7 Hacks For Hockey Parents

Rich Cohen, author of "Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent," is writer at large for Air Mail and columnist at The Paris Review.

For many parents, Winter would be inconceivable without youth hockey. It carries us, in the way of a roller coaster, from the melancholy of late summer to the joy of Spring. The season is long, the mornings early, the highways covered in snow or ice, but there’s nothing to match the excitement of watching a group of teens, preteens and even tiny little kids gel as a team. And the other parents— if your kid plays travel, you will spend more time with these people than you have with anyone since college — will become your best friends, the only people who truly understand. It’s not just a game but a way of being, which we refer to, in the way of mobsters, as “the life.”
And yet it can be a challenge to maintain perspective, especially when your kid gets shafted in the tryouts, or dumped to the third line, or benched for no good reason, though you’ve spent three hours getting to the game and paid thousands of dollars just like everyone else!

(Richard: Stay calm).

With this in mind, I have devised 7 Hacks for the Youth Sports Parent. You’ll live longer if you follow them, and your kid will thank me.

1. Don’t Go To Every Game

When you add tournaments and playoffs, a season of travel hockey can run upwards of 70 games, a length that rivals the NHL. My suggestion, which is often greeted with disbelief, is to attend no more than half of these games. It’s hard advice to follow because you’re often expected to drive, and because there’s nothing more exciting than watching your kid score. But it’s worth the effort to carpool, split duties with a spouse or drop your kid at the entrance of the rink and head to the nearest Dunkin' Donuts, which, according to Waze, is never more 0.7 miles away. This will reduce your stress – if you can’t see it, it can’t hurt you – and it’s good for your child. You don’t want him or her performing for you or seeking your eyes in the stands. Most kids will play a little differently when you’re not around. Let them learn to love the game itself – not your approval.

2. The 24-Hour Rule

In Ridgefield, Connecticut, parents are asked to refrain from talking to a coach about a game for 24 hours. If you let a day pass, you will be surprised by how many of your beefs have been forgotten, or have come to see unimportant or even silly. I suggest expanding this rule, first to include every aspect of the sport – do not talk to your kid about what did or did not happen on the ice for 24 hours as almost nothing you say will help – then to the rest of life. Imagine what this country would be like if everyone who wanted to Tweet or Facebook or otherwise comment waited 24 hours? The scars would heal, the flowers bloom, the social networks die. Which makes the bigger point: the ecosystem of youth hockey is no less than a microcosm of the national culture. If it works here, it’ll work out there, too.

3. Sit With The Parents From The Other Team

No matter the situation, we tend to organize ourselves into tribes. We sit in a cluster of team parents, where we pick up the mood and stress of the group, then, looking at the game from inside the group, see it with the same eyes. (As a famous man once said, “Believing is seeing.”) That’s why every referee seems biased and every big kid on the other team seems like a goon. Spending a game in the rival cluster is enlightening. From within the bias of that group, you will see your own team and child in a new way, as if for the first time. You might even see your kid as she or he really is, which is not the best or the worst, but probably somewhere in the middle.

Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent

In his newly published book, New York Times-bestselling author Rich Cohen takes us through a season of hard-fought competition in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Part memoir and part exploration of youth sports and the exploding popularity of American hockey, Pee Wees follows the ups and downs of the Ridgefield Bears, the 12-year-old boys and girls on the team, and the parents watching, cheering, conniving, and cursing in the stands. It is a book about the love of the game, the love of parents for their children, and the triumphs and struggles of both.

» The book is available on Amazon.com

4. Have Sympathy

This advice is intended as much for coaches as parents. If you’ve ever seen a group of adults watching a Pee Wee hockey game in which you have nothing at stake, you might feel moved to judge. Look at that idiot, banging the glass? Did you hear that woman scream at the ref? In dealing with such people, be tolerant as you might behave in the same way as soon as the next game starts. In the brain, there is an organ unknown to neurologists called the “Youth Hockey Cortex.” You won’t even know its exists until the game gets hot and you find yourself banging on the glass. It’s like being drunk. And that’s how you should approach crazed hockey parents – as you would approach someone who has got into the Jägermeister: a normally nice person blitzed on the narcotic of youth sports, which is merely parenthood amplified in intensity.

5. Remember What You Realized When You Were Scared

Every kid who plays hockey gets hurt at some point. Most of these injuries are minor, but a kid who is knocked down will often stay down, as they’ve been told to do. The other players take a knee as the coach shuffles across the ice in street shoes. There is solemnity on such occasions, fear. When it’s your kid laid out at center ice, you will have an epiphany: you will suddenly know that none of this really matters, the game, the ice time, the tryouts. All you want is your kid to be healthy and safe and to the hell with the rest of it. If your kid is OK and skates back to the bench and is back out for the next shift, you’ll forget what you learned. My advice: try to remember what you knew when the world was scary.

6. Eat Dinner (Breakfast Or Lunch) In The Local Town

The word “travel” in travel hockey is a bit of a misnomer. The truth is, though you log hundreds of miles, you always seem to end up in the same place: the same dank rinks, the same jammed parking lots, the same steamy lobbies, rickety bleachers, pungent locker-rooms and pro shops — the white noise of the skate sharpener, the orange glow of the sparks. A meal in the local town before the ride home will restore the perspective of player and parent, filling in the map while reminding you that this is a real place, that the world is bigger than the game, and that no one out there knows or cares if you won or lost.

7. Don’t Drink The Rink Coffee

Rich Cohen is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Tough Jews; Monsters; Sweet and Low; When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead (with Jerry Weintraub); The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones; and The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse.