Hockey Dad in the Corner

Last season I sent forty-one emails trying to fill four open dates. I got eleven answers back, and two of those were from a team we had already played three times. There was a team twenty-five minutes from our rink sitting on the same empty weekends, about our speed. Neither of us ever found the other one. Nothing was wrong with either team. We could not find each other, and the only fix anybody sells you for that is moving your kid somewhere else. So I built the other one. It is free, it is going to stay free, and it is at homegrownscheduler.com. If you coach or manage a team, go put your open dates in. If you don't, ask your coach why you played the same four teams six times last year.

Got stopped in the cereal aisle Sunday by a mom from the team who wanted to talk about the power play. I was holding two boxes of the same cereal, trying to work out which one was on sale. She had real thoughts, specific ones, mostly about who belongs on the half wall. I nodded a lot. At some point I put both boxes in the cart just to end that decision, and I said something about puck movement I'm fairly sure I heard on TV. She seemed satisfied. I got home with two boxes of cereal and no idea what I'd agreed to.

One of my players has asked to try goalie every week since September. Thursday I finally said yes, borrowed the spare gear, and stuck him in for a scrimmage. He let in eleven of the first twelve. He flopped on everything and lost his stick twice, and for one entire rush he just hugged the post with no stick at all. He came off soaked and laughing and asked if he could do it again next week. I said we'll see, which he correctly took as a yes.

My younger one came to watch his brother's game this weekend. Nobody made him. He'd already played his own and could have gone home and played video games until dinner, which is his usual plan. By the second period he knew half the numbers on his brother's team, and by the third he was yelling them. When his brother finally got a shot through from the point, a wrist shot the goalie caught without moving, the little one banged on the glass with both fists like it had gone in. His brother didn't look over. But on his way back to the bench he tapped the boards once with his stick, right about where the little one was standing.

Happiest person at our rink is a guy in his late fifties who plays in the 9:30 men's league. He is not good, and I want to be clear about that. He shows up forty minutes early anyway, sits in the lobby fully dressed except for his gloves, and watches the end of whatever kids' game is on like he has money on it. Last week I heard him tell a mite dad, completely unprompted, that he didn't start playing until he was forty-four. Then his group got called for the ice and he about ran.

Halloween on a Saturday this year, and we have a game this morning, so the main topic in our locker room this week has not been the forecheck. It's been whether a kid can wear his costume under his gear. One of them came in Thursday with a whole plan. An inflatable dinosaur, deflated, under the shoulder pads, then blown back up in the parking lot so he can go straight out trick or treating. I said no. I've been reconsidering ever since, mostly because he has clearly thought harder about that dinosaur than anybody on this team has ever thought about our breakout.

Letter to the dad whose kid got cut from AAA in May and is skating AA this fall. You haven't said the old team's name out loud since. I know because I didn't either. And you still check their scores between periods, fast, like somebody might catch you at it. Your worry is that this year sets him back. I had the same worry with my older boy, and I was wrong in a way that still embarrasses me a little. After he got sent down he touched the puck more in a month than I'd seen him touch it in a long time. He was on the penalty kill by the second week and on the point for the power play, and somebody needed him on just about every shift. Next game, forget the logo. Just count how many times he has the puck.

Lost my voice completely on Tuesday and had practice that night anyway, so I ran the whole thing with a whiteboard and a lot of pointing. Best practice we've had all year. Turns out a room full of fourth graders will watch a marker far harder than they will ever listen to a grown man. Nobody zoned out during an explanation, because there wasn't one. I drew it and they did it. My voice came back this morning and I'm honestly a little sad about it.

His fall skills package wrapped up Monday. Eight Monday nights for 275, and I signed him up in about four seconds back in August. On the drive home from the last one I asked him what he got out of it. He thought about it, honestly, which I appreciated, and said the other kids were nice. And the thing I can't get past is that he's better than he was in September. So is every kid on his team, including the ones who did nothing all fall but show up to practice twice a week. I have no idea which part of him was the 275.

At a family birthday party Sunday, a relative asked my ten year old if he made AAA this year. He answered before I could get there. "No, I'm on the AA team. We're pretty good." Then he went back to his cake, like he'd been asked his shoe size. He hasn't heard yet that he's supposed to say that part a little quieter. I'd like to keep it that way for as long as I'm allowed.

