Edit: 08/14/18
NOTE: After some further thought and wise comments I want to point out that without volunteer parents flawed (like me) though they may be, there would be no hockey for us to enjoy at all. They take a lot of abuse and are accused behind their backs and to their faces of favoritism etc. Some of this is warranted as time goes on closed door deals are discovered to convince people to coach or to stroke an ego. However, for the most part for as many kids as we have I believe most of the people involved in the process are doing their best. Parents lives are busy and complicated enough without volunteering to be on an ever criticized board. Notice I’m not on it on purpose. I don’t have the temperament. All I can do is thank them for their service as I whine to them.
Also I need to point out our club is massive. The clubs up North are so many that the club sizes are smaller and easier to manage whereas our club huge and handing out individual grades for each of the hundreds of kids would be a nightmare and volunteers to do so would disappear. My version of a better tryout system would have to include splitting our club up into a more manageable size. That would be an entirely different undertaking.
No matter what the sport, if kids are playing it you can bet that parents are doing their best to screw it up. Hockey parent behavior will never make sense. Including my own. Especially my own. When I talk about Youth Hockey for this post I mean from the ages of 5-13. Not high school. That’s a whole other thing.
Our boys play travel hockey and it is an all consuming sport. From the beginning of August through the end of March, you are at a rink 3-7 days a week or in a row per kid. You’ll be traveling together staying in hotels etc for out of town tournaments at least twice a season. That’s not counting weekends you’ll be traveling to teams that are in your division as regular season opponents, but are two to three hours away. This does not include Spring and or Summer hockey camps. As we spend a massive amount of time living the hockey life you can bet there will be some blogging about it. I will begin with the tryout or evaluation process.
First Some Hockey Specific Terms:
Hockey Skill Level Ranks from high to low skill: AAA, AA, A1, A2, B1, B2, Gold, Silver/House
Hockey Age Brackets and weird names:
LTS- Learn To Skate – Any age
LTP- Learn To Play – Any Age
6U/Mini Mite – 6 and Under
8U/Mite – 8 and Under
10U/Squirt – 10 and Under
12U/Pee Wee -12 and Under
14U/Bantam – 14 and Under
15U and up to 18U/ Midgets
Someone in USA Hockey, the organization that gives us our rules and takes our money, stated that those names Mites-Midgets were derogatory and discriminatory. We are supposed to only use the number and Under terminology, but we don’t. I have a Bantam goalie and a Squirt forward right now going into evaluations for this upcoming season 18/19.
Our tryouts or “evaluations” as they are officially named are a murky politic ridden process that is both corrupted and dreaded by parents. I haven’t been to soccer or baseball tryouts, so I cannot say for sure they aren’t the same, but it sounds quite a bit more transparent. I don’t hear my soccer/baseball parent friends do the kind of whining and conspiracy theorizing that we hockey parents do. As in any and all topics I could be completely wrong. Please don’t yell at me soccer/baseball people.
Both my boys play for our local club the St. Peters Spirit. As long as you pay the fees and buy the uniforms you’re in. I started both my boys at 5 years old with Learn to Skate which is exactly what it sounds like. If they don’t flip out as some kids do trying to ice skate, then you move them on to Learn to Play. Still self explanatory. The kids are figuring out if they like putting on suits of armor on ice swinging sticks. Most of them do. You aren’t supposed to hit each other, but come on these are little kids in armor with sticks. This is also a period of time for the parents to get a feel for the time and money they will be investing if they stick with the sport.
I coached both my boys from when they were holding themselves up on buckets through Pee Wee for Logan and Squirt for Luke. Once they could out-skate me and/or didn’t need me in the locker room anymore, I was done coaching. They needed me in the locker room longer than the time it took for them to out-skate me.
When I say coaching I was mainly a “wrangler.” I kept the kids in line literally and figuratively. I didn’t start ice skating until I was in my 30s, so my skating skills are mostly just not falling down, and keeping the kids from beating the crap out of each other. Once it came to the more complicated skating techniques like you know, skating backwards, I stuck to wrangling or working the bench.
There are not a ton of volunteers in hockey as not all parents can skate and there are very few if any paid coaches. It was a lot of fun being able to be on the ice with both my boys or running the benches during games. The locker room business used to drive me insane hearing all those kids screaming and making fart noises etc. Now they don’t want me in the locker room with them and it’s kind of depressing.
