Just a game

Hockey is life. This is what I often tell my kids as we leave the rink, usually when they haven’t given a particularly inspiring effort. This sermon is always given on the car ride home—because I suspect for some my “hockey is life” speech to 10 year olds just sounds nuts.

I don’t mean that hockey is all there is to life—though at times I may not make this as clear as I should.

What I mean is that hockey rewards sweat. It rewards creativity, energy and hard work. It rewards those who understand the power of a team. It establishes clearly that one can cut corners or give a half effort for a while, but soon others in the game will be skating you by. It doesn’t matter how skilled or innately talented one is; without effort, soon you are no longer a player but a spectator. Hockey is life, amplified.

There are different roles in this complex ecosystem. Starting in net there is the person charged with securing the important ice—ensuring that pucks are kept out. To do this you must be quick, dexterous and willing to be pounded with a rubber projectile travelling faster than a car on the freeway, over and over again. Up front the game needs talented forwards with well-honed skill to move through an opposing team with the puck always in control.

No one is born able to stickhandle. It is a skill that is learned and honed over thousands of hours on the driveway or back yard rink. The best forwards are able to see the ice differently than others—they understand where all the chess pieces will be in a split second from now and act accordingly.

On the other side of the ice, the game requires folks equally skilled and doubly energetic in breaking up the advancing play. They need to decide the greatest threat, the capacity of those behind them, as well as the best approach to neutralize it and execute at speed.

The game needs workers—those willing to put their head down and push burning legs up the ice to aid in a scoring rush or back down to fix a mistake. And they need to do this three or four times a shift.

You need to be able to take an elbow to the chin. Then you must summon all your strength not to retaliate. You must stand up when the opposing player uses two hands and his stick in your back to knock you down. And brace yourself to be hit again.

Success, however, means coalescing these skills and attributes together as a team—individuals must play like a team and think like a team. Perhaps the most succinct proof of this occurred just a couple of weeks ago as the OJHL—the league in which the Wellington Dukes play—awarded trophies to its top six players of 2010/11.

The hardware was handed out before the face-off in game two of the Buckland Cup final between Wellington and Oakville. The last two teams standing in the OJHL were lined along each other’s blueline in observance. None of the six players recognized was a member of either Wellington or Oakville’s teams. All six wore their team jerseys over street clothes. Individually they had outperformed, yet their season was over. The two strongest teams were still playing.

I tell my kids hockey is life because I want them to understand that there are rewards beyond grades. That putting effort behind mathematics and social studies will deliver tangible benefits beyond the number or letter on a report card— rewards they may not see or comprehend yet. I want them to know as well that doing less than one’s best also has consequences— perhaps not right away, but soon. And that these less-than-positive consequences tend to be just as enduring as the rewards.

I tell my kids hockey is life because I want them to see achievement and success through their own lens—not mine. I don’t want them to succeed for my benefit but rather their own. My hockey metaphor, I think, helps to do this.

If I am right, and hockey is indeed life, then Prince Edward County is truly at the centre of the universe. From those still learning to walk, through to seniors unable to walk after their weekly game of shinny, the rinks in the County are the pivots around which the rest of life spins.

It is spring and buds on trees are signalling that a long winter is behind us, yet many of us remain captivated by the exploits of the Dukes—just a win away from the Buckland Cup—or the Picton Pirates vying for the Schmalz Cup. The glow of the County Farm Centre Novice Kings East Ontario championship still burns brightly.

If hockey is life, life is pretty good in Prince Edward County.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca