Hockey Weekend

Harrison's team was in a hockey tournament this weekend. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that slightly less than half of his team was in the tournament! They played Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, and again on Sunday. However, since several of the young men decided they didn't want to miss going out to dinner on homecoming evening (Saturday), they didn't show up all day Saturday. Keep in mind, they would have still had time to go home, change, and be at the dance. So, we wound up with barely enough kids to play. The bench should have 18 to 19 kids on it, enough to fill 3.5 lines. Hockey is an incredibly demanding sport and even pros can rarely skate more than a 2 minute shift. So, with only 10 kids on the bench, we were outnumbered by the other teams at least 2:1 - meaning while they had "fresh legs," we had wiped out, tired kids that would skate 2 to 2.5 minute shifts and then be right back out on the ice. The photo above is Harrison (going too fast for my camera!) - he's the blurry one getting speed up to go after the puck - red jersey, big kid!

This second photo is of our pathetic bench. Kinda looks like the game's over, doesn't it? But, no - it was during the first period! I guess when almost everybody is on the ice, nobody is on the bench! For the boys who did show up, great job! Every single one of the kids there skated their hearts out. Those boys never gave up and skated as fast in the third period as they did in the first. A very impressive display of will, determination, and committment. They held the Owls to 4 points (we had 1, which we scored with Harrison on the ice - an assist!).

So, it was actually an exhausting weekend with lots of time spent at the ice arena. I also did a TON of correcting in the wait time (waiting for games to start). Clay stayed home most of the weekend and caught up on rest. He wasn't feeling so great last week (a lot of kids at school are sick), fell asleep within a half hour of arriving home on Friday, slept 2.5 hours, went to bed early, slept in really late on Saturday ... well you get the picture! I think he needed it!