What was I talking about? Right evaluations. Since we’ve been there the evaluation process hasn’t changed much and each year it is outrageously frustrating. Logan against every wish and want in our bodies started his official hockey “career” as a goalie. Everything about being a goalie and goalie parent is different from all the other positions and many would argue more difficult. Goalie parent is a blog post of its own someday. As far as evaluations go, the goalies are evaluated once on their own and then attend the next four nights of regular evaluations with all the other skaters.
At goalie evals the kids perform some goalie specific skating drills and then station drills in the net trying to make saves from different shooters in different situations. In our area we have a Stanley Cup winning NHL goalie that coaches the majority of our goalies on their own time as he is not affiliated with any of the local clubs. He will run the drills, but he’s inexplicably not consulted on ranking the goalies even though he is the hands down goalie expert in the St. Louis area. Instead some dads/coaches rank the goalies. For goalies and players the evaluators are not allowed to evaluate age groups that include their own kids. Good idea.
In the first round of the four days/nights of one hour evals, the kids are thrown together by name at random. The evals themselves consist of a few skating drills and then a scrimmage. Once they get to the rink they’re assigned a bib number like a marathon runner. This is to allegedly hide their identity from the evaluators and when they are “graded” into one of three skill level groups. The groups are announced after each session. The levels are ranked low 1 to high 3. You can be moved up a level during an evaluation. Your kid can be moved up or down the night of an evaluation after all three are complete. The evaluators get together and rank the kids into the three groups by their bib number. The evaluators are mostly dads that also coach. Even though they may not coach the age group they are evaluating they’re around enough to know who is who. Especially if other parents are in their ears about which number to watch.
This is where things get squirrelly. Now our hockey peers or superiors in the northern US and Canada give parents a detailed list of what skills are being evaluated, what the grade sheets look like, and each night their “grades” are posted, so you know exactly how your kid is doing. Now you still may not agree or like it, but you know and your kid knows. They need to skate faster, pass more, maybe defense isn’t their thing etc. When evaluations are done there is no great surprise what skill level team they are placed on. Not so much for us.
For us backwater wannabe NHLers, parents are not told what the kids are being evaluated on or what they are doing right or wrong. You watch your kid and may think rightly or wrongly how they are doing. At the end of each night after the 3rd group goes, you get an email with the bib numbers and see if your kid moves up, down, or not at all. You are not allowed to ask why or what they need to do. At the same time, the rest of the not at all anonymous kids are moving up or down. You’re wondering how on earth that kid is in the top group. As a dad coach I’m familiar with most of the kids in my sons’ age brackets. Everyone else figures out what kid belongs to what bib number within the first night. For parents like me it gets really difficult to see kids in skill level groups you know they shouldn’t be in. And that’s whether they’re too high or too low.
Each year without fail there are some kids that stick way out as not belonging where they land up or down. Without fail the kids that land on teams of higher skills than the kid has, are board member’s kids or friends of friends of board members etc. This is when the conspiracy theories come out when people really start asking “how on earth is that kid in that group?!” This is not always deserved. Sometimes kids like 8 years old are getting bashed by parents. It’s shameful and it’s ugly. Sometimes the board member’s kid is just better than yours, but you don’t like that board member or whatever, but the kid earned it. Did I mention parents will find a way to ruin anything?
Initially every red blooded American dad has dreams of their kid becoming a professional athlete regardless of sport. In hockey you have a better chance of being struck by lightning while winning the lottery than your kid making it to the NHL. My dream initially was to just get one of my boys into college on a hockey scholarship. That’s a nearly impossible dream as well. The difference in hockey parents is that most become aware quickly their kid is not going to ever be paid to play hockey anywhere. Best you can hope is they make a team of equally skilled kids and you have a great group of parents as you’ll be spending more time with them than your extended families or normal groups of friends you used to hang out with.
The parents (dads usually) that are living through their kids will lie, cheat, and bribe to get their kids on a AA or an A1 team. They are the ones preventing a transparent evaluation process. They don’t want grades posted each night. Our club is not the only local club to do things this way. We hear the same rumors across Missouri and Illinois. There are even internet forum groups dedicated to parents attacking other parents and kids anonymously of course. I used to love reading some of these as sometimes they were super funny making fun of certain crazy hockey moms or coaches you may or may not even know. It was all fun and games until someone pointed my kid out and I lost my sh crap.
