February 8, 2019: Friday Night Practice

Finally… we finally got an open gym slot to practice another sport.  That was the best thing about baseball; we had the fields Friday for practice, and then the games were on Saturday.  We never got any practice time for basketball.  It was tough because we needed somewhere the rims would lower to the height we played at each weekend.  Nothing; man, if we had practice in basketball, I’d like to think that would have added a win or two.  But this week, I got the text for some potential open gym time for floor hockey.  I took it, then text the entire team about it.  We only had 3 kids at our first Friday Night practice.

It was fine too.  I knew 3 kids were out of town this week, so that only left 3 others that could potentially make it to the practice.  The 1 kid had ice skating practice, the other kid couldn’t make it, and the other one I didn’t hear back from.  But like I said, 3 was plenty.  We’d actually be sharing the open gym with a 7-9 year old team… coached by my old rival from the other sports; yeah, that guy.  We both nodded at each other… nothing else.  Whatever… haha.  I saw how he was practicing with his team; I felt like saying, guy, these kids are only 7 years old… trying to run it like they’re pros.  Anyways, ours was nothing like that.

All 3 of us dads had sticks and joined the boys on the court; even one of the kids little brother grabbed a stick and joined us.  We did very little structured stuff.  We practiced some shots, a little bit of passing, a little bit of chasing down the puck in the corner, but other than that, it was a free for all.  We ended the last 20 minutes or so with a game:  boys vs dads.  That was fun.

You could see the competitiveness of the dads, including me, come out.  You could see the competitiveness of the boys too.  One kid trying to steal the puck from his dad every time, another kid sliding into the wall for a puck, and of course my son, throwing his hockey stick on the floor when the dads scored another goal on him; he also stormed off the court after missing a shot.  Yeah, he’s got that fire… I don’t want to extinguish it, that’s for sure, but it’s something that needs to be controlled.  He was all over the place out there, sweating bullets, firing bullets into the net, blocking shots.  Meanwhile his dad broke a stick… yeah, I can’t believe I did that; I wasn’t swinging the stick that hard… I must have caught it on the floor or something.

We practiced for about an hour and a half; the boys didn’t want to stop, but… we do have a game on Saturday morning.  And tomorrow we’ll only have 6 kids, so there will be no rest.  I want to make sure the kids save some energy for the game, although somehow, I don’t think that will be a problem.  Those kids can go all day; I remember those days…

It should help, this practice and all.  Not worried about structure necessarily, but just more time on the floor with the stick, handling the puck, passing the puck, shooting the puck, chasing it down, getting more aggressive.  We’ll see if we can improve to 2-0 on Saturday.  Let’s go Knights!