I Hate Hockey Parents!

This is my first hockey based post.  I started this blog during the transition between the end of hockey season and the beginning of the fishing season.  I spend so much time on the ice in the winter that I try to avoid (usually unsuccessfully) skating during the summer.  That leaves me with not a whole lot of hockey to talk about during the summer months.

I have played the game for 35+ years, officiated for 20 and coached for 10+ seasons.  The reason I gave up coaching is simple: hockey parents.  Growing up, I was witness to some pretty bizarre incidents.  I was part of a team that was evicted from a hotel because of the party the parents threw.  We had a parent supply us with beer at way too early of an age.  One of the funniest things I witnessed was two hockey mom’s scrapping in a fight that consisted primarily of them pulling hair and throwing jelly donuts at each other.  I can proudly state that neither of my parents were involved in any of these.

Earlier this month, I worked my first youth hockey tournament in about 10 years.  It took one game for me to realize that I do not miss it even a little.

I opened with a Pee-Wee game.  Five minutes and two calls into the game, I heard the coach announce to his team that they needed to overcome my obvious personal vendetta against his team.  Keep in mind that it has been 10 years since I have worked a youth hockey game so I had never seen a single player on either team.  I also had never worked a game involving this coach at any other level.  At no point had I ever met the man walking around a rink.  In spite of those facts, I had somehow developed a personal vendetta against a team/coach that I had met for the first time a little over 15 minutes prior.

A quick visit to the bench settled him down for the time being.  Halfway through the game, a player tries to throw a body check unsuccessfully, resulting in the player delivering the check being injured.  The first thing we are taught when a player is laying on the ice is to evaluate how severe the injury is.  We always err on the side of caution, especially with kids this young on the ice.  The second thing we look for is which team has possession of the puck.  If the injured team has the puck, play gets stopped.

My assessment in this case was that the kid had gotten the wind knocked out of him and the opposing team had the puck.  I allowed play to continue and 5 seconds later, a goal was scored.  Needless to say this threw the “personal vendetta” coach into a rage.

Sometimes as an official, it’s best to allow a coach to blow off a little steam rather than going straight to a penalty.  There are some rules to this such as his choice of language and how big of a scene he is creating.  This usually works best when you go over to the bench and have him step down from the bench so you are speaking face to face.  Sometimes a gentle reminder that he needs to settle and talk is needed as well.

This coach immediately went above and beyond that.  The assistant coach was doing a much better job of keeping his head about him so I decided to explain this particular call to him.  The head coach was so fired up and loud that I had to chase him away a couple of times so I could actually speak with the assistant.  After the 3rd time I gave up on being the nice guy and assessed a penalty. I had already figured that would not be the end of it.

Before we could drop the puck for the next face-off, the coach exploded again.  I was at the end of my rope, I assessed the game misconduct and ended his game.  By that point, his team had taken on the coaches demeanor.  They continued to complain and take penalties.  They eventually lost to a team they probably could have beaten and passed the 15 penalty mark in the process, which disqualified the assistant coach from the following game in addition to the head coach we ejected earlier.

It turned out that the injured player was the son of the head coach.  My assessment on the player’s injury happened to be correct.  The player served the coach’s penalty then resumed playing.  He didn’t miss another shift the rest of the game.

The rest of the tournament did not disappoint.  I had one other run in with a Slovakian team where I learned some new words in Slovakian but that incident paled in comparison to this one.  I was not directly involved with any of the other incidents that took place, here are a few of the highlights:

• A parent was caught shining a laser pointer in the eyes of a 12 year old goaltender.
• A parent/coach walked in demanding that the female official scheduled for his game be removed because she wasn’t qualified.  He was instructed to Google her last name and after doing so, decided to drop the issue.  (She worked the 2010 Olympic games.)
• Parents demanding that a player be permitted to play after he was suspended from the tournament for kicking another player in the head.

In general, the tournament wasn’t that bad.  In general, it is a minuscule number of parents who behave this way.  There was also some pretty solid hockey played over the two weeks as well.  I was selected to work one of the finals specifically because it was a rematch between two teams that had a pretty heated game in the first go round.  It turned out to be one of the better games of the tournament and it went off with zero problems.

There is a great quote from a speech given by Don Lucia, the head coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers.  “A lot of people think I have the best job in hockey.  And I tell them, I think have the second best in hockey.  The best job is being the head coach at an orphanage; no parents to deal with.”  If you are involved with youth hockey in any way and you happen to be reading this, please invest the 9 minutes and 4 seconds it will take to watch this video.

If I were the King of Hockey, I would make this video a requirement for any parent who walks into a pro-shop to buy their kid hockey skates.

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