the net. So when most guys shoot on muscle memory, at a stand-up goalie, they're usually putting it right into their chests and gloves.

I don't know about that particular neck guard. As far as I can tell, the high density foams are in the clavicle/collarbone protection, and not in the part that wraps around your neck. That part appears to be Kevlar over soft internals. If I was to start wearing a neck guard, it would be (ironically) for the clavicle/collarbone protection moreso than the neck protection. I don't, because I don't like how much warmer I feel when I wear a neck guard under my CA, and because my CA has more than enough protection over my upper chest and shoulders. If I was to wear a neck guard without a dangler then I would buy something with D3o (or equivalent non-Newtonian material) in the part covering my neck. I definitely wouldn't feel comfortable otherwise.

Neck guards are better than nothing for impact absorption, some can be quite good even, but all they do is cushion the impact to your throat; danglers, properly worn, keep the impact from ever reaching it.

No, the cup is sewn into a bunch of padding and such. Not sure if they're manufacturing the Reactors anymore, but the Vapour that seagoal posted looks like a re-skinned version of it. For the record, before I started wearing a player cup behind it, shots that hit my goalie jock square would push it back into my tender bits, and the padding on the inside of the cup felt like it was doing more harm than good. I wouldn't recommend using this cup without a player cup behind it. The player cup provides separation between my tender bits and the goalie cup, and acts a bit like a spring system if I take a shot there, keeping the goalie cup from pushing back into me; it gives me a bit of a pocket that my tender bits can, ah, comfortably hang out in. It also runs between my legs more than the goalie jock does, for a bit of extra protection if someone thinks they can go bar-down through my five-hole. For someone who isn't facing high-level shooters on a daily basis (most of my games have a few Junior A, or ex-Junior A guys, max), it works fine. I'd definitely upgrade my goalie jock if I was facing harder shots more often, but I'm always going to wear the player cup, I think. I find the pocket that the player cup provides is more comfortable than just wearing a goalie jock.

That's pretty much what I do, with a Bauer Reactor over a normal player cup in my compression layer. Never had any issues with protection, or having to make adjustments mid-game, and I tend to be a very active goaltender.

That's very interesting. Maybe the one-piece design, eliminating the backplate, gives additional structural integrity to the whole of the mask; less deformation, more even energy distribution throughout the shell when it's struck? I'd be very interested to see a mask like this subjected to industry standard testing, just for comparison purposes.

Concussions seem to be caused by rapid acceleration of your head, which causes your brain to rattle around inside your skull and deform. Knowing this, we can infer a few things thanks to some basic principles of physics. For example, a heavier mask, having more mass and thus being more difficult to accelerate, would presumably reduce concussions more than a lighter mask would, because more energy would be required to move the mask (and thus your head). The question would be how heavy would a mask needs to be before it's increased mass made a substantial difference; it could very well be (and I suspect this to be the case) that the mask would have to be prohibitively heavier to provide any kind of benefit, making the weight of the mask a non-factor in reducing concussion related injuries from puck impacts. In terms of geometry smaller surface areas that create oblique angles relative to incoming pucks, such as the ridges commonly found along the forehead and brows of many goalie masks, will result in pucks skipping off of the mask without expending all of their kinetic energy into it. Pucks that strike our masks at right angles, where the trajectory of the puck is perpendicular to the surface of the mask, transfer more energy into our mask, head, and brain. Basically, it's better to get a puck off the front of our mask, where there are very few flat surfaces for the puck to strike, than the side of the mask. Related to that is shell materials. Stiffer shells deform less, which means pucks contact less of the mask and transfer less energy, so stiffer materials increase the amount of energy that gets deflected away from our heads. Less energy transfer to our heads means less acceleration, and presumably fewer concussions. I can't really imagine how goalie masks could be better designed for preventing concussions, outside of making them larger, more spherical (to reduce flat faces), and adding more liner materials. All of which strike me as being somewhat detrimental to our performance (think a football helmet, but made of Kevlar and fibreglass, and lined with lots of high-density foam. I wouldn't want to wear that on the ice). Mask geometry strikes me as being about as good as we'll ever have, because the human head naturally has large flat surfaces and we can't really do anything about that. I think whatever advances get made in goalie mask technology are going to be from shell and liner materials, both of which have an upper limit on how much they can protect our head because, at the end of the day, there's only so much energy three pounds of Kevlar and high-density foam can deflect and absorb before our brains start rattling around.

I use a 3/8 hollow on my goalie skates. (100/75 FBV on my player skates)