Being a Hockey Parent

[Eleven]

Originally Posted by Ahbroody

Scott that really sucks. What age level was the Pittsburgh team? We had to pull M off a team as a Mite because of a psycho coach but im sure its nothing like what you went through.

Tier 1 U16. He had friends in Pittsburgh (4 hours away for us) and he wanted to play Spring Hockey there. Mario Lemiuex's brother Alain owns the Selects and coached the U16 National team last year and a guy named Gallis coached the American team. Alain coached the Spring team and was impressed with Cam. So, Spring went well and we looked into fall teams and made the decision to try out over there (I also do some business in that area so I made arrangements to combine work with practices).

During tryouts Gallis left and went to another organization, and Lemiuex decided to coach U12 since most of his National team were 97's and moving up to U18. It wasn't a huge deal because Cam still knew some of the kids that made the Selects team so we stuck with it. But it was obvious early on that other than Cam and 1 other kid, none of the boys had played Tier 1 before.

So the team wasn't great and even that wasn't a huge deal, Cam got tons of ice time and exposure in a different part of the country from where we were used to. He even got a call from a college coach that happened to see him play in Rochester NY one weekend.

Right away the team had issues with injuries, and I mean lots of them. I lost count of all the 'consussions' and players out for weeks at a time. It never got better. So in the end I left it up to him and he decided he wanted to play closer to home. We had already talked about next year and he was going to try out for the Cincy U18 team anyway, so I got kinda lucky and they had a spot open and already knew Cam from being in that organization for 5 years so they added him onto the roster to finish out this season.