At 45 years old I have definitely become a “get off my lawn” kind of guy. Well not literally, because my lawn looks like crap and I don’t actually care all that much. I’d really like to pour gravel all over it and plant some cactus and install some cool lights like we live in AZ or Vegas. That would be my front yard. In the back I’d like to lay down sport court and have an outdoor inline hockey rink. I just mean crabby old man. If I’m being honest I’ve been a crabby old man since some time in childhood or at least one in training since I can remember. Way too many minor things get to me way too quickly. What does this have to do with hockey? Well on our last out of town tournament I had a full dose of pet peeves and annoyances thrown at me at once. So you’ll get some raving lunatic-ness and some insight on what a hockey tournament can be like. It’s not all bad or even half bad.
Each season in travel hockey your team usually votes to go on at least two out of town tournaments. The destination and cost etc is totally up to the parents on the team. That can be a whole drama in and of itself. Getting 12-15 families to agree on anything can be exasperating. Anywho this particular tournament was for Luke’s Squirt team in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was mine and Luke’s second trip there in his distinguished career. Or once when he was eight and now he’s ten. He’s officially a veteran youth hockey player.
The games can start as early as Friday afternoon. If it’s a holiday weekend the championship games are usually on that holiday Monday. Depending on the timing you will take Friday off work and you will pull your kid out of school to get on the road or have him/her not go at all and leave Thursday night. This is our normal method when me and Liz can both go. That way we get an extra night of kicking back at the hotel before the rushing around commences. You get a couple other parents and some coolers to show up early and all the better. In this case it was just me and Luke as Liz split time to get Logan games he had the same weekend.
Luke and Logan went to the same elementary school. Fortunately/Unfortunately there is a hockey mom in the administration there and pretty much everyone knows why Luke or Logan won’t be at school on Friday. The first time we pulled Logan and they needed the reason I tried “family vacation.” Said hockey mom administrator asks, “Where’s the tournament?” Me: Uhhhhh…. From then on they don’t even ask anymore. Currently Luke has straight A’s so no one really cares anyway. Still kind of fun to “skip” school even vicariously.
We hop in the Jeep and head to Chick Fil A for lunch on the way. And so begins non stop annoyances. It was snowing here in good old St. Louis which means everyone must leave work early, panic, drive like idiots in an apocalypse, and buy up all the ingredients to French toast at the store or apparently order all of the food at Chick Fil A. Our main thoroughfare to the freeway is a four lane “highway” that should be an eight lane road for all the people who cram themselves into the latest subdivision of McMansions. No offense we are one of these people too. Every weather report every day in St. Louis is a 50/50 proposition. I have some Air Force friends that swear our unpredictability is caused by the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. A valid argument can be made, but I digress. If the weather guy says “Snow” it might rain, sleet, hail, sun come out and be 60 degrees or every great once in awhile it actually snows.
I like driving in snow. I like snow. To me if it’s going to be cold it might as well snow. To me you’re getting something that looks pretty, and allows for many great activities. I must be in about a 1% minority of the population of Missouri that doesn’t equate snow with asteroids or a plague of locusts or raining zombies. Thus it’s a gas/brake/gas/brake/repeat driving situation to get a couple blocks to Chick Fil A.
Once we get there we gaze upon a vast sea of SUVs and minivans clogging both lanes of the Chick Fil A drive thru all the way out into the street. Luke has his heart set on the nuggets and truth be told I felt I had already earned a chocolate shake of which they make the best. Being the genius I am, I figured I would outsmart all these drive thru suckers and actually go in and order. Yeah because no one else thought of that. Oh wait about 40 people did in fact think of that. Instead of sitting in the Jeep I’m now standing in line.
Here I am number 41 in line an I am viewing the chaos and madness of the counter which I must say no one handles better than the staff at any Chick Fil A. However, there are always these jackasses. Some stupid millennial holding up his app arguing over a 75 cent coupon he feels entitled to even though it’s for the wrong day. First off. YOU ARE WRONG, so why argue at all? Next there are 40 FREAKING people behind you. The world does not revolve around YOU!! Obviously it should revolve around me, because I’m in a hurry damnit. Next there’s the old lady that either has never been to Chick Fil A and is overwhelmed by all the choices in chicken entrees and/or just didn’t have enough time to read the giant high definition menus in the twenty minutes it took her to get to the front of the line. I could go on, but let’s get on the road.
