“If the coach wants to win more than his or her team does, that’s a problem and the team is doomed to fail,” says the longtime coach of my 15-year-old son’s hockey team. Rich Cohen might understand. In Cohen’s thoughtful, lively new memoir, “Pee Wees: Confessions of a Hockey Parent,” the coach-player relationship is almost as important as the parent-child dynamic.
Welcome to the world of youth hockey in Connecticut — and meet Cohen’s 11-year-old son, Micah. What’s amazing is how universal the experiences are for hockey families: the grueling three-day tryouts (after all, “the team a kid makes will determine his standing in the youth hockey hierarchy”); the early-morning long-haul drives to arenas throughout the Northeast for games; the armchair-coach parents, keeping track down to the second the amount of time one’s kid plays; and verbal tensions between parents of opposing teams. “The mildest New Jersey heckler outdoes Connecticut’s most vociferous,” Cohen reports. “The nastiest are found on Long Island.”
At the book’s center is the development of Micah as a hockey player, and Cohen’s identity as a type of parent he describes as “the crazies, the control freaks, the hyperinvolved.”
Tryouts for the Connecticut team begin in April, with anxious parents pressing their faces against the glass or huddling like scouts in the stands. At the end of each evening, the parents gather in front of a list to see whether their kid made a team on the first round or will need to return the following night. For the Bears, 200 kids try out, of whom only 70 will be placed on teams, ranking from AA down to B. Micah slips into the A team.
