This is the start of my hockey blog. This blog will focus on the lessons I am learning as a youth hockey coach. I started to coach my son’s Mites (ages 6-8) hockey team in the Fall of 2020. It was in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic which created its own unique challenges both inside and outside the rink. I am writing this blog for a multitude of reasons. First, to share some insights on coaching youth sports. Second, to keep a record of my thoughts and lessons learned as I watched my son, his teammates, and even myself grow and mature as hockey players and as people. Finally, to serve as a reminder of what hockey, and more generally sports brings to our culture, to our relationships, and to our identity.
With the exception of my kids, the names of other kids are fictional.
Summer 2020
I taught my daughter and my son to start ice skating the week of their third birthday. My daughter, the eldest, is 16 months older than my son, or as I explain to others, 9 months, and 10 minutes. Each of them started with small rental skates from the local rink in Yorktown, progressing to figure skates, and finally fitting into hockey skates shortly after their fifth birthday. Learning to skate in figure skates was how I was brought up, and seems thebe the best way to teach kids who skate once or twice a week unlike our Canadian neighbors to the north who seemingly have an ice rink in every backyard. It takes a little longer to get to 10,000 hours in Southern Virginia.
Out local rink hosts both learn to skate lessons, and a “hockey university” learn to play program. Both my children played in the hockey university program, and both enjoyed their time on the ice. My daughter however completely rejected the scrimmage portion of the clinic. At nearly every level of youth hockey the final 10-minutes or so of practice usually contains a dark jersey vs light jersey scrimmage. While the time does not focus on any specific skills, it is an important part of the practice to keep the practices both fun, and to induce a level of competitiveness in the kids. My daughter shutting down in the scrimmage portion leads to the first lesson I learned as a hockey parent.
Parents want their kids to succeed. Part of this success is searching for and discovering what kids enjoy, and what their passions are. It is easy to have a child emulate or mirror what we do well, but harder to encourage what we are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with. I enjoy hockey, have been skating and playing since I was 3, and found it easy to drive my kids to the rink. It’s harder when kids want to make their own path in life. In addition to tennis, my daughter now plays guitar, an activity I am complete unfamiliar with, and unable to help her other than providing her the time, the lessons, and of course the guitars, amps, picks, and other equipment.
It wasn’t just me who learned from this experience. One of the hardest things for a kid to do is tell their parents they don’t share the same passion for something their parents do. After a practice session over the summer, while tucking my daughter into bed, she explained to me that she didn’t want to play hockey anymore. Overcoming the fear of disappointing her father took courage, and I’m proud of the way she did it.
October 2020
The season begins with a weekend tournament in Chesapeake, Virginia. We have had zero team practices, and although some of the kids on the team played together in previous seasons the lack of preparation and ice time from the pandemic is glaring from the start. Over the course of four games (two on Saturday and two on Sunday), we lose each game by an average of 12-15 goals and failed to score even once. Each day the 45-minute drive home is long, and a bit awkward, as this is my son’s introduction to the team. I try to lighten up the modo by explaining to him that the team can only get better. But 8-year-olds are hard to figure out. Brendan acknowledges that it can only get better, but also states that it will be hard to keep playing if they keep losing games by 16 goals. Yong kids think concretely, often only seeing what is directly in front of them and thinking that whatever they are experiencing will last forever, or mostly forever.
I have nice conversation with one of the other fathers over email. I relate what happened over the weekend to what I experienced in youth football. Over my final two years of youth football, my team won precisely one game. Most games were blowouts, often losing by 30 or more points without scoring a single touchdown. However, for myself and my teammates, we learned more about ourselves over those two seasons than in any other period in our lives. We would lose by 30 points on a Sunday, and be back at practice on Tuesday, giving it our all. It was important to keep showing up and trying hard, because whether you are 8, 10, or 40-years-old, being there for your teammates matter more than the skills you bring to the field. The friends I made in youth football I keep in touch with to this day.
There are pure skaters and there are hockey players. They are not mutually exclusive, but you can certainly excel in one while being average in the other. I can judge the value of a hockey player by their performance in the last game on the last day of a tournament, down ten goals better than I can judge them as a hockey player by having them skate circles around a cone.
Coaching
My son convinces me to serve as an assistant coach on for the team. I use the word serve, because taking the time to coach youth sports is service. It is service to kids and families you don’t know, and service to the community as you mold kids into better people. When someone mentions that they coach youth sports, be it hockey, football, baseball, softball, basketball, or any other sport, thank them for their service.
