Free write 3-coaching

When I was a sophomore up through my senior year I got the great honor to help coach one of my hometown youth hockey teams. It was a bantam A team. Bantams are mostly 7th and 8th graders. Sometimes you will have 9th grader if they meet the age requirement and don’t want to play high school hockey. I coached the team with my old bantam coach, and my older cousin. It was a great opportune for me to learn a better understanding of the game. It also gave me a chance to give back to youth program that helped me develop as a player and as a person. The big thing it taught me was responsibly. I learned that I had an obligation to these kids, their parents, and the other coaches. They were all counting on me to be there for games and practice, at the same time you have give a hundred and ten percent for every one, just like the players. I also had to give up my weekends and two nights a week for the seasons. I had to learn how to manage my time better than I did before I started coaching. On the week days I balanced school, my hockey practice, homework, and coaching. On the weekends I balanced homework, coaching, having a social life, and an occasional game of my own to play in.

My junior year was the best and most fun I had coaching. We had a great group of players that wanted to learn and improve their game. We played all the bigger programs around the state. When we played those bigger programs we would beat them or at the very least compete with them. When I say we played bigger programs it is like a division 3 team playing a division 1 or 2 team. We were the division 3 team. That same year we made it to state for bantam 3A. We went into that weekend feeling good. All the teams that were there we had already beaten. So we thought we would be a shoe in to play in the championship game. As anyone can tell you, when it comes to playoffs anything can happen, and that is exactly what happened. Our first game we played a team we had beaten three times. We ended up losing that game by one. After that game we had a chat with the kids and told them not to get down. “We still have one more game today, so let’s go out and play the game we know we can play.” So they went out later that day and won. We went on to play the next day for 5th place. We won and took home a 5th place finish. Not what we wanted, but it is what we got along with a great learning experience.