One day more

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competing, cycling, diet, exercise, family, fitness, hockey, Minor hockey, training, working out

Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store!
One more dawn
One more day
One day more!

— One Day More, Les Miserables, Boubill and Natel

It’s March and that means playoff hockey in Oakville.

Our team – the peewee red Packers – faceoff tonight in a semi final with the season on the line. There are no best-of-five or two-game-total-goal series in house league. It’s one and done. Win, and you get to be sweaty on the blueline after the championship game, win or lose. Lose and your season ends.

It’s not life or death and Donald Trump won’t show up and make fun of us if we don’t get the outcome we want. But it’s still a big deal.

Our opponents are a solid squad. They have beaten us, we have beaten them (the last time just two weeks ago in the last game of the regular season with 2^nd place on the line.) But after nearly two decades of this I know that in a one-game playoff, expect the unexpected and stuff will happen.

Win or lose, we are already proud of our guys.

Rep tryouts: How do you make a rep hockey team?

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how to make a rep hockey team, junior hockey, Minor hockey, MOHA, rep tryouts, tryouts

Rep hockey tryouts started last night.

So I am going to repeat a lightly edited version of what is easily the most popular post I have ever written: the FAQ on rep hockey try outs. This is version three of this over the years, and it really is just a cut-and-paste job but it is a worthy one. There is also a brief 2014 addendum at the very bottom worth reading, I think.

Literally hundreds and hundreds of people find this particular post every month so welcome, and here’s a little about us. Happy suburban Toronto family, two boys. One was a house leaguer (1996) the other (a 1993) relentlessly chased the dream to always try to get to a higher level.

Starting in rep at major peewee, Pad played AE, A, AA (in Oakville) and AAA (in the GTHL), then 200 games of junior A in the OJHL and the BCHL and a very brief stop in the CCHL. Next fall he will be playing university hockey.

What follows is some of what I/we have learned along the way. (Ironically, Pad, who never made a AAA team in Oakville, is now running some on-ice AAA tryouts for the local association. Smart move on their part.)

–          – –

How do you make a rep hockey team?

Starting over

Tags

hockey, kids hockey, Minor hockey, new season

They don’t have jerseys or a team name but we have 16 kids and 16 families and a lot of optimism about the road in front of us. That, and 200 feet of freshly flooded ice will take you a long way in September.

House league hockey is back.

On Sunday night our team split an hour of ice time with the team we will practice with all winter (the same coaches we practiced with all last winter, too — no coincidence there) and put the boys through some light skating and then scrimmaged for 40 minutes or so, followed by a shootout where all the kids did breakaway drills on the goalies.

I have no great insights or witty tales from the hour or so we were on the ice. It appeared that even though we started at 630p we may have been the final act at Joshua Creek on Sunday night — the lights weren’t even on over at the Red rink. But that being the case the rink attendant let the 720p deadline slide a bit and our guys got a little bonus ice.

It was nice to see all the kids smiling and having fun (there was one serious grimace when one of our defencemen scored on our own net, but I told him that was a good play to get out of his system at a pre-season scrimmage. The grimace didn’t go away.)