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.

No Pleasure Cruise...

I've had the song "We Are The Champions" stuck in my head all weekend, and it has nothing to do with the Super Bowl. It's because I heard the movie The Mighty Ducks playing on repeat in my van all weekend while driving to a hockey tournament in Saratoga, NY.

And it's probably no coincidence that the particular line "its been no bed of roses, no pleasure cruise..." has stuck with me. The trip featured my hubby with a fever, chills and the stomach flu, weather that could only be described as a "wintry mix", opposing parents who were CBWI (cowbelling while intoxicated), and a swinger party sharing the hotel with us. Kind of like a Carnival Cruise with the Noro virus.

Unfortunately, it was no bed of roses for my daughter's Mite A team. It was no pleasure cruise straight into the boards for the kid my little girl jacked up for her "roughing" penalty, either... but unfortunately that was the most interesting part of their tourney. They got beat, and they got beat bad- four games in a row. Oh well. It happens. You lose some, you lose some, you swim in the pool some, (get a wierd skin rash) and torment the hotel staff some. It's all good.

Lucky for me I got to see our B team show up and quack all over those Upstate New York teams, Mighty Ducks style. Those little buggers skated their hearts out and won all of their games- the championship in a quardruple overtime! A Mite B game can be more exciting than the NHL, because absolutely ANYTHING can happen, and the slow pace just adds to the anticipation. I laughed, screamed and had tears in my eyes, remembering my son's State Championship Mite B game. When they won that game, we moms screamed, cheered, cried and some of us peed a little. Now that the kids have gotten bigger and skate faster, we all still miss the magic of that season, when they were small and clueless and mostly off sides.

Today when I heard a hockey mom scream to her youngest child, as he took the faceoff in overtime "You got this baby!", I realized my baby- my 5 year old- could still be a Mite B someday and I'm already looking forward to it. But if they ever play "We Are the Champions", be prepared for me to bawl my eyes out.