"Preposterous!"

Practice, 8:30 at night. I have finally taken the reins from coach Steve for this one drill. I extol the virtues, necessity and urgency for a swift and crisp break out. I take the marker board shaped like a rink and tip it to resemble the ice being "tilted." I use all my teacher training and energy and enthusiasm to keep their attention as I describe the drill in detail.

I'm intentionally keeping the instruction as simple as possible because Tom has mentioned several times that it's tough to figure out what the coaches want with all their squiggles on the board. This would be different. "the wing's only job here is to dash down the boards to the hashmarks, plant their butt on the boards, receive a pass and then give up the puck to the center."

Before starting off, I needed a volunteer to demonstrate. "Tom, would you show us what a wing is supposed to do here?" Tom eagerly agreed, picked up a puck, skated down to the net and shot on goal. If I didn't have so much energy pumping through me I might have fainted. All I could do was sputter loudly. "that's, that's, that's PREPOSTEROUS!" (I suspect a lot of saliva was lost in spewing out the word).

meanwhile, some politcal/economic intrigue. Parents are upset with lower end skill players keeping our club from being competitive. A defenseman in particular looks like a lower-end rec player, a kid who might hurt himself on the ice led to a major collapse in our last game. Parents are serious about leaving Devils program because they have prostituted themselves by taking every paying customer. Why even have a tryout?

Should we keep playing this kid? We don't have that many D, and only three can really skate well enough. Hmmm....to be continued.