I avoided sports my entire life. Until my son's hockey. What mind-blowing fun.
“Be amazing!!” Mondo-Mom yells, “30 seconds from glory!”
She jumps up, swinging a cowbell way up over her head, then freezes, striking a dance-fever pose.
“Sorry.” She turns around grinning. “I’m normally quiet. I really am. But I’m just overwhelmed….with love for them!”
Mondo-Mom is one of dozens of fabulous parents I’ve met through three seasons of house league hockey.
“We believe in you!!” she shouts even when the kids are losing. “YOOOU. GOT. THIS!!” bellows a mom who will never stop cheering.
How many ways can you say hurrah. Mondo-Mom has a continuous stream of off-beat commentary. "You're too clumpy. Like oatmeal," she yells. Her repertoire is as capacious as an Oscar-the-Grouch garbage can: she is always pulling out a new way to say bravo.
You cannot be crabby around this kind of enthusiasm. Everyone brings their own sparkle. The assistant coach who makes melt-in-your mouth sugar-dipped donuts to celebrate shut-outs. Grandpa from Manitoba who knows every kid by name and has an “Atta boy” and “Wind’er up” for every player. The moon-faced mustachioed grandpa and my husband jibber-jabber non-stop throughout the 50 minute games. They have a spooky similarity to the Muppet duo Statler and Waldorf. But unlike the heckling Muppets, the Gladiator geezers are gregarious, not grumpy.
The vivacity overload has transformed me into a devoted, improbable fangirl of kids’ house league hockey.
My own athletic pursuits stunted before Grade 6. I struggled doing log rolls in gymnastics. Skating and swimming lessons never stuck. Play day, with its legendary obstacle course, made me sick to my stomach. My only ticket to annual track meets was doing Joe-jobs like carrying the First Aid kit and black garbage bags. It never improved. In Grade 10 I sprained my ankle and I was thrilled. No pressure to do back walkovers on a balance beam. Instead, I did an essay on gymnastics in Ancient Greece. I clicked and clacked on a typewriter through an Easter weekend as if I had a chance at a Pulitzer.
This, all this, is why I get such a kick out of seeing the name CELLI stitched on the back of a jersey.
When the final buzzer goes, when the last game is over, there is a misty eye here or there. We've shared a winter of crazy highs and lows.
“Have a great summer.” We wave and sometimes hug. For many of us, that’s it. Kids grow up, move around, and move on. Ah, but as the saying goes, we’ll always have the Gladiators.
Hugging one mom, I'm humming inside my head, mimicking Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. “I’ve grown accustomed to her face”....my soundtrack is an updated spin, a BFF version of the classic musical.
For three winters, we’ve been in happy hockey bubbles. It’s left me with a significant disconnect. I hear so many horror stories about sore losers, pushy parents, and spoiled kids that I honestly wonder if we are lucky, or kids’ hockey is more civilized these days. Some people say this decency is the line that separates house from competitive. All I know for sure is that the experience has been in a league of its own.
Our son’s first season was splotchy thanks to the pandemic. He and a pal had landed on the same team but as organizers balanced things out, he got shuffled onto a different team where he knew no one. It turned out to be the best thing that could happen.
It set off a trajectory of three seasons with the same coach. Coach is a lot of great things, and above all: classy, kind, and fair.
If the team pulls off a magnificent comeback, he fights back tears. When he is super thrilled, he raids the arena’s vending machine and flies into the change room with an armload of Skittles.
He’s coaching because of his son, but he has a sincere dedication to each child. In the first season, the coach mailed a Christmas letter via good old Canada Post. He added a handwritten personal message to each of the 8 and 9 year old boys. You want a team that will fling itself across the ice to stop a puck? These kids will. They listen and respect the coach, for all the right reasons.
“Come on!” Coach shouted in frustration at a referee during one game. The ref promptly gave the team a penalty. Coach apologized to us. He was disappointed in himself but no one else cared. “It’s the equivalent of Ned Flanders swearing,” joked one of the dads.