I register with USA hockey as a coach and undergo the required background checks that ensure I don’t have a history of criminal behavior. I also take some mandatory online training that USA hockey offers to coaches that range from identifying inappropriate or predatory behavior form other adults to recognizing the symptoms of concussions. There are also some lessons on how to run a practice that involves a bunch of 6–8-year-old kids skating around on the ice. It’s chaos, and one must embrace the chaos to be successful.
Part of embracing the chaos means keeping the players moving for the entire 60 minutes of practice. A typical practice session for Mites is to start with some skating drills and warmups, and then to break into three or four stations (depending on the number of coaches and kids at practice). Each station is typically a small area game that builds skating, passing, stick handling, and shooting skills. With 3-4 players at each station there is little waiting in line. We don’t spend time on tactics, preferring to keep the kids moving and interested in the practice. Tactics will come in later years and higher levels (Squirts, pee-wee, bantom, etc…). Moreover, we don’t have the kids focus on a position. The theory being that when the puck is in the offensive zone, they play offense, and when the puck is in the defensive zone, they play defense. The most we try to do is to have the kids spread out, so as not to look like a youth soccer team with everyone chasing the ball. Mites hockey is 4-on-4 and played on half the ice sheet. We can save tactics for another year.
As we practice twice a week, one coach is responsible for designing the practice on Tuesday, and another coach for Thursday. We draw up the drills on a hockey whiteboard and send it to all the coaches on a group chat and in the Slack app, along with a description of the drill and which coach is responsible for that station. Every so often we get through the warmups on the ice and I forget what drill / station I am responsible for, and I take out my phone to check. I hate doing this as it gives the impression that my head is not in the practice, so I do my best to remember, and later in the season write down what I am doing on an index card to avoid the “coach is texting” perception.
The first couple weeks of coaching I try to be more of an assistant, but as time goes by I get my opportunities to make some changes to the practice. For example, during the scrimmage I have those not on the ice skate around in the neutral zone. The goal here is to keep the kids active and give them a chance to play around with the puck to work on skating and stick handling.
Part of coaching Mites is instilling a love for the game of hockey. The coaching staff wants every kid to keep returning to the rink and to the team year-after-year. We keep the practices fun, and try to keep a light demeaner at all the games. In the end we don’t don’t “work hockey,” we “play hockey.” Hockey is play time, you practice hard, you play hard, but never lose sight of the fact that kids are PLAYING hockey.
Before our second game I grab a new puck from the rink and purchase a silver sharpie from Target. My plan is to give a “player of the game” puck to one player each week, writing in their name, number, what they did special, and the date, creating a small memento that the kids can put on their desk or shelf at home. The first game I do this, Garrett (one of our players) scores five goals and earns his trophy puck. I think nothing of it until I get an email from his father later that night. Turns out Garrett’s dog passed away the night before, and Garrett played the game with a heavy heart. On the backside of the puck Garrett inscribes a personal note to his departed pet. Sometimes you don’t understand how a small gesture can mean much more to another person.
A New Tradition
During the learn to play sessions when my daughter and son both participated, the three of us would drive over to a local pizzeria for some pizza. Brendan and I typically ordered personal pizzas, while my pizza-hating daughter ordered a bowl of spaghetti. This tradition of eating out after practice continued with Brendan once the team practices began. Our practices on Tuesday end about 7PM, leaving us enough time to grab some dinner. By the third practice we started going to a Mexican restaurant on the way home. A month into the season we became regulars, ordering the same dish every time. Often the meals are ready for us by the time we sit at the table.
Breaking bread is one of the more important activities of humanity. It creates trust, friendship, and allows us time to tell stories to each other. After some of our early Saturday or Sunday morning games some of the coaches and our kids grab breakfast at Einstein’s bagels (when we play in Virginia Beach), or a local diner (when we play in Yorktown). When we do this, the kids typically sit together and forge the friendships that they have been developing on the ice. For the adults, it gives us time to talk about hockey, our families, or any other kind of adult conversation that we tend to miss throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
At its very core, hockey is a brotherhood/sisterhood. Throughout my 20+ year military career, the friendships I make outside of uniform tend to form inside a hockey rink. Even in uniform, I tend to find other hockey players at the various posts I’ve been stationed at. These friendships form irrelevant of rank, and one of the cool aspects of men’s league hockey is watching a junior enlisted soldier chirp a field grade officer, which is followed by joining each other for beers in the parking lot.
Whether it’s enjoying a meal with my son and daughter, or breaking bread with new friends who also share a passion of parenting and hockey, I sense that the memory of these meals is just as important as the memories we gain inside the rink.
