Best Words of the Weekend
It was a very busy celebratory weekend here in young Devils land. Our Squirt B Select team went to Lake Placid and came home with bronze medals, despite a tough tournament bracket and an Adirondack ice storm. Since we share a coach with that team, I called to check in on their tournament, and got the full report Saturday afternoon — walking down Main Street in Lake Placid, our coach’s daughter (an up and coming player herself) said, “Dad, this is the best weekend ever.” That was before the medal game, before hearing her name ring out in the Olympic complex, and before cradling a chunk of metal on the six-hour ride home. Jim Craig says that if you listen carefully on a cold night, you can still hear “USA! USA!” on Main Street, but if you listen more carefully, you hear the true essence of youth sports on any given day.<p>We went to the Bar Mitzvah of a good friend’s son, a great friend to our son and a baseball player I’ve coached in previous seasons. There’s something wonderful about seeing young athletes mature into young men, and apply their passion for sports to more mature endeavors. In our friend’s case, he raised over $15,000 for the Valerie Fund by holding a raffle for autographed sports memorabilia donated by local teams. The good deed was returned, as an eventual surprise on the bar mitzvah boy himself, when Johnny Damon made a cameo appearance in his video montage to wish him good luck and congratulations. There you have it: good sportsmanship, so easy even a caveman could do it. Those fifteen seconds of fame-brought-home went to the top of my “best words” list, with a bullet, ahead of the stroll down 1980 memory lane in Lake Placid, but only for twenty-four hours.</p><p>Sunday night found our Pee Wee B team in Toms River for a non-league game, minus an entire line and both coaches. Our part-time parent coach and I filled in on the bench. It was a very hard-fought game, with more than the usual volume of hitting, passing, and shooting. We broke a 1-1 tie with my son’s first goal of the season, and Toms River tied it again on a simply monstrous slapshot from one of the biggest defenseman I’ve ever seen in a Pee Wee game. That’s how it ended, and my co-substitute coach noted “Our head coach would have won this game.” The simplest recognition of how much he can get out of our own players, and completely true. Not an admission of regret, but a statement of respect. As I waddled off the ice, I was greeted with “Good game, coach” by the parents. But not just from our team; from our opponents’ parents as well. </p><p>Apologies to the news channel that snuck in Johnny Damon, and those who channel Herb Brooks through all manners of Miracles on Ice, but those were the best three words of the weekend.<p><!–adsense–></p>