The “dead” of winter

This is a difficult part of the season- It’s the “dead” of winter and really cold outside, the boys are playing school hockey as well as “rep” hockey, the scheduler is paying us back for the tournaments that we have played by giving us busy schedules and the cream seems to be rising to the top of the standings.

Hockey Player’s team played one of the better teams last night and lost 3-1. It was a disappointing effort. The other team was the one that HP’s team played in their first game of the regular season and lost in the last 10 seconds on great solo effort by one of their kids. We came away from the game feeling that we could beat that team and in subsequent games against them we still felt the same: This team is beatable!

But last night there was such a big disparity in the way that the two teams played that it was really pretty blatant. The other team played a much more spirited game, they were on our players hard all over the ice. Our team ended up the game with only 8 shots on net and, other then the 1 that got past their goalie, none of them were what you would call “Quality chances”.

I had this feeling that Hockey Player’s team so far has mirrored the Leafs this season- A good start with lots of effort and hard work that maybe covered up the deficiencies in skills, which was fine against the bottom teams, but now we are playing the better teams, who have been honing their play over the course of the season, and the gap is becoming large.

And this gets to the question of, “What do we do next year?”

I would really like to be able to skip the whole try-out process in April- HP has pretty much been asked back. But it will depend on how many, and which, changes the coaches want to make for next year. There are some players that probably haven’t developed quite the way that the coaches might have projected that they might, but they are only 11 years old.

Hockey Player says that he would like to play AA. But I don’t think that he is there, yet. He may be some day but he isn’t right now.

I was talking with one of HP’s coaches recently and he was commenting on how some of the kids who played select/house league last year might be having a hard time this year because of the busier schedule and how they haven’t been contributing consistently.

The boys play another game tonight and I hope that there is a better effort then they showed last night.