COVID 19
The impact of COVID-19 touches nearly every aspect of our lives. My kid’s school was completely online at the start of the year, then moved to a hybrid model where they are in residence twice a week, and online the other three days. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than millions of kids at this point, so I am thankful for how our community has thus far responded. One aspect of life that remained largely unimpacted was youth hockey, at least until now.
In November of 2020, the rinks in our local area, from Richmond to Yorktown to Virginia Beach experienced a COVID-19 outbreak. Multiple players and coaches from every rink informed the hockey community of positive tests, which resulted in the rinks and hockey programs shutting down for two weeks. It offers a nice break, but by the end of two weeks as cabin fever sets in we are itching to get back on the ice.
We were lucky to maintain the season throughout the pandemic, but some critical aspects of youth hockey disappeared. First, we lost use of the locker rooms. To mitigate the spread of the virus, all players get dressed outside the rink (in the parking lot). For kids, the locker room is a space where they can forge their friendships, joke with each other away from the ears of their parents. It’s a place where they can talk about to the good, the bad, and the ugly of what happens on the ice. Topics can include talking about how they set up a “tic-tac-toe” goal or do shaming of a player who didn’t hustle on a back check. When their winning, it’s a fun place, sometimes filled with loud music from someone’s hockey playlist. When you’re losing, it can be a place of respectful silence. Either way, it’s a place for a team to build chemistry, or the intrapersonal dynamics within a team that can determine success or failure. Peer pressure is a hell of a thing.
In addition to the banter of the locker room, other aspects of team building and childhood in general sit on the back burner. There are no sleepovers, no birthday parties, no team fun days at the bounce house or laser tag, or at whatever the new popular place for kids to hang out may be. They are building friendships but building friendships in the same way I make friends with the people I work with. I see them at the office, but then they disappear from my life from the time I begin my drive home until I get in the next day.
More than the kids not building chemistry in the locker room, coaches and parents rarely intermingle throughout the season. Our faces are hidden behind masks, protecting us from spreading and contracting COVID while also protecting us from forming friendships that normally form when your kids form their friendships. By the time you turn 40, get married, and start a family making new friends doesn’t rank high in your life’s priorities. As Chuck Klosterman wrote in Raised in Captivity, “what’s the upside of meeting interesting people if your’re already married?” Indeed, having kids means spending time with people you would never otherwise have met. Knowing fellow hockey parents helps to build context of what we see from the kids on the rink. Context builds empathy, and we are missing out on this critical aspect of team building.
Masks and social distancing, although absolutely necessary reduce the personal connections that come from sports
January 2021
After the holiday break, we pick up the routine of our two practices and one game per week schedule. Three days of hockey seems to be the ideal. I am a firm believer that young kids need time for rest and recuperation following youth sports games and practices. More than physical rest, they need a mental break from the game as well. On days when Brendan is not playing hockey he also plays tennis with his sister, or nerf wars with other kids in our neighborhood.
I am a firm believer in kids playing multiple sports growing up. The end of the season will be an end to hockey for a few months. However, I also believe that playing other sports helps to build strength, hand-eye coordination, and overall athletic skills that can apply to any activity. Indeed, playing multiple sports helps to build a personal culture of fitness, which is something that I hope my kids will carry with them their entire lives. There may come a time when my kids choose to focus on one sport, but ages 8 and 9 isn’t the time to start.
The pandemic closed our local recreation center, which meant no basketball leagues this year. However, we have been able to continue tennis, which of course is an outdoor sport. Both Brendan and Sabrina play every Wednesday, and as often as I can take them to a court to hit with them.
Games
We have a weekly game, normally on Saturday morning, but occasionally on Sunday. Game time is early, sometime at 7AM or 8:30 AM. The Yorktown rink is only 15 minutes or so from my house while it takes approximately 50 minutes to drive to the rink in Virginia Beach, the latter of which includes crossing the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel (HRBT) which can randomly add an hour to any drive on the Peninsula. The commute with the early start times means waking up by 5:30AM, and leaving the house by 6. This is a new experience for Brendan, but a nostalgic feeling for my childhood winter weekends.
