twothousandone said:
I know the feeling. Sometimes it's helpful for coaches to find someone to coach them. I remember the parent who casually mentioned to me that no one gets yelled at like the coach's kid. Hopefully, I've solved that problem.
And then in the final game, they put it all together. 'cept for bounce passes. One kid asked me "are you coaching next year?" Tough to say no to a kid.
Surely, one or more kids or parents are glad you coached, Santa?
We just finished up with our "house" season for my above mentioned team. After my last post, we had a final tournament out of town, which was 4 games. We actually cancelled the remainder of our practices, due to work commitments for both of us. We lost the first game of the tournament 7-3. After that game, my son asked if he could play forward. I chatted with my other coach and he said sure. We blew up our lines and made two strong forward lines with 3 weaker players moving back to play defence. And it totally worked. We started scoring. Our inexperienced d - men pinched like crazy and our forwards, who were normally defence back checked like crazy. We ended up winning the next three games and won the B - side. We didn't win two games in a row all year until that point. We also had a mini windup during a night of the tournamemt and both us coaches had kids and parents thanking us for the good job we did.
One of the moms said her son was telling her how much he loves hockey again, after being coached by a different coach for the past two seasons. He was ready to quit this year if that same.coach picked him again.
We also ended up playing two final consolation games with the other bottom team in our league. Lost the first one, won the final game.
Even with the thank you ' s and such from the kids and parents, I still don't know if I have it in me to coach hockey again. I have a new young son, who may be playing in the future. A couple years off to recharge isn't the worst thing right now. Especially with some partner transitions at work coming up in the next couple years.
We really only feel like there was one set of parents who didn't want to be on our team. The mom even said she missed her old coach, who at the draft, had to contemplate very hard if he wanted this kid or not. The kid was a bottom draft pick. This was the same coach mentioned above who basically made our other pick mentioned above want to quit hockey. The funny thing is, this mom makes her kid play hockey (the kids words, directly to me) and as best we can tell, she liked the other coach, because he never taught her son a thing and never expected him to get better, or even try. Weird thing is, this family didn't say thanks to myself or the other coach, but the kid did on his own. Mom didn't say two words to me at the informal windup tonight at all.
Anyway, this is long winded. At the starlet of next year, if all these kids sign up for hockey again next year, we did our job. Coming into this year, our entire team from last year played again. None of the other coaches could boast that record.