Nieuwy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[billhoward]

[Q]RichS Wrote:

 Bill,

Your comments about middle school advice intrigues me.  I'm In NJ also and in my town, where I coach HS hockey, the advice is most assuredly NOT that a kid concentrate on only one sport.  Would love to discuss that with you.

In fact, as a hockey coach, I love it when hockey players play lacrosse in the spring...along with spring league hockey, of course.   [/q]

We're in Westfield (Parkway Exit 137, as you know one says by way of reference in NJ), one of those classic upscale Republican WASPish commuting towns (and then we moved in). A couple of our boys' friends are doing the all-lax all-the-time bit including the summer camps; others are doing soccer the same way. Westfield feeds a couple kids to Division I and a bunch more to Division II and III lacrosse colleges, and to soccer schools, and maybe already they’re thinking they could start for the Blue Devils or Bucknell or Cornell if only they’re a little bit better. There was a powerful piece in Sports Illustrated last fall (summer?) about the death of the three-sport athlete in all but the smallest high school towns because of the desire to specialize early on.

I’m hoping our kids specialize in being kids. Our older boy just wants to be a goalie in whatever sport is in season plus roller hockey year-round and the younger one wants to play whatever his friends play. So far they haven't felt the need to go a) traveling or b) single sport. The big question is whether to jump from indoor roller hockey (cheap, fun, readily available rink time, a lot more like ice hockey than I ever imagined possible, and did I mention cheap) to ice hockey (ka-ching). I must say I also like roller hockey / hockey because it cuts across all demographics better than lacrosse. Outside the rink, there are rusty pickup trucks and X5's parked side by side; in comparison our four-boy neighborhood lax car pool is Expedition out, Excursion back Mondays; Escalade out, our Odyssey back Thursdays. Their little butts touch nothing but supple leather except when we drive.)

You may have noticed some of my comments in other threads about my preference for artistry not violence in sports. In part it's because our two kids will probably be 5'9" not 6'3" and I really do like seeing skilled players rather than pugilists. The seventh grade lax team had two kids (one from each side) tossed out for fighting this weekend. Sheesh.

The coaches we know do a great job teaching life skills. They say: “You’re responsible for your uniform being ready, having your mouthguard; you have to have your homework done before practice, you need to know when the game is. Don’t tell me your mom forgot what time the game is; *you* forgot.” In lacrosse, everybody plays for three quarters; if the game is close, then the best kids move to midfield and attack in the fourth quarter.

The other thing that's tough around here is finding adult leagues for hockey over 40. So I go to the exercise classes at the Y where it's two old guys like me and twenty dazzling women in spandex. Most of the guys still playing hockey as older adults are hard chargers, based on the couple I know around here. I yearn for my just-past-college days in WMass where you could always find a pickup game of barely capable skaters and nobody cared about the score. And I yearn even more for those midnight pickup games at Lynah ...