Like many of the readers of EliteFTS, my son is now old enough that we're getting involved in organized sports. My son is six years old, and after trying many, his chosen sports are ice hockey, baseball, karate, swimming in the summer. As a parent and as a strength and conditioning coach, I look for a few things when signing my son up for a team or organization.

Number one for me is that he will have fun. I will never drag him to his practices or games. If I have to do that, I’m sure it isn’t fun for him and you can be sure it isn't fun for me. I’ve seen parents beg their children to give an effort in practice to the point where they’re offering money as a motivator. The fact is kids don’t play in the streets and fields anymore. If you want your child to be active, you sign them up for different activities. If you have to beg and plead for the child to go kicking and screaming to practice, perhaps the sport you chose for him isn’t exactly what he wants to be doing. Choosing a sport isn’t about what you the parent enjoy. It should be all about the child’s enjoyment. Period.

Hockey, like any other team sport, has tournaments. We participated in three tournaments this year. In each tournament, we encountered teams that loaded their rosters with players who weren’t on their teams. In some cases, the “ringers” were older than the kids they were playing against. There are two sides to this coin. The parent of the “ringer” ostensibly views it as extra ice time for his child. The said “ringer” goes on to be the star of the tournament, scoring goals by the boatload because he is skating against kids two to three years his junior. In most youth sports, two to three years of age difference is a huge gap in communication, motor skills, and maturity until they reach the ages of 14 years old and up.

As a parent rooted in competitive sports (I still compete in powerlifting and played junior C ice hockey), I would view this opportunity for extra ice time as a waste for my son. In most cases, the extra time comes to three to four hours. He would be skating around kids as if they were traffic cones. His time would be better spent at a skills development clinic. Gladwell states in his book The Outliers that the magic number of hours of practice to be considered elite at any sport or field of endeavor is 10,000 hours. If my son skates five days a week from now until he’s old enough for the NHL draft, he’ll have roughly 6,000 hours of ice time.  Worse than just putting time in, what am I teaching him by simply allowing him to participate for a team he doesn’t even play for?

In almost all cases, parents are all consumed with the “glory” of winning. We played a team in a tournament that we had bombed in the season. They brought in an older kid and you can’t imagine what was seen and heard from parents in the stands. The parents were drunk, and the atmosphere was so crazy I had to send my wife home with our younger child. All this over a tournament for six to eight year olds. The parents of a team that plays by the rules feels cheated because their kids put in the practice time together and they essentially have kids that are on the team roster from the season's beginning to the end. That really should be the bottom line.

So why is this allowed? Hockey isn't any different than any other sport. Cheating in the name of winning is an age old epidemic. It’s for a profit and that’s the bottom line. Like powerlifting meet directors who allow five to nine year olds on lifting platforms, rink managers and organization managers look the other way because tournaments make money. As a parent who has experienced this first hand, I may not allow my son to participate in certain tournaments because I know the outcome beforehand. This doesn’t hurt my son. He’ll have fun wherever he’s playing, and I simply want him to have the opportunity to compete. I’ve yet to see a youth tournament where the winners receive monetary awards or the MVP wins a car.

So what’s the answer to what’s best for the child? For me, it's that he will be doing something he will get the most enjoyment out of and get the best instruction from as well. My son definitely got that playing for the team he was on. I’d have him playing anywhere his coaches are coaching. They taught the kids how the game is played, the skills needed to play the sport, and to have class by not running their mouths when they were winning games. Our head coach didn’t load his roster for tournaments, and I admired his patience and effort in getting the boys to play at a higher level without the influence of outside help. That is the epitome of class, and Matt Wnek of the Blazers Ice Hockey organization has it. More adults should learn and practice it. Their kids just might enjoy whatever sport they’re playing because the odds of getting scholarships or even going professional are so slim.

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