Brendan, #56 in Black skating the puck
On the ice, the games are four vs four, and played on half the ice. There are no referees as the game flow is managed by one coach for each team being on the ice during the game. No referees mean no penalties, an aspect which I think many parents have yet to understand. I come to this conclusion after hearing some parents loudly complain that the other coach or I should have called a tripping, or a hook during the game. In the NHL and other professional leagues, the high glass around the boards is meant to protect the fans from pucks flying into the stands at nearly 100 miles per hour. In youth hockey, the boards and glass protect the coaches and kids, as we cannot hear parents screaming abusive language at us. Combine this with youth hockey players having ear guards on their helmets and any screaming or yelling from the bleachers doesn’t reach the kids ears.
Call it stoicism if you like, but my personal perspective is that it is useless to get angry over things you can’t control. One of these incontrollable things is call from referees, a dynamic that will begin next year in Squirts. I tend to believe that by the time we leave this world the bad calls and the good calls will even out. It takes effort to overcome recency bias, but when calls in a game seem unfair, consider that they are unfair to someone else’s benefit, a dynamic that will eventually play into your favor.
Playing half ice also means there are no offsides, and no icing calls. When an incident that would normally be a penalty occurs, one of the coaches simply pulls the offender aside to explain to them what they did wrong. Barring a player going all out Happy Gilmore by trying to stab another player with a skate, the kids stay on the ice and learn the rules. No penalties mean no powerplays, just figuring out what to do when they get the puck is enough as they learn to play.
The games are split into two 20-minute running clock halves. After every two minutes the buzzer rings for a controlled line change. The boards are too high for Mites to jump over, and there is a coach on the bench responsible for opening and closing the door at each change. We start the game and the second half with a face-off, and those are the only two face-offs for the game. After a goal, the team that gave up the goal gets possession from behind their own net, like how adults play in pick-up games. This keeps the game moving, which is important as setting up for face-offs could constitute a large percentage of the time due to the number of goals each team scores.
Watching Mites hockey has dispelled the myth of precocious hockey players in the 6–8-year-old level. Often, there are stories of NHL superstars who scored 100 or 200 goals in a season. Don’t be fooled, it’s not that hard of an accomplishment. We use normal sized goals, the same size as adults use. This means that often the goal is taller than the kid playing goalie. Moreover, at the Mites level goalies are rotated through, meaning there are no full-time goalies. Indeed, the kid in net might be playing his first game ever as a goalie, and this can be the scenario in every game. It is not unusual for one player to score eight or ten goals a game, half of which were blind attempts at clearing the puck down the ice when the opposing goalie wasn’t paying attention. This also explains why we don’t keep score.
Coaches don’t keep score, but the kids do. Brendan is sure to tell me the exact score of every game, even though I lose count in the first five minutes. Not only do the kids keep score, they happen to know the exact number of goals and assists they have accumulated throughout the season, as well as the stats for their teammates. I don’t put much faith into the cumulative season stats, as they might be a bit inflated. Seeing kids keep score, track stats, and focus on wins and losses brings to light an interesting dynamic. There are some kids that hate to lose. You see the pain in their face at the end of the game knowing the other team scored more goals. It’s a pain that goes deep into their souls and I think it is a focus that they will carry with them for most of their lives. Even though the coaches are preaching fun over winning at this level, to these kids it is important to win, all the time, every puck battle, every period, every game. They might leave the rink angry from a loss, or in constant criticism of their individual performance. On the surface they seem miserable, but at a deeper level this is what they thrive on. Other kids are just the opposite, focused on having fun and truly enjoying the time they are at the rink and on the ice. I don’t think one perspective is necessarily better than the other, but more of an important trait to notice in our kids as they progress through childhood.
The Incident
It’s mid-February and in addition to managing the bench, it is my responsibility to bring snacks for the kids to eat and drink after the game. Each family gets one or two turns in this job. Looking at what each family provides is a kind of insight into their private life. Some weekends the kids get Gatorade and fruit, other weekends it’s Capri-Sun and potato chips, or granola bars and candy. When we play in Virginia Beach there’s always the possibility of donuts with a Krispy Kreme across the street from the rink. When it’s my turn to bring the snacks, Brendan sits in the lobby as I walk 18 bags of Capri Sun, Oranges, and Granola Bars inside the rink area so the kids can quickly grab them on their way out following out game. As I set them up, I become a front row witness to some unexpected violence.
The game before us is the High School aged kids. A player has the puck near the boards and is hit from behind. It’s a nasty hit, and the referee immediately blows his whistle, probably for a 5-minute penalty. The rest of the players on the ice are frozen, except for one from the home team who immediately gets in the face of the offending player. Words are exchanged, but as I am behind the glass, I can’t hear what is said. The home player then chokes up on his stick like it’s a baseball bat and whacks the original offender who tries to skate away. The home player then reloads, winding his stick back, and cracking the opposing player in the arm and ribs as he crumbles to the ground. This is Happy Gilmore land, and about the worst one can do short of taking off their skate and stabbing another player with it. I’ve been playing hockey for 40 years, and this is the first time I have seen a hockey player transformed into a baseball player to injure someone.
