Chapter 1, Alaska
In the fall of 2010, the Benefield family moved to Alaska and it changed our lives forever. We all fell in love with Alaska and decided that it was a home that could satisfy our sense of an adventure that is native to any military family. As a family, we embraced the Alaska lifestyle and started participating in things that heretofore were foreign to us. It is an undeniable truth that our kids adjusted to the Alaska activities much faster and much better than their parents, but what we lacked in ability, Cammie and I made up for with enthusiasm.Learning to ice skate
At the top of the list of Alaska things to do was ice skating. Cammie signed the kids up for lessons and all three became very competent skaters. Cammie became a nervous skater and I once walked around in ice skates (without falling).Our three kids are all pretty athletic, but Jay Allen is our natural agility athlete and he took to skating as quickly as he took to Taekwondo as a four year old. He did a fair amount of skating in our first few months in Alaska, but he never aspired to be a speed skater or the next Scott Hamilton. Something else was brewing.
First Hockey Picture |
Learning about hockey
Jay Allen's best buddy in Alaska (pictured below with the blonde hair) was a huge hockey fan and a little hockey player. It was all they talked about and knee hockey and street hockey consumed most of their play time.Alaska Aces Game with Aiden and some team mates. |
Now that he was signed up, we just had to buy his equipment. I can't describe the comedy show that unfolded as I, a certified hockey idiot, tried to help my son find all the required gear. Many thanks to the staff at the Anchorage Play it Again Sports for getting us squared away - at least as much as I (Hockey Idiot) could facilitate. After a car payment to sign up, we got Jay Allen into all the right gear for just a house payment. A house payment should have gotten us the right color equipment, but because I was a big HI (Hockey Idiot), I did not get him all the right colors. This turned into confirmation that God looks out for those of us who are not that bright, because those bright red hockey pants that I bought Jay Allen turned out to be key for me to find him on the ice among all the other black hockey pants.
The Red Rocket |
Dressing Room Shocks
When I carried Jay Allen to the first practice, we both stopped cold at the entrance of the locker room. First, based on the smells coming from that room, I just wanted to visually confirm that all the Arctic Lynx and other wild animals that had obviously been living in that room were all gone. They were indeed gone, but their scent lingered.The second thing that stopped us both was that there were boys and girls in the same locker room and none of them seemed to be bothered by stripping down to their Batman drawers and Dora the Explorer panties to get their hockey gear on. Jay Allen didn't like it. I didn't like it. The coach saw the looks on our faces and correctly assumed that we were uncomfortable with the co-ed locker room and assured us that "we are all just family in here." Two things popped to my mind - first, this is day one and I don't even know your names, and second, my family doesn't strip down to their drawers and panties when we get together, even when we were little.
But, by the time the season got going, we had worked through this and were indeed all family. But still, Jay Allen showed up for the games in uniform and only had to put on his skates. And for the smell, we just carried that around with us in his bag so we could get used to it. At least the males in our family got used to it.
It jumped out to me that mainly the dads came into the locker room, probably because of the smell. If you want to know the difference in a hockey mom and a mom whose kids play hockey, ask her if she goes into the locker room - that is for hockey moms only.
Learning the Schedule
The hockey league in Alaska Jay Allen played in was small and fairly spread out. And, the demand for ice time created some strange practice times, and by strange I mean 5:00 am. So, in order to get the kids plenty of game opportunities, we could be practicing or playing anywhere in the Anchorage or Mat-Su Borough at any time from 5:00 am to 10:00 pm. That is 1,961.1 square miles in Anchorage and 24,682 square miles in Mat-Su Borough that was open for business. Our team managed to dodge the tournaments in Soldotna and Fairbanks, but we still covered a lot of (frozen) ground to play hockey that first year.Unfortunately, our schedule was not set in stone or frozen in ice. It was amazingly fluid due to all the factors I tried to explain above. That kept parents on our toes and I am happy to report that I only once carried Jay Allen to the wrong venue for a game. We did arrive early enough to recover from our mistake and get him to the right place before the game started (or at least before the first shift change).
Learning the Game
In order to be the over-enthusiastic parent, it is helpful to understand the game your child is playing. I did not know anything about hockey when Jay Allen started. Right out of the gate, he knew more than I did and I was not too proud to ask him questions, but when he was on the ice, I was sort winging it. I started out by sitting close to parents of other kids on the team and cheering when they cheered. This lasted a few weeks and then the game began to reveal itself to me. The first revelation was that ice hockey looked a lot like the college football option being played on a frozen basketball court. The pace of basketball and the collisions of football while the kids carried football bats (hockey sticks) to hit the puck (the game is played with a puck instead of a ball). Hockey also doesn't require the teams to have the same number of players. If you get a penalty, you have to leave the ice while the rest of your team plays. I love that. Can you imagine if basketball or football let one team have a manpower advantage! It would be awesome.As you can probably tell, I became a huge hockey fan watching my son play. It is an awesome game and I am still learning it, but I am a full fledged fan, especially when I get to see the game live. So, my transition from Hockey Idiot to Hockey Dad was complete.