Some of the best youth coaches I've known asked for the lower team. On purpose, year after year. One of them explained it to me once in a parking lot. The top team gets the kids who are going to be fine no matter who's behind the bench. A lower team is full of kids a season can actually turn, in either direction, and he wanted to be the one holding that. Every fall somebody tells me their kid "only" made the second team. Sometimes I know who's coaching it, and I have to stop myself from saying congratulations.

Handshake line after my older son's game, and two kids on opposite teams stopped dead in the middle of it and hugged. Full gear, helmets knocking, the whole line backed up behind them. Cousins, it turned out. They'd spent the whole game trying to put each other through the boards, and they had a sleepover planned for that night.

The quiet part out loud: if my kid told me tomorrow he wanted to quit, the first thing through my head would be the money. Two tournament deposits already gone. A pair of skates from September he's barely broken in. I'd get to him fast, I like to think, maybe a second or two behind. But I know exactly which thought would show up first in my house, and I'd bet most of you know which one would show up first in yours.

The goalie's mom stood next to me in the corner at my older son's game. She watched maybe half of it. Any time the other team got the puck across our blue line, she turned around and studied the trophy case with enormous interest. She knows a lot about that trophy case by now. I asked her afterward how he played, and she said she'd find out when she watched the video, and then she'd decide whether to watch the video.

My older son has started giving his little brother advice in the car. Stick on the ice. Don't turn your back on the play. It's mine. All of it, word for word, stuff I have said from the driver's seat something like four thousand times. The difference is that the little one listens to him. He nods along and says "okay" like he's writing it down. I sat at a red light on Tuesday hearing my own coaching land for the first time in years, coming out of somebody else's mouth.

I write about the AAA machine like a man standing outside it. I was in it for years, with my older boy. I wanted it more than he did. I paid for it and drove it and told myself the whole time that I was following his lead. It did not end because I got wise about any of it either. It ended because the machine ended it for us. When I say I picked AA on purpose for his younger brother, people hear conviction. I had just already run the other experiment, in my own house, on my own kid.

We have half a sheet on Thursdays. The other half is a learn to skate class, twenty or so little ones in helmets that are too big, most of them pushing those plastic walkers around. Last week one girl, maybe five, fell something like eight times trying to make it across the blue line. Our whole team ended up stopped along the boards, watching. When she finally got there they banged their sticks on the ice like it was a playoff goal. She had no idea why. She waved anyway.

There's a kid on my team who would rather pass the puck into the parking lot than shoot it. Six weeks of me telling him to shoot, and nothing. So last week I changed the deal and offered him a slushie for every shot that missed the net, which he made me repeat twice to be sure. He missed nine times in a scrimmage and scored twice by accident somewhere in the middle of it. I now owe a ten year old nine slushies, and he is very clear on the count.

Every October I watch it happen to a different family. The kid who was the best player in the building at eight is, at eleven, a regular kid on a decent team. Nothing went wrong. The kids around him grew, and the ones who were a step behind at eight caught up the way kids do, all at once and without asking anybody. But his dad spent three years believing in a version of his son that was partly just a birthday, and now he's doing what any of us would do, which is look for whatever broke. The boy can't tell you what changed either. Only that his dad used to be happier in the car.

Hardest ice time call I make every week is my own kid's. If I play him a lot, I can feel the stands doing the math. When I cut a shift he's earned, he does the math himself, and at ten he's a lot better at it than the stands are. I have never once found the right number. The best I manage is one I can defend to thirteen other families and to the boy in my back seat, and those don't always match. Last Saturday we played twice. He had a great first game, and I cut his last two shifts in the second one anyway, because of how the morning had gone for somebody else's kid. He never said a word about it. At dinner that night he talked about the Bears for an hour and did not look across the table at me once.

Taped a stick for one of my players at practice last night because his had come apart. I've been taping sticks for twenty-some years, and I was honestly a little proud of it. He thanked me, skated off, and at the far end of the bench he quietly peeled the whole thing off and redid it himself. He didn't think anyone saw. Heel to toe, tight, with a little overlap on every turn. The kid is ten and it was better than mine. I have told nobody about this until now.