by Bob Mckenzie
The ref confiscated the Barrie player's stick for the measurement and the whole arena erupted. Their bench and their parents went a little nuts. The ref had to go to the referees' room to get a stick-measuring gauge. It was quite a scene.
Sure enough, the stick was illegal, the Barrie player went to the box and with only seconds left in his penalty, we scored a power play goal to narrow Barrie's lead to two goals with just over three minutes left in the game. The goal lit a fire under our guys. We started to play a lot better. With less than two minutes remaining, there was a stoppage and I went back at Stu.
"Let me call another stick measurement," I said. "Their kids are still using the illegal sticks."
Stu started laughing. "Go ahead," he said.
If everyone in the rink went little nuts on the first stick call, you should have witnessed the scene when we called the second. Their bench was in bedlam. Kids were throwing sticks up to their parents in the crowd, presumably to get the illegal sticks off their bench. Some of their parents were screaming at me and our bench. The referee was looking at me like he wanted me dead.
Less than twenty seconds into the power play, we scored to make it 5-4. There was lots of time, more than a minute, left. The worm had definitely turned. You could see the Barrie bench was in a state of disarray. Our kids were all fired up. There was a stoppage with about one minute left. I noticed one Barrie player on the ice still using a stick with a banana curve.
"Stu, let me call another one," I pleaded.
Stu laughed, thought about it briefly: "No, we're good now.
We're going to be fine."
Stu pulled the goalie in the finally minute and one of our defensemen, Bobby Scott, who hadn't scored a goal all season, tried to one-time a shot. He chunked or sliced the puck and it went straight up in the air and came down, bouncing wildly, in the slot. One bounce, two bounces and right over the goalie's glove and into the net. With nine seconds left, the game was tied 5-5. It was pandemonium.
Time expired, we were going to overtime and our message to the kids was very basic. Go for it. Hold nothing back.
We had all the momentum. You could tell by looking at their bench they were crushed.
Sure enough, Matt Snowden scored the game-winning goal about twenty seconds in on the first shift of overtime.
Our kids and parents were celebrating. I seem to recall some of the Barrie parents yelling at me, although it looked like a few of them were yelling at their own coach, too. The referee was looking at me and shaking his head. If looks could kill.
Once our kids and coaching staff had gone to the dressing room to celebrate the win, I told Stu I had better go over to the Barrie side of the lobby, where their parents were waiting outside their dressing room, and take any medicine that was coming my way.
I went over and, sure enough, as soon as I got there, one of their parents let me have it.
"What a cheap way to win a hockey game," he said. "You should be ashamed of yourself, and to think you go on TV and talk about hockey. You're an embarrassment."
I asked this guy how long his son had played on the team and he responded it was his first year with the club. I then told this dad to ask one of the other parents on the team whose kid had played there for two years to explain to him why I might be calling stick measurements in a major atom game.
If you haven't already figured it out, the coach of this Barrie major atom team was the same guy who had coached the Barrie major novice AAA team two years ago, the same team that protested and overturned a playoff game that they lost to Whitby because our suspended coach was seen coming out of the dressing room.
Those two stick measurements-and I still wish Stu had let me call the third one, just for the hell of it-were my first, second and last calls of that kind. Ever. I never, in a million years, would have even considered calling a stick measurement if not for the history with that coach and what the Barrie organization had done in Mike's major novice AAA year.
But, like I said at the end of Chapter Eleven, payback's a bitch.
And if you talk to any of the '86s who played AAA hockey in Whitby for a good long time and ask them for one of their most memorable moments, chances are good they'll mention the "Barrie stick measurement game." It will still bring a smile to their face.
Mine, too.
17: The Best Reward, Bar None, and Hockey Parents From Hell
WHEN LAST WE LEFT YOU with regard to Shawn, he was wrapping up his Select 7 experience and looking as though he might be on his way to figuring out on which side of the face off circle he belonged. It was now time for Shawn to enter the rep phase of his minor hockey career and it was fairly obvious to all of us, including Shawn, that he wasn't exactly AAA material.
