Youth Sports Stories

TIL Angus moved to Connecticut and has a child on Wolf's soccer team.

As mentioned in the shoutbox last night, there's a bit of drama developing around Pup 1's hockey team.  I've never met the dude that runs the organization; other than a Zoom meeting with all parents before the season started, I've never even seen him and assume no one else besides the coaches knows him either.  But I do know he gives absolutely zero fucks about the pandemic; if there was a town in Utah called Florida, he would be mayor for life.  We've played at 5-6 rinks besides our own this season, and every one of them has strict Covid policies - every player signs a waiver, locker rooms are closed so you have to dress at your car, only one (or sometimes zero) spectators per player.  Meanwhile, our rink has all the locker rooms open plus even more kids spilling out and just getting dressed in the lobby; the snack bar is open (and run by a VERY vocal gentleman who seems to think the virus is a Democractic hoax); you can bring as many people to the games as you want; just absolute chaos as long as you're wearink a mask.  I think the right decision is likely somewhere in the middle, but the people in charge here have certainly made it clear that they're not that interested in social distancing and the like.

I've felt totall comfortable at the games/practices, in terms of the size of the crowds and such, so I'm not looking to have them lock shit down and go to one parent per kid.  But what drives me absolutely fucking nuts is that our team policy for home games is that the kids have to arrive a full hour before game time, wearing shirts and ties.  They do this for nobody but themselves, as it's not like the other team is hanging around to see us all walk in dressed up and coordinated.  They arrive one at a time in their nice clothes, go into the locker room and immediately change into warmup gear.  Then they go outside and run around for 20 minutes before coming back to the locker room to start putting their pads on.  The coaches don't dress up, and one of them (and his kid) has been late to like 4 games in a row and missed the warmups anyway.  A couple weeks ago the dude in charge sent an email to everyone about how there were some new state guidelines coming, and we have to be strict about coaches wearing masks on the bench (which wasn't enforced previously) and just used a bunch of vague bullshit language like "no large gatherings".  I've never been this guy, but I called him on it, and specifically said the shirt and tie an hour before the game thing is pointless nonsense that does nothing but create an additional opportunity for the kids to gather in a small place more times than necessary.  He replied:


May as well have just said, "Yeah, I don't give a shit."

So this week CT does announce their new guidelines as we rolled back to whatever they're calling this phase.  This includes masks being worn on the ice during youth hockey games.  So he emails everyone last night to notify us of this, including the line:


I don't particularly care what your politics are, but I'm pretty comfortable saying that shoehorning them into a discussion about 9 year olds playing hockey is way the fuck out of line.  I'm not offended by your dumb joke, and I have (and will continue to) defended people's right to joke about any topic no matter what the 79s say about it.  But there's a fucking time and place, dude.  An email about children's hockey to a bunch of people you've never met ain't it, IMO.

Meanwhile, my kid is in quarantine but got a negative test result.  So I asked what their policy is on that, and he said he's gotta finish his quarantine.  Which is probably the right decision, but you clearly don't care about any of this shit, so why can't we go to practice on Wednesday?  We also got an email that supposedly one of the coaches is in quarantine.  If I find out he was at the game yesterday I might lose my shit on this fucking guy.

Thank you for reading.  This has been a delight.

Can confirm.

We also had a kid get kicked off the team a few weeks ago.  He kept throwing tantrums at practice, pushing kids to cut in line during drills, shit like that.  The coach tried to have a conversation with the kid's mom; she got super defensive and cunty about the whole thing, so they suspended him for a week if neither he nor his mom was willing to talk about it.  First practice back from suspension, he allegedly kicked a teammate.  We got an email an hour later saying he's no longer on the team.  Good times.

Didn't even wrap up.

Near foot, head across, lower your load, wrap up, grab cloth, drive through.

we'll give him credit for the tackle, but will review technique in Monday's session.

I heard the kid is also a really good wrestler. So instead of being punished and kicked out of high school sports, he'll likely get a teeny slap on the wrist because god forbid we hold really good football players accountable for their actions like the rest of us.

As alluded to in the shoutbox...

So the parents of the goalie on Pup 1's team have long established themselves as being annoying.  They're Italians from Philly, so you get the idea.  I can't stand the dad; I get along OK with the mom but my wife has complained about her being overbearing and obnoxious a few times.  The kid is an OK goalie, basically middle of the pack out of all the teams we've played against.  But his dad obviously thinks he's a star in the making, and nothing is ever his fault.  He bitches about the coaches to anyone who will listen, claims that his kid always gets along with coaches but not this year, and is always quick to say that the defense let him down on a bad goal (he's right half the time, but they're 9; chill out, Chris).

Apparently in Sunday's game (I wasn't there), there was an incident where one of our defenseman (Parker) crashed into the goalie (Rocco), and Rocco stayed down for a while as if he was hurt.  This had also happened in Saturday's game FWIW; I was sitting next to Rocco's dad, who immediately said he was faking it because he was mad about giving up a goal.  My point is that there seems to be a pattern here.  So on Sunday, he was down for a minute and the coach left the bench to go check on him.  The ref waved him off and said something like, "He's OK. He just needs a minute."  As far as I know, they went on with the rest of the game and he was fine.

Sunday night, Rocco's mom takes to what she thinks is a private Facebook group for mothers of goalies, posts a fucking video of the incident, and implies that it was intentional and his own teammate was trying to take him out.  I guess there was some big sob story of, "This is unacceptable.  The coaches need to get control of these kids.  Blah blah fucking blah."  Again, this is a 9 year old defenseman (who happens to be one of the worst skaters on the team) getting crossed up on a play and crashing into his own goalie.  I've watched a decent amount of hockey in my life, and I'm not sure I've ever seen a game at any level where there wasn't at least one play with a defenseman getting tangled up with the goalie.

The coaches got wind of her cunty Facebook post, contacted her and said "If you have an issue with the team, please take it up with us."  Not sure what happened in that exchange, but her next move was to email Parker's mom.  My understanding through the parental gossip channel is that this was not the kindest of emails.  In the meantime, word has also gotten around to the mom of a kid (Ashton) who got kicked off the team early this season for repeatedly losing his temper and fighting teammates.  Ashton and Parker are in the same class, and happened to run into each other while sledding on Monday.  Evidently Ashton's twat of a mom (who's the only person in this story that's even halfway decent looking, FWIW) told him about the incident, so he confronted Parker about it when he saw him at the sledding hill.  Parker's mom says that he spent the whole time sulking instead of sledding, and later told her that it's because Ashton told him he's a bad teammate.  Again, Ashton is the kid who was kicked off the team for starting multiple fights.

Long story short, hockey parents are fucking cunts (breaking news, I know).  My wife continues to be surprised by this.  Every time I tell her that youth sports are known for parents being assholes, travel sports are a step up from that, and travel hockey is the top rung of the ladder.  She somehow manages to get argumentative about this, firing back with, "How do you know that? You don't know what you're talking about."  As if I'm the crazy one here.  Anyway... These people suck.

As the cherry on top... Rocco's mom (who started this whole shit storm with her Facebook post behind everyone's back) puts a message in the team chat this morning saying that they're going out to a diner after Saturday morning's game, to a place that has a private back room with socially distanced tables.  Wanting to know if anyone wants to join them.  Why the fuck would anyone want to hang out with you now, bitch?

We have fun.