Getting behind the Mustangs |
Tournament time
Jay Allen's first team was a great bunch of kids. They played some great defense and rolled into the state tournament winning games 1-0 and 2-1. They went on a pretty good run in the tournament, coming up just a little short. It was the most exciting kid sporting event I had ever seen or been a part of.Playoff Hockey! |
It was also during the tournament though when I discovered the obnoxious parent-fans. I cheer like crazy for my kid and I expect other parents to do the same, but as I was watching one of Jay Allen's tournament games, some parents crossed a line with me. Jay Allen and some other kids were in a huge collision (nobody's fault) and Jay Allen got thrown up in the air and landed on right on the top of his head. It looked like pictures you see of people being ejected from a car that is rolling over. I stood to my feet to see if Jay Allen would get up and while I was waiting, the idiot parents behind me were laughing like they were at the comedy club because of the collision that just happened. There were kids laying on the ice and these adults were laughing. Thankfully, none of the kids were hurt and they all got up in a couple of seconds, but I could not believe parents who laugh at such a thing. As soon as Jay Allen popped up, I turned and said something to to the parents that I can't fully recall, but two of the words were "shut up" and they did when they realized my kid was the one landed on his head.
That one event was a huge outlier and most of the parents on our team and other teams were really great in Alaska. Because the teams were from areas so far apart, most parents and kids didn't know each other, so the sportsmanship was authentic and not shaped by the fact that your kid might play against the boss's kid. I took that to heart and have tried to be an enthusiastic parent without losing the sense of what our kids are learning from playing sports and from watching how we act when they play sports. The nature of hockey makes that challenging.
Jay Allen warming up with the Mustangs |
End of Chapter 1
When the Benefields arrived in Alaska, we considered ourselves Alabamians even though our children have never lived there. As we were riding to a hockey game in our Subaru with our Alaska Husky puppy, we realized that we had gone native - we were an Alaskan family in spirit. We were very at home and happy in Alaska, so of course, the Army told us to move. We were ordered back to the Washington DC area, but this time, we had to be sure we lived close to a hockey league for Jay Allen.Chapter 2, Virginia Season One
Back to the Capital
Ironically, we moved across the street from where we lived the first time I was assigned to the National Capital Region. We did not know the first time we lived here that there was hockey nearby, but thankfully that was the case.Hockey is huge in Alaska, but what is sometimes lost on people is that the entire population of Alaska is less than 732, 000 people. It is even less in the winter. The population of Fairfax County, VA is documented at 1.119 million, but may be closer to twice that. So, the hockey league here has a population base that is probably double of the entire population of Alaska. The good news is that all of the games are at the same Ice Rink nearby, making our round trip to hockey always less than ten miles.
The Next Level
The net effect of all those facts is that the level of competition in Jay Allen's hockey league this year was more than a couple of notches higher than the league he played in last year. He was on another team with a great bunch of kids and coaches, The Green Machine. The coaches did an outstanding job of helping each kid develop and the team became the strongest team in the league. Jay Allen rose to the challenge and improved greatly over the course of the year, only his third year on skates.Present for Duty
The down side of all this for the new hockey dad (HD) is that I am not able to help Jay Allen improve one bit. At one point, I could not even reliably make it to his practices on time, even though they were at the same exact time every week. So, when I did have time to help with the games, I tried to find ways that I could help out and pull my weight as an HD without crossing over into the meddling parent territory.Alabama HD in the Penalty Box
I started out by volunteering for the penalty box. This was great duty because I had center ice seats near the team's bench - a great view of all the action. I could give Jay Allen a little fist pump encouragement as he was on the bench or going on the ice and I could cheer like crazy for his team. The other duties that parents could sign up for were clock operator and score keeper. I did each of these duties twice and it was a small disaster each time. I never meant to sign up for score keeper, but on one of those early Saturday mornings when there were no other parents able to do it, I did my best - which was horrible. Not to worry, though, the parent from the other team who was keeping the clock knew every rule better than the coaches and officials and made sure to point that out. Based on the hour I spent in close proximity, I have a feeling that the reason that parent knows the rule book so well is that he was reading it during the time most parents were taking a shower. This was one of the few times I remember thinking, "this must be what Jabba the Hutt smells like." {I want everybody to know this experience was another outlier and all our team parents practiced good personal hygiene no matter what time the game was. The only area where we took liberties with our appearance was the early morning hairstyle that cried out for hats and an abundance of the color green come playoff time}.How I felt in the scorekeeper box |
So based on my lack of qualifications for keeping score or running the clock and my olfactory sensitivity, I put myself back in the penalty box. Then, the league put me in the figurative penalty box by reminding everybody that penalty box parents are "game officials" and can't cheer for their kids during the game. I wasn't sure I could pull that off.