That never bothered me in the least and it most certainly didn't bother Shawn. He had no desire to even try out for AAA and was content to try to make his mark with the minor novice AA team.
Mike and Shawn could not have been more different in their on-ice temperament. Mike was competitive and driven, sometimes too much so. Shawn was far more relaxed and happy-go-lucky. Which is not to suggest Shawn wasn't a good AA player in his own right. He was just motivated by different things than Mike.
There was a game early in his minor novice year that illustrated this perfectly. Shawn found himself in the penalty box.
The timekeeper was the son of Shawn's head coach, Norm Orviss. Shawn was chitchatting away with Norm's son in the penalty box when The Proposition was made. "If you come right out of the penalty box and score a goal," the timekeeper said to Shawn, "I'll buy you a chocolate bar when the game is over." This kid was talking Shawn's language.
As fate would have it, Shawn stepped out of the box at precisely the same moment the puck was cleared up the ice. He found himself on a clear-cut breakaway. He went in and buried it. It was the winning goal in a 2-1 game, the team's first win of the regular season. In the days that followed a community newspaper ran a little write-up with a photo of Shawn that was taken immediately after the game. The black and white photo is a little too grainy to see it clearly, but if you look very closely at Shawn's hands, he's holding onto something. It's a Twix chocolate bar, which the timekeeper had given Shawn at the end of the game.
By the time I got into the dressing room to take off his skates, Shawn had already started munching on the bar and happily told me the story of how he got it. He was on Cloud Nine, as much or more for the bar as the goal. All these years later, it's as funny and cute and brings a smile to my face now as it did then.
I would be lying if I told you I was as heavily involved with Shawn's hockey, from his Select 7 season through the next three years of his rep hockey, because those were the four years I was coaching Mike. Cindy picked up the slack for driving Shawn and being there when I was absent because of conflicts with Mike's games or practices or my work schedule, but any chance I got to be at Shawn's hockey, I was most definitely there. Even if it meant I had to do a little Crazy Hockey Dad crazy driving.
Mike was fortunate throughout his minor hockey career to have some nice continuity in coaching. He had John Velacich for three years. Then it was Stu Seedhouse, who was an assistant under John, for the next two years. Then it was me, who was an assistant under Stu, for two years, followed by Bucky Crouch, who worked on my staff as the goalie coach, for two more years. Mike played eight years of AAA hockey and had only four head coaches. His new head coach was always someone who had been an assistant the year before.
Shawn, on the other hand, had three different head coaches in his first four years of competitive hockey and never had the same coach in two consecutive years until I coached him in major atom and minor peewee. Jeff Sisson, a good guy who lived in our neighborhood and whose son, Kyle, went to school with Shawn, was the Select 7 coach. Norm Orviss was Shawn's minor novice AA coach. Jeff Sisson came back to coach the major novice AA team for a year and then Don Houghton took over in the minor atom AA season. I suppose there's nothing intrinsically wrong with having a new coac
h each year, but there is a lot to be said for continuity, for the coach getting to know the boys really well and vice versa.
Every new coach comes in with big ideas on how he wants to do things. If that philosophy or approach changes year after year, it's a lot harder for kids to adapt.
Shawn's first year of rep hockey, though, did feature our first experience with The Hockey Parents From Hell (THPFH).
It's funny, really, that for all the minor hockey and lacrosse teams Mike and Shawn played on, I could count the real problem people on one hand and have a finger or two left. Sure, over the course of time, there might have been isolated incidents involving a parent on a particular issue, but there was, from our personal experience, just one extreme case of THPFH.
THPFH generally fall into two categories. The first is THPFH lifers, who in spite of being a cancerous blight on the minor hockey landscape, manage to go the distance and be a royal pain in everyone's ass for an eight-to-ten-year period.
