King for a Season

Now I have chance to update the blog on what happened to Hockey Player.

We did go the AA tryout and Hockey Player wasn’t a step or two behind the other players, he was a good 4 or 5 steps behind. All of the kids there could really skate and they could all shoot the puck. Needless to say, he wasn’t asked back.

He tried out for, and made, a minor peewee A team. It is a first year team but I got a really good feeling about the guys who were going to be running the team and that it wasn’t going to be a repeat of last years fiasco.

The team held its tryouts over two days. On the first day there were over 30 kids on the ice and there was the inevitable discrepancy of talent. Some of the kids were quite good and some were weak. I was beginning to think that it was going to be a repeat of last season, where the necessity of filling a roster takes priority over keeping a sufficient level of talent on the team.

But this also assumes that there is a shortage of talent out there and you have to take whatever comes along and one of the things that had struck me from the tryouts that I had attended was the strong turnout that these teams were able to drum up. There is definitely no shortage of good hockey players available.

The second day of tryouts brought out another 30 kids, some of whom were asked back from the day before, and some who were showing up for the first time, and the level of talent was much improved over what it was the day before. So much so that I was actually worried about whether Hockey Player was even going to make the team-even though he had kind of been offered a spot before the tryouts began.

They did ask HP to join the team and the differences between last year and this new team were already apparent from even before he signed his card. The signing was taking place in an empty dressing room and there was the team’s GM and his wife doing all of the administrative type stuff. While HP was waiting to sign, the GM’s wife was having him try on jerseys, with his shoulder pads on, to make sure that it would fit properly and that they would look good when they stepped on the ice for their first game. It was a nice touch.

The team wants to play 3 on 3 during the summer to keep the boys skating and help them to get to know each other better.