Gatekeeper
Since I could not be trusted to be quiet and impartial, I volunteered to help shuffle kids on and off the ice for the coaches. The first game was a moderate success, but I let the kids talk their way on and off the ice a couple times that the coach wasn't involved in. The second game, I came up with a kid-hockey friendly way to say "AT EASE" when the kids were trying to talk me into an authorized shift change. By game three, I had this gate keeping duty down cold and things were going well (as far as I knew). I thought I was just on the bench opening and closing the gate and giving a little encouragement here and there, but Cammie let me know that I was the loudest, most vocal adult anywhere in the building. I did encourage the kids constantly by repeating what I heard the coach saying. Maybe I repeated it to each kid with my brow furled and with a little more intensity than needed, but I really thought I was being laid back on the bench. What I was feeling on the inside was not what the wife is seeing.Playoffs
Just as I thought I had found a way to help out and maintain my enthusiasm, the hockey league put me back in the penalty box, literally. "NO PARENTS ON THE BENCH WHO ARE NOT LEAGUE CERTIFIED." People who know the Benefields are wondering if Cammie ratted me out, but she had nothing to do with it. In the Mite division (5-6 year olds), a parent who was volunteering on the bench got into a huge shouting match with the referees over a disputed call. Who knows when a referee's bad call might derail the career of a five or six year old future superstar, so that parents behavior is completely understandable (if you are a raving lunatic). I understood the league position on this and complied.Back to the penalty box for the Alabama HD. In the semi-final game, I had to rotate out with another dad so I could get some cheering in without drawing any attention. The Green Machine won that game and went to the Championship Game to play against the team they had beaten the night before in the round robin portion of the tournament.
James showing his support for his brother. |
For the Championship Game, I felt obliged to resume my place in the penalty box, though I knew I would violate that no cheering rule. It just wasn't fair to stick anybody else over there for the championship game, so my strategy was to not over cheer. This involved watching the dad from our team keeping score and in the spirit of, "you don't have to be faster than the bear to survive," I thought that as long as I did not cheer louder than him, that we would both be alright. It was the last game, so I wasn't too worried about blow back for the team at this point.
My strategy served me well because the dad keeping score made no attempt to restrain his enthusiasm. I won't name the dad because I know that his kids are already signed up for other seasons in this same hockey league, but I will say the fact that he speaks Russian as well as English gives him a decided advantage. Nobody is sure exactly how loudly those words are supposed to be spoken in Russian so nobody challenges him. Again, I don't want to identify him, but it also helped me out that he had two sons to cheer for and I only had one. The two of us did a lot of cheering and still managed to do our duties with integrity if not complete impartiality.
Not to be
The Green Machine had an incredible year and was a great bunch of kids. I still believe they were the best overall team in the league, but they came up short against another very good team (Bama fans, we know that happens, don't we). They lost 2-1 and played the last minute in a power play with their goalie pulled (6 on 4 in the other team's zone). They played hard and I thought until the last tic of the clock that they would pull it out. It was a great year and Jay Allen improved tremendously.The Mighty Green Machine |
End of Chapter 2
I have fully embraced my role as a hockey dad and I am proud of the way Jay Allen plays the game. He has had the chance to play with some great kids and coaches and he is still improving rapidly. I also love the fact that he has gotten to play with kids from different parts of the world and has been in locker rooms where French and Russian are spoken frequently. There are many different languages, dialects, and accents in hockey, but so far, only one dad with a hillbilly accent, but he may be the biggest hockey fan of them all.Hockey Night in Pittsburgh! |
Game jersey and game face on! |
I thought it was time I captured some of these experiences for other hockey dads and future hockey dads out there. I have learned a lot about the game and how to help out without being a hockey expert. I also have learned some random things - like not to play music from Pandora for the kids before the game because you never know what ads might play if you abruptly change your Pandora channel from Country to Hip Hop. Better to play from your own collection that isn't very cool than to introduce ten year olds to products and stores that cater exclusively to adults. I dodged that bullet before the kids could understand the commercial that was playing, but even this is making me smarter on every aspect of youth hockey.