Leadership matters and this guy has it locked down.
“Oh my gawd!!!!" everyone shrieked, jumping up and down. Mondo-Mom's son scored the winning goal with less than 8 seconds left in the game at an out-of-town tournament. “That’s my baaaaay-beee!!” Hugging and high-fiving, it was hours before the players and parents' feet touched the floor.
As the season unfolds, it's so fulfilling to see how the kids improve, mature, and mesh as a team. It’s mostly boys in the league, but every so often, they go up against a team with a couple of female players. Even when those girls crush our guys, I can’t help but show her some love. “You go girl!” No one is ever going to push her around. I hope that girl will always feel like she can do anything.
“Wind it up,” bellows Grandpa, his voice booming in the arena. “Atta boy! Go for a skate!” Like Mondo-Mom, his enthusiasm is infectious.
Everything about hockey has been a win: team spirit and camaraderie, developing skills and all that wiggle-busting skating and sweating. Most precious of all, is building confidence and self-esteem. Things didn’t just fall into place for our son: learning to read was a slog, piano was a bust, and the pandemic was lost time. The ice, however, was always a happy place. He rides waves of big emotions and keeps it all in check. He is never too nervous or too bummed out. The only thing he has ever worried about is the one trash-talking kid at school the next day.
I did, at long last, have one of ‘those’ moments this year: a full blown, face-twitching, eyeball-bulging, angry mom moment. All it took was one impressively smug-faced guy. A champion jerk. He was an organizer at the tournament. The details don’t matter, but Mr. Smug-Face made a crappy situation worse. “It is what it is,” he said with a big eye-roll, and went back to what he was doing, acting like we weren’t there. I could feel myself laser beaming holes into his eye sockets: Read the room buddy. Don’t you see the swarm in front of you clutching pitchforks??!!
I’ve had a good share of heart-gulping moments when our mostly squirt-sized kids play against giants. We watched one team do warm up drills with the precision of a Russian battalion. We knew that game wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Is that kid really 11?! He looks like he should be going home to feed his own kids after the game!” We chuckle. And wince.
The out-of-whack Davids versus Goliaths can at times turn out to be an irresistible story of triumph. The Goliaths don’t always win. What the Davids lack in size, they can make up for in speed and instinct. The odds are stacked but it’s not impossible.
Personally, I have come to see these outrageous physical differences as hockey’s way of saying every kid belongs. Feverish debates over the alleged advantages of trans athletes dominate and divide. But really. A hairy 150 pound ten year old is a fair match against a 70 pound kid the same age? The 12 year old who is shaving versus the kid still sleeping with a stuffy? If sports leagues were that insanely serious about ‘fair’ competitions, they’d be sorting kids by height and weight, not age.
Someone, somewhere, will always have a built-in advantage. Pristine and equal playing fields only exist in our imaginations.
I witnessed one truly dispiriting incident, and it happened just as season three ended. We could see Coach across the ice, head to head with the referees, his arms pointing to the other team. After the game, we found out why our calm and collected Coach had been so agitated. A boy crying on his bench, sitting out several shifts. Some kids on the opposing team had said rude things to him because he's Korean. Racist bullying is real. Among tweens. In 2024. This is what adults should be getting worked up about.
“Play like a team!”, whoops Mondo-Mom, swinging her cowbell.
“Put it in the hole!” Eyebrows shoot up. “You mean, the net. Right?"
“Do the fancy!!”, she squeals. Moments later, “Don’t do the fancy!”
“What does she mean?” someone asks.
Everything and nothing.
Unhinged and happy.
Just bubbling, uncorked love.
Every year, we have scored big. Lucky us, we say to each other at home, for meeting this group of kids and this group of grownups. I hope we never break that record.
Eleven year old Gladiators hit the pavement to gather sponsors for the team
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