Hockey, like football isn’t a contact sport, rather it’s a collision sport. While hockey players typically don’t weigh 300 pounds, they collide at faster speeds. If force equals mass x acceleration, the force of a collision in hockey can be as bad, if not worse than those in football. There is no checking in Mites hockey, but our practice drills and games involve a lot of contact, normally in the way of kids bumping and running into each other. Learning to absorb contact from an opposing player without losing your mind is an important piece to building a life-long hockey player.
People’s inability to absorb incidental contact is the reason I no longer skate in men’s league hockey. The leagues are filled with grown men who started playing hockey as an adult, learning how to carry themselves by watching highlights on ESPN. They consider any contact as a reason to drop their gloves. Tripping, interference, and other penalties happen throughout the game, and often the referee earning twenty bucks a game will make the call. Unfortunately, some adults can not leave well enough alone and consider any penalty an insult to their personal honor, as if after someone tripped them the offender will sleep with their wife in the penalty box. About three years ago I found myself coming home at midnight full of anger after a 10:30 PM game. I would lie awake most of the night full of adrenaline leading to long and painful day afterwards. The dream died a long time ago, and when you get home at midnight from a men’s league game it’s too late to become anything other than the hockey player you already are.
My peak hockey came in my early 30s skating in the Landesliga for the Stuttgart Rebels. The LandesLiga was a nice return to practices, coaches, and full contact hockey, something most people never experience. This was a decade ago, though it seems like yesterday. Now I skate in a private pick-up game every Sunday. There are no referees, no penalties, and we police our own behavior on the ice. There is one golden rule: “don’t be an a**hole,” which works surprisingly well. For the most part it’s the same group of 20, and we rotate the players to keep the teams relatively even. There are no 10-point blow outs which as an adult is not fun for either the winner or the loser. In the end, no matter what level one attains in hockey, you end up where you started, at a local rink. Instead of playing games in the dark hours of the morning you are playing the dark hours of the night. The circle is complete.
As you continue skate in men’s leagues, every so often your faster than your opponent, but only because you are twenty years younger. This is perhaps the best part of becoming eligible for Over-35 league. However, that 65-year-old sitting on the bench next to you might be a step or two slower, but he once played in the WHL with Gordie Howe. Despite your speed, he beats you with his hands, his vision, and his experience every single time. Being a great hockey player is more than just the cumulative rating of your skating skills.
Learn to Play and Playing the Squirts
Every hockey program needs a sustainable pipeline of new players. To encourage new players form the local community, the Prowl hosts a “Learn to Play” event at the rink in Yorktown. Coaches from each level run different stations, while some of the Prowl players volunteer to help. We organize the ice into six stations, with one set aside for young kids without skates. Paul (one of our Mites coaches) diagrams various drills, but we quickly devolve to having the kids skate the puck and shoot on a goal. The Prowl players work with the young kids, sometimes holding them up while they try to skate, or sometimes passing back and forth with the learn to play kids. The event is a success, but even more impressive was how the young Prowl players handled themselves on the ice. Watching Brendan take a younger kids hand and skate with him on the ice, and then softly pass the puck back and forth warmed my heart. When your child succeeds in an athletic or academic event it’s easy to feel pride in their success. But when your child shows compassion and helps those not as skilled in something they do, you come away with the feeling and knowledge that surpasses the thrill of a hattrick or game winning goal.
Brendan on the breakaway
Following the learn to play session we have the rising Mites scrimmage the Squirts. It’s an interesting experiment as it clearly displays how the Mites have yet to comprehend the concepts of offsides and position play. In Mites, the 4 vs 4 on half ice means that players can move ahead of the puck, plant themselves in front of the opposing net, and shoot the puck down the ice without any consequences. In a developing 2-0, Brendan skates ahead of his teammate Victor, and goes offsides by about ten feet. Brendan was doing what he was taught by skating to the net but with little afterthought on the timing of arrival.