Invariably any road trip through this great United States of America you will find yourself on a two lane highway for hours and you will play a game of cat and mouse in the fast lane. This phenomena is still after some almost 30 years of driving, completely inexplicable to me. If you want to pass someone AKA speed, well you drive in the “Fast Lane.” There are even signs in every state that allude to this common sense rule. If you’re not going to go faster than me then get out of my way. Who are these people who either are oblivious to the line of slowed and pissed off traffic behind them, or they are intentionally expressing a big “F you,” to those of us who feel the speed limit is really more of a friendly suggestion and we abhor driving under it or at it. In fact I feel itchy all over until I am going at least ten over. Yet these asshats driving slow in the wrong lane decide at some point that this is their lane and they don’t have to move for anyone.
You throw some big rigs in there playing the same game of I’m passing you-now you pass me and you have some mega frustrating driving. Me, I like to get to ten-twelve over set my cruise control, because I have a bad knee, and just cruise in the appropriate lane for the speed traffic is flowing. People seem mystified when I use the passing lane just to pass and stay at a steady speed. They take it personally and think I’m going to race them and there needs to be drafting and blocking as if we’re in a NASCAR race. Nope I just want to make the ETA on my GPS go down. I want to take time off that clock that’s the joy of my whole road trip experience and if you’re preventing that, I really wish I could use the big black steel stinger on the front of my Jeep and just push you right out of the way. That should be a law.
We check into the hotel after driving through a brief snow storm and miles and miles of annoying drivers. Immediately the kids run around like idiots fascinated by elevators and ice machines. When I first began our hockey journey with Logan we were made to understand that our children are to be let loose within the hotel to hit the pool depending on game schedule and whether the coach wanted them to stay “rested.” Or they find a hallway they can play Shinny or Knee hockey in. The wiser veteran hotel staffs would block off a set of rooms in the most hidden corner of the hotel where the team would all have rooms next to each other and it keeps us away from all the normal human beings staying at the hotel that actually want to sleep or relax.
If you’re not a hockey parent, trust me I understand your thoughts of, “How dare you let your kids run around a hotel like wild animals?!” I would think the same thing. At first I was very self conscious about it and tried to keep the boys leashed our first trip. I soon learned I had a choice. I could be annoyed by my kids trapped in a small room or you could be annoyed by them running around. I promise you would make the same choice in my shoes.
These are little boys and girls that love to skate as fast and hard as they can as often as they can on frozen water with boots attached to steel blades. They may not even know how to stop except by crashing into a wall. They wear armor and they beat each other with sticks. Some of them allow the other kids to shoot hard frozen rubber pucks at their head. These are not the type of kids that sit in a hotel room quietly reading a book. Thus you ask the hotel to ensure we are all neighbors and we keep to ourselves in one hallway or you offer us a conference room and we keep the zoo contained in there.
There are only so many cities that host hockey tournaments and within those cities you’re given a list of hotels or you’re just given a hotel period. You want the whole team to stay together, because the whole point is for the team to bond together. There is no better way to get a team and its parents and siblings to bond, then going on the road and staying at a hotel together. The kids won’t remember the wins and losses. They remember running around the hotel, swimming, and playing shinny hockey with each other. Whose parents got the drunkest, was it a kid or a parent that had to be pulled out of the hotel fountain. Ok it’s not really that crazy, but it can be.
Most hockey tournaments thankfully do not hand out participation trophies. Our league also does not hand them out. You win or go home. It’s difficult for any team at any skill/age level to get through 3-12 other teams for the winning hardware. At least it’s supposed to be. My point being it’s the experience for most kids not the trophy.
Speaking of skill levels, here begins my chapter on shady tournament practices and shenanigans. All teams are given a skill level rating if you will from AAA descending A1, A2, B1 and so on. The idea is that all the teams that sign up are of the same skill level so no one is slaughtering everyone else or your team gets slaughtered by everyone else. Human nature being what it is unfortunately, there are some coaches that will sign up their higher level teams to wipe the floor at an out of town tournament where no one can really call them on it. Sometimes they’ll bring one or two ringers or a whole team of ringers so they can be “Champions.” Later in life I bet these folks have problems.
