“As a hockey coach, that’s funny right there!!!!”
I was a hockey coach. I used to have parents standing along the boards with stop watches. After games they would pull me aside and tell me how much ice time their kid got that game. At one point I had 6 parents screaming at me. I went into my bag, pulled the contract they signed and told them to find the part where it says all players get equal ice time.
Before the next practice I called a parent meeting. At the meeting I gave every parent a choice. Pull your kid from the program with no refund, go to program management to get me fired whereby your kid will never see the ice again during a game, or let me do my job and teach your kids how to be better players.
I couldn’t believe it but they tried to get me fired. That’s when I learned the biggest lesson about coaching youth ice hockey. The job of an ice hockey coach is to prevent the one parent who forced the program to take their kid despite his lack of skill from convincing every other parent that you shouldn’t be coaching the team.
I had a kid in Squirts who couldn’t stop. Literally he stopped by going full on into the boards and when he came to the bench for a change, he’d take his stick and chuck it like a spear and throw himself head first over the boards and use the bench to pull himself over. When I told the parents that I had to be careful when I played him, they got all heated. I said they can either have a kid who sees less ice time than the other kids OR they can have a paralyzed kid. They put him in a Laura Stamm class immediately. LOL...