For reasons no one can explain, they bounce from team to team wreaking havoc but have inexplicable staying power. The second is THPFH flaming burnouts, who roar onto the scene with reckless abandon, lighting fires, abusing coaches, insulting kids and parents and generally proving to be antisocial deviants who were born without a clue. The former is bad; the latter is worse. The lifers have some-not much, mind you, but some-sense of boundaries, knowing that if they push too far they'll ultimately be expelled from minor hockey culture.
The flaming burnouts, though, know no bounds. They come, they go, they scorch the earth and then pull their kid out of hockey because of the "politics." It's always the politics, never the fact that they are usually rude, ignorant, selfish, malicious and truly crazy.
THPFH on Shawn's team were flaming burnouts, there for just one season. It was obvious at the first tournament of the year when the patriarch of THPFH showed up to the game with a stopwatch and a pen and notepad to keep track of Junior's ice time. He had actually enlisted another parent on the team to help him out because, well, as anybody in the game knows keeping track of nine forwards' ice time on the fly is no mean feat. And, of course, misery loves company. The other dad should have known better but then that's the real danger of THPFH.
What is it they say about the universal truth of coaching in minor hockey? Five parents love you, five hate you and five are neutral. The challenge is keeping the five who are neutral away from the five who hate you. I love that. It's so true. Even in the NHL, coaches will tell you it's the same, not with parents of course, but players.
Shawn's coach that year, Norm Orviss, had come out of minor hockey retirement, along with three of his best buddies who had once coached their own kids. They were a little older version of Stu, Kevin and me, just looking to relive some of the glory days. And they got THPFH as their reward.
In the wake of the tournament where everyone saw THPFH and his accomplice feverishly recording ice times, Norm called a parent meeting in a dressing room at Iroquois Park, where he tried to put out the fire. He explained as best he could their philosophy and while it all made perfect sense, the patriarch and matriarch of THPFH weren't satisfied. They began peppering the staff with questions and accusations. It was very uncomfortable with most of the parents just looking at the floor and hoping it would end soon.
I'd finally had enough of this inquisition-being a coach for Mike's team at the time, I had great sympathy for Norm and in the middle of it all, I just said: "Well, I think we can all agree that the coaches are doing a good job. I would say this meeting is over."
All the parents made for the door except of course THPFH, who continued to grind Norm. It was just them and me and Norm. I was seriously concerned this verbal confrontation might escalate to physical, so I put my arm around Norm and said, "Excuse me, but I need to talk to you about something outside."
And that was that. We just left them in there. Long story short, THPFH were never heard of again after that season. I used to occasionally see them around the rink the next season-it wasn't long before they disappeared entirely-and isn't that the most unfortunate aspect of all?
Their boy seemed like an okay kid and was a decent little player, too. I always felt sorry for kids like that. They never stood a chance. Kids like that don't get cut from hockey teams; their parents do, not that THPFH would ever figure that out.
18: The Four-Point Plan: Not as Stupid as I Look
THE PREMISE OF THIS BOOK is I am not the least bit shy about holding myself up to ridicule and revealing to one and all that I can be a horse's ass at times. I'm okay with that. But if you're going to read the stories that make me look like an idiot, you're also going to have to put up with the occasional parts where I tell you how smart I am. If that doesn't appeal to you, skip this chapter entirely and forge ahead because there are many examples of stupidity to come.
But right here, right now, it's time to tell you I'm not as stupid as I look. I do actually get it; I fully understand what minor hockey is about, at least what it should be about. This, of course, is the preface to me becoming the head coach of the Whitby minor peewee AAA team.
Coaching as an assistant with Stu Seedhouse in atom, I knew I wanted to be the head coach in minor peewee, but my fear was I wouldn't be able to because of work commitments.
Exacerbating the situation was that Stu was not going to be involved this year as he was going to coach his daughter Ellie's team in girls' hockey. Kevin O'Brien was back as trainer and I shanghaied another parent, Ron Balcom, whose son Aaron was on the team, to be the manager/treasurer.
The challenge, though, was finding minor hockey coaching expertise-one or preferably two experienced assistants-for the times when I wouldn't be able to be at a practice and/or a game. In my business, that could be anytime, anywhere.
I was at the Nagano Olympics in 1998 and my biggest concern was not whether Wayne Gretzky should have shot in the shootout against Dominik Hasek, but whether I could, long distance, convince a friend, Mark Rowland from Oshawa, to help out as an associate coach. Mark had coached his own son back in the day, had been "retired" and wasn't sure he wanted to do it again. But I was persuasive on the phone from Japan and managed to convince him to give it a shot, for one year anyway.
That was great; it was even better that Mark had a friend, Steve Hedington, who had played in the Ontario Hockey League (Niagara Falls and Sudbury) and wanted to help out, too. That took care of that. I was going to be a head coach for the first time. I am often asked how, with such a busy work schedule, I ever find the time to coach. The answer is simple really. If you want to get to your kids' practices and games, it's actually easier if you coach. Who decides when practices and games are scheduled? The coach, of course. It's all about control. For the most part, I had control of when the team would practice or play and I set it up in such a way to minimize conflicts with work. When I went to the OMHA scheduling meetings I was like General Norman Schwarzkopf on Operation Desert Storm.
But there are always going to be conflicts and that's why you need a large and able support staff who you trust implicitly and I most certainly had that. Coaching is a weighty responsibility.
Ultimately, the head coach of a minor hockey team is charged with safeguarding seventeen kids, whose parents may or may not be present, for many hours each week from late August to early March, in places that could be many miles away from home. Outside of a kid's parents, a minor hockey coach can have as much, if not more, input and influence as that kid's teacher at school.
I have very strong opinions on what minor hockey should be. So now you're going to get the same four-point philosophy I outlined for the parents and players at the start of that season:
1. Have Fun. If it isn't fun, what's the point? That doesn't mean it can't be challenging or there won't be bumps in the road, but if the players and parents aren't having fun, why do it? It costs too much money and takes up too many days and nights for it not to be fun.
I firmly believe that once a month or so, outside of practices or game
s, the team needs to have fun as a group away from the arena. It could be an excursion to the Hockey Hall of Fame; a pregame meal at Pizza Hut or Don Cherry's Restaurant; the ever-popular trip to Laser Quest in Oshawa; a game of touch football or ball hockey; or perhaps a bus trip to a road game to make the kids feel like they're (minor?) pros.
On the ice, I started every practice with five-minute mini-games at each end of the ice, four-on-four at one end and four-on-three at the other with a goalie in each net. The attacking team had to score a goal and then go on defense or the defending team had to get the puck back out over the blue line in order to switch to offense, just like a half-court game of one-on-one basketball. The only rule was the kids had to go hard, keep their feet moving, and that was rarely a problem. Of all the things I ever did as a coach, nothing got a more favorable reaction from the kids than a mini-game to start every practice. It's the best warm-up for practice because they not only worked up a good sweat, they got excited about practicing. The kids worked harder, competed harder, got more creative and had more fun playing that mini-game than any drill.
They were eager and pumped up to do whatever hard work we threw at them in practice after that.
The fun, I always believed, should extend to the parents, too. We had many good parent parties. It didn't hurt that the group of parents on Mike's team were a terrific, level-headed bunch who were always up for a good time.
At the end of it all, as much as what takes place on the ice is of value, it's the other stuff the kids really remember, like the time Nick Cotter zipped himself inside his hockey bag or when Kyle O'Brien got Walter Gretzky to autograph his jock. It's about the relationships, friendships and many memories. If you make it just about the hockey, you have made a critical mistake.
2. Instill the Right Values. Teamwork. Sportsmanship. Discipline. Work ethic. Commitment. Dedication. Sacrifice. Cooperation. Respect. All that good stuff.
If, at the end of the season, the players, and the coaches and parents for that matter, have learned more about those qualities than they have about how to take a slap shot or break the puck out of their own end, I would consider it a successful season. If you're going to invest that much time, effort and money, there has to be a bigger payoff than what happens on the ice.