This happened to Logan awhile back on one of his trips to Iowa ironically. Every local Iowa team was annihilating the out of town teams. When the tournament director was called on it she said, they (Iowa Hockey) considered teams from St. Louis and Chicago automatically a higher skill level than theirs. Looking incredulously, we gave a “Huh?” They considered our B level kids were skilled equivalent to their A level teams, because we are from “hockey cities.” Again, huh?? Turns out they were wrong. A was A and B was B so shockingly the local team cruised through and won the championship. Shenanigans!!
As any round robin tournament will do, there has to be tie breaking rules. The standard is usually wins equalling points. If the points come out in a tie they look at goals for and against, if still stuck they will go to goals for/against versus the rankings of each team. I’ve never seen it get this far. In Iowa we discovered they were going from points to penalty minutes counting against the teams. There is a huge leaderboard at the rinks with the table of teams and their wins, losses, points, goals, and penalty minutes. First time I’ve seen penalty minutes on the list. Not that it hasn’t been there before I guess maybe I didn’t notice it because I never had to. Well guess what?
Luke’s team played well through the tournament. They have never been a heavily penalized team. Somehow when we played an Iowa team it was like we were the Charlestown Chiefs from the movie “Slapshot.” Luke must have rolled some quarters in foil in his gloves. If he even brushed by an Iowa player that fell down it was a penalty. The local team in return could check, trip, and slash with reckless abandon without any fear of consequences.
You may think I am being dramatic here and every hockey parent or any sport for that matter, think the refs suck and are persecuting their team. I have statistical proof to back me up. Amazingly when we played teams from Chicago and Nebraska the officiating was equal. Then again we needed to get through another local team to go to the finals and again we were penalized 20 minutes to their 2 minutes. This was the one and only power play we got the entire tournament versus a team from Iowa. On the leaderboard in the lobby when you ran down the penalty minute column the local teams had zero to five minutes total for the tournament. We had somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 minutes I believe including some ridiculous major penalties. I mean come on. Same with the other out of town teams though we lead them all by quite a bit. Just so happened we were still winning despite being short handed most of the games and wouldn’t you know it we came to a tie breaker versus one of the locals that went to penalty minutes which kept us out of the finals. Shenanigans!!
Well we still had a blast running the halls and having dinners, breakfasts, and beers together as a team. We won and whined together. There was a team of local girls that could barely stand on skates much less play hockey that they let play in the tournament for free. Why I cannot understand. The first team we saw play them won something like 39-0. They only count a nine goal difference so the other 30 didn’t even count, but each goal you would’ve thought was the winning goal for game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals the way the kids and their jerk parents celebrated each one.
Now as I explained due to the point system unfortunately it forces you to run up the score the most you can in case it comes down to that in a tie breaker. Again though you can only run the score up by nine. I was proud of our coaches, yet not surprised that they showed the class enough to slowly get our nine goals making the kids pass so many times etc before shooting. By the second period they weren’t allowed to shoot anymore. We could score on accident. They would swap positions and basically practice passing and it gave the girls a chance to catch a breakaway once in awhile.
You’d think their coaches would have appreciated this show of class and we gave the girls a sort of fighting chance to at least score a goal, but they just couldn’t, even with no one stopping them. The post game handshake had the girls’ coaches all pissed off at our coaches for not firing away. Damned if you do or don’t I guess. Oh well that night we had a great game and then attended the Cedar Rapids Rough Riders (mind out of gutter please) minor league hockey game and the kids and parents had a blast.
Before I headed home for the inevitable cruise control frustration I noticed a couple other annoyances. When did people stop holding the door open for other people? Random I know, but it stuck out when a nine year old is carrying a hockey bag bigger than them plus jerseys and a couple sticks, and an adult shuts the door to the rink in their face. When did that become ok? There is no way you cannot know a kid with all the crap is right behind you. I also noticed adult versus adult not opening or holding doors open for others. That just pisses me off. It’s like the lane thing. Not everything is about you move over and hold the door open ya jerk.
Jacked Up Dad 