That’s all some pretty disgusting behavior. The worst behavior though is my own. My goalie is a little guy. He started out at the Silver level and he belonged there. He had zero goalie training. Even though we were sort of a band of misfits, that’s still the most fun we’ve had thus far. Each year due to ages and these stupid evals you never end up on a team with all of the same people. Maybe a few, but never all. This leads to several months of getting to know new people etc. Once evals are over you have no idea what level/team your kid will end up on and who you’ll be learning to love or hate for the next 8-9 months. You wait and guess and whine and complain to each other as well as hope you end up with a good coach and at least a few of your friends.
Honestly last year was the first time I thought either kid was placed at the wrong level and it was Logan the goalie. He is extremely critical of himself, and then I am next in line. What I mean by that is neither one of us thinks he’s ever been the best out of his peers. He’s got some skill, but more importantly he’s got heart and guts. I will take him any time in an overtime or shootout situation. For the kids at our age level there are only enough goalies to have one per team, so even if they could move them around it couldn’t be by much. The competition is fierce.
In fairness last years evals all the way around didn’t seem to go very well at least for Logan’s age group. For the first time ever I complained about where he was placed. All I asked was what to tell him. We were unpleasantly surprised by where he landed for the first time. After all, this is supposed to be about the kids developing not only into hockey players, but decent young men and women. His dad should be able to explain what he needs to improve, but I couldn’t. I thought he should have placed higher. I never could get a straight answer. This did not seem to endear me or Logan to the club at all. I am hoping it is not being held against him this year. Either way, I will not be doing that again.
His team last season along with many other Pee Wee teams were put together with kids of very different skill levels indicating something went pretty wrong with the evals. A lot of team records backed this up. I am admittedly over protective of my kids and kids in general. A lot of that has to do with traumatic incidents involving children while I was in the military and when I was a street cop. My goalie was hurt that the majority of his closest friends all left him behind a skill level or two. Sadly I am ashamed to admit I was jealous those kids were “better” than mine and their parents also our close friends, were all on teams together. Because of that experience I find myself even more snarky and cranky about this years’ evals. Logan is in the bottom level skill group at least this time with some of our closest friends, but many are in the higher groups and they deserve it. There are some folks we are not close to that are inexplicably in higher groups and all we can do is wonder how that can be as it’s all still a big secret.
Each night the three groups eval one after the other and you’re in the lobby of the rink with people you really want to be on the same team with, but it’s clear you will not be. Is it because my kid is so short or are all the taller goalies that much better? We never really get to see. I very embarrassingly just want out of the rink as fast as possible to not chit chat with people while a huge elephant stands between us we aren’t going to acknowledge. The elephant is that one of our kids is “better” than the other and we will not be playing together, traveling together, winning, losing, and boozing together for another year. It is stupid and shameful behavior on my part and to those of you at the rink I have been avoiding I still love you I’m just depressed we’re not going to be together all that much for another season and they are quickly coming to an end.
And to the other goalie parents, you guys are awesome and it’s a bummer we can never be on the same team. As much time as we spend together at goalie practices and camps we have our own bond, but the competition is as tight as it can possibly be. The elephants between us are really big and smelly. I would never take anything away from your kids. It’s a hard, but valuable life lesson. Don’t like it ya gotta play better and or take some steroids and find a medieval rack somewhere and get taller. One of my favorite things about hockey is watching the goalies high five each other even when competing for spots. They are always rooting for each other, because only they know the pressure of being a goalie at any age or level. For the most part it’s the same for the parents. We’ll even feel bad for opposing goalies and tell their parents their goalies had a great game.
Our Bantams will hit high school next year and more than likely they will stop playing club hockey together. Obviously this doesn’t mean we can’t still hang out, it will just be different. Instead of cherishing the time we have left as a hockey family whether on the same team or not, I’m wasting it being petty.
If the club would just come clean on these evals I believe it would relieve a lot of the pressure and frustration that causes some of this ugly behavior. That said I know it cannot be easy to fairly evaluate 150ish kids at a time and place them all exactly where they should be. I am thankful I am not one of the people trying to do that. I am by no means accusing these people of rigging teams per se or fixing an election. It just would seem to make more sense to be more in the open about it. Why they feel they can’t be even though it’s a new board and there are new evaluators I guess I’ll never know.
Regardless, I am one of the parents that are screwing it up. No excuse whatsoever. I can only hope I’ll behave more like an adult with Luke and his evals. I cannot wait till these things are over and we see our teams. GO SPIRIT!!
Jacked Up Dad 