Effective Goalkeeping is entirely the work of me, Justin Bryant. I was born in 1966 in Melbourne, Florida, and took to goalkeeping with a passion when I was twelve. I played college soccer at Radford University, crossed the Atlantic to try my luck at Dunfermline Athletic and Borehamwood FC, and played domestically for the Orlando Lions of the ASL and Cocoa Expos of the USISL. I stopped playing competitively in 1995, at age 28, and spent much of the next decade as a goalkeeper coach in North Carolina (Elon University, NC State and a staff coach with Triangle Futbol Club Alliance in Raleigh, North Carolina). I am currently the goalkeeper coach at UNC Wilmington and with the Wilmington Hammerheads Youth.
As a writer, I've twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and my fiction has appeared in journals such as Thin Air, The Chiron Review, The Rockhurst Review, The Ampersand Review, Vlak Magazine, and Snowbound. My first novel, Season of Ash, was published in 2004. I graduated from New York University with a Master's Degree in Creative Writing in 2008. For two years, I wrote a regular column for Goalkeeper Magazine and have written for soccer publications and blogs such as XI Quarterly, Howler Magazine, In Bed With Maradona, and The Set Pieces. My memoir Small Time: A Life in the Football Wilderness was published in 2013 by Bennion Kearny in the UK. I've been quoted in UEFA's official publication of the Champions League, Champions Magazine, as well as Rabona and Sports Illustrated China.
I hold copyright for all text herein, but feel free to copy, re-blog, or re-print for any purpose, as long as credit is directed back to The Goalkeepers' Union. All images of me are considered fair use.