Surprisingly the Mites keep the game close, and with less than a minute to play find themselves down one goal by a score of 3-2. The Squirts took an early 2-0 lead, but the Mites led by Victor’s two breakaway goals even the score about halfway through the third period. As soon as the clock hits 1 minute, one of the coaches calls for David, our goaltender to come to the bench, giving the Mites an extra skater, but leaving the net empty. Just as David arrives at the bench Victor and Garret get a two-on-one opportunity, Garret shoots the puck into the pads of te goaltender, but Garrett is right there for the rebound. It’s a tie game with twenty seconds left. I look towards the bench and see all the kids jumping up and down, hugging each other and giving high fives. More than any other moment in the season, they have come together as a team Time runs out before we can get to the faceoff (we use a running clock). We had intended to have a shootout no matter what the outcome, allowing each skater to take their turn, but now the shootout has a sense of meaning to all the kids.
To my surprise the Mites win the shootout. Again, the team goes bananas on the bench. Easily one of the best memories these kids will take with them.
March 2021
The season is starting to wind down, and in our first game of the month the opposing team can only field three skaters and a goalie. We have all our players, and before we start the game, I ask for two volunteers to play for the opposing team. Two of my solid players volunteer, and they turn their jerseys inside out to blend in with the other team who wears white. This is not the first time a team has been short of players, and surprisingly the kids are amenable to playing for another team especially when it means they will get more ice time. The 4-on-4 structure of Mites hockey gives us more reliance or flexibility when kids can’t make the game. The magic numbers of players are either 8 (for two lines) or 6 which lets me pair two players, as they get two shifts on for every one shift off.
Over the course of the season, we have had games with seven skaters. With seven skaters one player will stay on for an extra shift at each line change. I learned my lesson the first time we did this to keep an index card and pencil handy, list all the players and place a check mark each time they do a double shift. While I may not be tracking who gets double shifts, the kids certainly are, and will let you know that one or two of their teammates got more ice time than they did.
Our last weekend of games comes in mid-March with a game on Saturday and Sunday. About 30-minutes before Brendan and I were to begin the drive, we get a note that the Virginia Beach team cannot field a team due to a COVID quarantine. Some of their kids play on a travel team that played in a tournament last weekend, and thus are on a two-week quarantine. Brendan and I make up for Saturday’s cancellation by going to a stick and puck session at our local rink. The coaches text back and forth and decide on an inter-squad scrimmage for Sunday morning to wrap up the season.
On Sunday morning we split the team into the two-sub teams we have used all season. There is the P1 team and the P2 team. This is the first time all year that the kids will play a full game against each other, normally only getting about 8-10 minutes at the end of practice. The best part of coaching youth hockey is the unexpected. You never know how 6–8-year-old kids will react to anything life throws at them. The inter-squad game turns out to be the most competitive game of the season with the scoreboard displaying a 6-6 tie at the end of regulation. Not only is it the most competitive, but it’s also the hardest I’ve seen everyone skate all season. When you compete against your friends, the sibling rivalry dynamic comes into effect. All the kids skate hard, are standing on the bench watching intensely throughout the game. Seeing and feeling the intensity is what brings hockey players back to the rink, day after day, month after month, year after year.
Protecting the middle of the ice
Our goalie David shows more intensity than I have ever seen. David loves to play goal, and if this were an older level, he would be playing in goal every week. As it stands different kids used the team’s shared goalie gear to provide everyone a chance to play. David shows a little frustration after the first goal is scored, then gets angrier and more intense, eventually slamming is stick to the ice after some of the later goals. I skate to him and remind him that it is a long game, that he’s making way more saves than goals allowed, and overall playing a spectacular game. But what I see this morning in David I see in some other kids as well which is a pursuit of perfection. In some ways being ultra-competitive is good, and other times it can be unhealthy. I see the same dynamic in Brendan at times. Trying to be perfect means leaving no room for failure. Having space for failure is critical, because that is the space that allows you to rebound when you do fail, and we do at multiple points in our life.
To finish the season off we have all the kids on both teams take part in the shootout, and each team knocks three goals past the opposing goaltender. Regulation ends in a tie, the shootout ends in a tie. All the kids come off the benches to congratulate their goalies, and we take a complete team photo. Perfect way to end the season.
I get home and edit the photos as I have done after each game. As I do so I reflect on what youth sports can mean to these kids. Chances are that none of them will ever reach the NHL, a couple might, and it’s a BIG might, play at a high level in juniors or in college. What that means is from Mites though Squirts, to Bantom, Midget, and High School, this is their golden years of sports, just as it was for the rest of us. This is the time that sports are the driving force behind friendships, physical and mental fitness, and overall happiness in life. Enjoy the time, encourage excellence, and always make it a positive and fun experience.
Your 2020-2021 PYHA Mites