Tacking on to this (I do that a lot lately):
Is there a way to try out goalie? The price of equipment is prohibitively high to just dabble with it and then find out I hate it. Do most people simply bite the bullet and go with it, or just sell their gear if they don't like it? I am not in a league yet and have no hockey friends per se to ask for a goalie's gear, even though that would be weird to begin with.
Is the best option to hope to pick up some 2nd hand stuff, go to a clinic or pick up and just try it then? We have all kinds of skating/clinics around here, but I haven't seen anything specific to goalies at all. I am interested though whether that would be something for me. I am not very flexible (I guess you one can work on that), but I am pretty quick and pretty fearless about getting in the way of shots. I played goalie in football and team handball before whenever our regular goalie couldn't make it and nobody else volunteered with good success.
Tough to answer... I jumped in because a friend of mine started playing hockey in a novice league and I was sick of the drama of rec baseball. I wanted a new team sport and found out that hockey is all over town.
I'm not very flexible either, I have an incredibly narrow butterfly. I'm also a horrid skater compared to everyone else. Working on conditioning too, good god I didn't realize how in shape goalies need to be.
You can probably get a decent set of used gear on the different goalie boards - I got my C/A, blocker, catcher, and (unused) goalie jock for $240 on here. I lucked out on my pads and got some very heavily used Reebook Kohos that were formerly the local HS team's backup, backup pair for $100. They get the job done, although I'm salivating over some Passau's...
You can check out --
http://www.goaliecrease.net/forums/
http://www.goaliestore.com/board/
If you post that you're looking for gear on goaliecrease there might be someone with some stuff that isn't really worth posting on the classified sections and give you a good deal. You should buy a brand new helmet though and plan to spend (at least) $300 for it. I'm using a Reebook 7k, but I wish I had the cash for a hackva at the time. I like the 7k though, I've gotten a few slappers to the head and it does a good job of deflecting the puck.