Seeing your Shadow

Today my friend posted a photo on facebook of her boy in tears at the end of his last hockey game of the season. The groundhog didn't see his shadow, I like to say, and it's an early spring for his Squirt team. I say this tongue in cheek, not only because we live in New England and can get snow in June, but also because he still has weeks left of House League playoffs followed by spring clinics, summer camps, etc...hockey truly never ends.


Someone commented under the photo that they had "learned more from their defeats than from their victories", which I think is quite true. And this is one of the reasons I'm glad my children play hockey. It seems that fewer and fewer youth sports keep score these days, and most give a participation trophy to everyone who shows up. I'm not sure what this teaches kids about life, but it certainly doesn't prepare them for disapointment. Youth hockey is one of the few places you will find competitive tryouts for kids as young as seven, for better or worse. It's not easy to deal with loss and rejection at a young age, but it doesn't get any easier as you get older, so you may as well give it a try early on. Once you lose a playoff game, or get cut from a team, and then you wake up the next morning and go about your day, you realize you don't need to be afraid of failure. Kids learn to take chances, shoot the puck, tryout for the team- what's the worse that can happen? My dad always taught me that adversity builds character. I hope hockey is helping to build my kids' character. Or at least to counter-effect the X Box games that are rotting at their souls.

My daughter's team will likely see an early spring...their season has been a lot more like the movie Groundhog Day. We wake up, drive thru the snow, get to the rink, and they lose, same routine every time. Sometimes, like today, they only lose by a couple of goals, sometimes we're just praying for a groundhog to pop out of the ice and put us all out of our misery. Learning to lose with grace is part of life, and it's hard. Winning is much easier. So when the buzzer rings and her team has lost, again, it's ok for my daughter to be disapointed, to give the ice a little bang with her stick and then brush it off and shake hands.

I just hope she knows God made her perfectly; that her Dad and I love her to the moon and back; and that life is short but the hockey season is loooong- there will be another game next week. And I hope she takes a lesson from her brother (below), everyone hugs the goalie when they win- go get your goalie after a tough loss.