Rant #1 - Competitive C Hockey

I had a conversation with a parent last week and it was one of those that raises the blood pressure significantly.  Her son is 9 years old and was playing with a Competitive C Atom team.  “What the heck is Competitive C”, you might rightly ask, and let’s be honest, it’s rec hockey.

Now I said in the introduction that he was playing, but now he isn’t because he has quit.  So, is he a quitter, has he let his team down?  Heck no, he’s a 9 year old that just wants to play hockey.  He’s a typical kid, except he’s not as good as some of the other boys so his coach decided that 2 minutes at the end of each period was ample playing time – less if the result of the game hung in the balance.  In fact, it is so important that the team be successful that the coach double shifts all the best players and confines the rest to the end of the bench.

This is 9 year old recreational hockey.  It exists to help kids have fun, learn new skills make new friends and be physically active.  That is its primary focus and the job of the coach is to help everyone of the kids on their team achieve these goals.  Now, I’m not saying that the kids should all hold hands, go easy on the opposition and try to end all matches in a tie – if keeping score at all.  No, I play to win and would expect all players to do the same, but it is not the result that is important at the end of the day.  Nobody cares or remembers who beat who on any given January day in a Competitive C New Brunswick hockey match-up.

For Pete’s sake, let all the kids play and use your coaching skills to balance your team as best you can to be competitive against your opposition.  The coach’s excuse to the parent in this case, was that the team needed to do well in the league to get a preferential draw in the play-offs.  Not good enough!  All the benefits of participation in sport, all the lessons to be learned around teamwork, hard work and commitment are all lost when a team is no longer a team, it's two teams – those with skill and those with less skill.  What makes this particular situation worse is that the weaker players were largely excluded in practice as well – sent to skate from pylon to pylon while the more able players did puck handling drills.

We’ve got to do better than that.