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.

I've got a player who does his own play-by-play while he skates. Under his breath, every shift. "He takes it wide, he's got a step, he looks off the defender." You can hear it from the bench when the building is quiet. Last week he got tangled up with a defenseman at the half wall and ended up flat on the ice, and from down there he said "and he's down, folks." Then he got up and kept calling it all the way back to the bench. He was very fair to the defenseman.

A letter to the dad whose kid hasn't scored yet this season. You know the exact number of games. You would never say it out loud, but you know it, and you've started leaning forward every time he gets anywhere near the net. I did that for most of a winter with my older boy. I could have told you the count on any given day. He finally scored in February, on a shot that went in off somebody's shin pad, and he skated straight to the glass where I was standing before he went to his own bench. I'd give that goal back to undo how badly he needed to see me relieved.

Rink math. AAA fees around here run about 12,500, and our AA registration was about 7,100. Call the difference 5,400. Our furnace died in October. The new one went in at a little over five thousand, installed, and for my own peace of mind I've decided that was a hockey expense. Choosing AA bought us a furnace. Two different dads have told me that is not how money works. I think about it every time the heat kicks on anyway.

The leading scorer on a lot of ten-year-old teams is the kid who leaves the zone first. He drifts out toward the far blue line while everybody else is digging in the corner, catches the turnover, and goes in alone. Some weekends that's four goals. His parents love it. Honestly so does he, and I understand both of them. I've coached one most seasons. I sit him a shift every time he leaves early, and every year his dad and I end up having the same polite conversation in a hallway, which I lose. He's learning to score and skipping the part where he learns to play, and I have never found a way to make that sound reasonable to a dad whose kid just had four.

This weekend the team I coach played in the CCM World Invite, the biggest weekend of their season, and I wasn't behind the bench. My older son had a tournament out of state the same weekend. It was smaller and a level down, and his team didn't win a game. I went with him anyway. Saturday after breakfast we found a diner and ate pie, because there was nobody around to tell us not to, and then we spent an hour in a thrift store talking about school and a couple of things I've been asked not to repeat. I see less of him every month now. His life is filling up the way it's supposed to, and I don't know how many more weekends I get where it's just him and me in a booth. The little guys got upset, and I'm sorry I missed it. I'd make the same call again.

At an exhibition weekend back in September, between our games, I watched a AAA game next to a dad I'd never met. His kid is good. Top line, the kind you notice from the parking lot. He spent two periods telling me about next spring, mostly about a kid from another program who might be coming over and whether that bumps his son down a line. That's the team every nervous AA parent I know is afraid of missing. His son is on it, near the top of it, and his father was every bit as scared as any of us. I used to think getting there would end the worry, and watching him I don't think it ends anywhere. It just picks up a new logo every year or two. I didn't say any of that. I told him his kid has great hands, which was true, and he smiled for about the first time all game.

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.