Our History
Goalie Army Academy was founded in 2012 by Rick Besharah in order to provide goalie camps and professional goalie training to teams and goaltenders within Ottawa and surrounding areas during their practices to both competitive and elite levels at a fair price.
We felt that proper goalie training seemed to have been on the back burner for team practices due to the sheer lack of knowledge of the position for many years. Therefore, we also felt that despite attending some goalie camps being made available within the city, many goaltenders weren’t learning to utilize proper techniques in order to ensure maximum efficiency.
Since the beginning of the 2012-13 winter hockey season, the demand for goalie camps and goalie training as well as goaltender evaluations and selection consulting, pre-season conditioning camps, on-ice technical training, on-ice conditioning, video analysis and theory, dry land training and conditioning, and goaltender-specific power skating has been amazing.
Due to the high demand, we have also expanded our services and programs to cater to goalie training via our various goalie camps (Academy Clinics, and Goaltender-Specific Power Skating programs) to keep our students moving throughout the off-season. These goalie camps are designed as a progressive curriculum in order to ensure consistency throughout the training and to fast-track the success of our students.
Since 2012, GAAHockey has expanded from working with one team’s goaltenders, to working with multiple associations, teams, coaches, and goaltenders in boys’ and girls’ hockey bringing our R3E System to inform, educate, and train goaltenders from the earliest stages of Novice to the most elite at the Midget AAA level in Canada, and partnering with the Söderhamn-Ljusnevägen HC to train their goaltenders in Sweden in the summer months.
We offer goalie camps and goalie training services year round, and would be happy to discuss the possibility of working with you, your child, team or association to ensure that each student receives the proper coaching via one of our goalie camps or other goalie training options.
We take a lot of pride in being able to provide our clients with the professional advice, service, and goalie training which they deserve. Therefore, we make sure that we work with them in order to help our students develop, while keeping personal, team, and association goals in mind at all times. With education always at the top of our list of objectives, we also offer free information to goaltenders, parents, and coaches via our Blog in order to provide additional support to our students.
Feel free to check out our Testimonials page to see what all of the fuss is about, and contact us to let us know how we can work with you to ensure that our goalie camps or goalie training services can work to your advantage this season.