The Unqualified Hockey Coach

by Craig Colby

My 17-year-old-son Shane and I were on our way to his final game of organized hockey, the Leaside U18 house league championship. I promised myself this would be my last game as a hockey coach. After 13 years, this was the end for me, regardless of the outcome. I’d never wanted to coach hockey in the first place because I was completely unqualified.

My family moved to Thunder Bay, Ontario from Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1971 when I was eight. Mom and Dad passed on weekends in dank rinks in favour of downhill skiing. I didn’t even learn how to skate. Hockey would not catch my attention until I watched my best friend Dave’s games in high school. When I went to the University of Windsor, I became a Red Wings fan. But I was purely a spectator.

In 2008, my wife and I decided to enroll Shane, then four-years-old, in East York hockey school, just 10 minutes down the road. My friends had played into adulthood and the sport was more accessible to us than skiing. I was happy to watch Shane play. Coaching was out of the question.

A year later, when Shane was on his first house league team, none of the coaches showed up for practice. At the next game, I asked Coach Larry what happened.  Next thing I knew, I was buying skates, gloves, a stick, and a helmet and helping on the ice. With Larry’s encouragement, I took the training course, and was a full assistant the next season.

At the first practice, Coach Michael called on me to demonstrate a drill - skate three strides, do a hard stop facing left, then skate to the other side of the rink. I burst out three solid strides, then dug my heels in for a hard hockey stop. My skates launched straight into the air and my head and shoulders crashed into the ice. I looked like a dropped ice cream cone. Before the end of the season, I was eased out of the practice and off the bench in favour of someone who knew what he was doing. It was a relief. I was off the hook.

Until a few years later, when Manny, my assistant coach at East York baseball, a sport I was much more comfortable with, asked if I’d help him with hockey. I said I’d do it for one season if I didn’t have to demonstrate anything. Manny agreed to my terms. We had a good season, losing in the championship game. I called it quits again.

Until the next year, when I noticed that Shane’s team only had two coaches. Usually there are three, assistants on the offensive and defensive doors, and the head coach surveying the action. When Coach Jeff found out I had my coaching card, I was back behind the bench. We lost in the championship game that year too.

Despite my best efforts to quit, I kept being asked to coach. Like Michael Corleone with wobbly ankles, I was trying to get out, but they kept pulling me back in. One convener put it bluntly, “You’re better than nothing.”

When my other son Curtis, four years younger than Shane, asked why I coached his brother and not him, I was suddenly the assistant coach on two teams each season. Curtis’s teams lost in the finals a couple of times too.

I stuck to my no demonstrating rule, but I still couldn’t hide my shortcomings in practice. When I was taking shots on net to warm up a goalie, the netminder stopped me and said, “Could you just pick up the puck and throw it at me?”

In another practice, I tried to take a hard shot on net, doing my best to raise the puck. The shot went high and wide of the net, crashing into the glass right in front of the face of a young mother holding a baby. When she saw that the shot was not taken by some struggling youngster but by a middle-aged man, she was not impressed. Her glare is with me still.

I did my best to do the grunt work so the qualified coaches could concentrate on skill development and strategy. I was a puck herder in practice and a door opener during the games. My favourite trick was shouting out instructions I’d heard other coaches give, hopefully in the right situation. I brought a few other skills to the rink, too. Although I had never played hockey, I was the captain of my football and soccer teams in high school, won the Rotary Citizenship Award, was given a leadership award by the Lakehead Board of Education and was sent to the Ontario Athletic Leadership Camp. I put those skills to work, joking with the kids in the locker room and praising good plays on the bench. Coach Jeff told me, “You are really useful.” That was the most I could hope for.

Still, I was humiliatingly bad at hockey and was looking for a way out. Curtis, now 13, no longer cares if I coach his team anymore, so this would be my last year behind his bench. Shane, now 17, was playing his last season. I wasn’t supposed to coach him this year at all.  

Shane had switched from East York to Leaside when he was 14 to play on their select team, a step up from house league. His season was cut short when Shane had emergency brain surgery that December. While he was recovering, his select team won the championship and included Shane as best they could, but I could see he was disappointed. Shane was back on the ice the following September. He missed select try outs, so he only played house league. Then came the pandemic and another year was lost. Shane never got back in the select program, but he loved the house league games.

When we signed Shane up for hockey this year, Nancy asked if I wanted to volunteer as a coach. I said, “If they really need me, I will.” When the rosters were announced, I was on a team with four other coaches. I asked the convener, Ted, to remove me from the list, explaining that I’d never played so I’m not qualified. Besides, he had plenty of coaches. Then Ted shuffled the teams. I was now paired with one other coach on Team Blue. At this age, kids open and close the doors themselves, or jump over the boards, so you only need one person behind the bench. There are no practices. I showed up, fully intending to tell the other coach that I would only be available as a back up. The other coach did me one better by not showing up at all. 

The game was going to start in about twenty minutes, so I gave out the jerseys, wrote out the roster on the score sheet, made some lines, then stood behind the bench while the kids played. The players came on and off the ice without any prompting from me. When I talked, they paid little attention.

After the game, I told Ted, “I shouldn’t be a head coach, but the kids already know how to play and they’re not going to listen to me anyway, so I’ll do it.” That was it. I was a hockey head coach.

House League at Leaside is low key. The players show up sporadically. Often one team doesn’t have a goalie. Either a plastic stand-in is strapped in front of the net, or the teams play six-on-five with an empty net. Many of the players use the games as a chance to work on their individual skills, abandoning passing altogether.

Before our next game, I told the team “I’m going to be your coach this year but I’m not going to coach you. You already know how to play. All I ask is that you play as a team. Pass. Get back on defence. Be a good teammate. Play the game with respect. That’s all you’ll hear from me. This game is for you. Go out and have fun.”

One of the players said, “Good talk coach.” Some of the players laughed.

Shane said, “My dad’s the coach because no one else would do it.” The players laughed harder.

Most of the time, we won. The players who showed up kept their part of the bargain. They played hard and correctly, for the most part. So, I kept my part of the bargain, setting the line ups and letting them play. In one game, however, during a battle for the puck along the boards, one of our players tapped his stick on the helmet of a friend on the other team. Our player was sent to the penalty box. Other players took egregiously long shifts or hogged the puck.

After the game, a loss, I said, “You played well, as usual, but there were some goofy penalties, and some of you took too much ice time, which isn’t fair to your teammates. Honestly, I thought some of you were a little selfish.” I saw eyebrows raise. “Let’s do better next week.”  Then I left the dressing room and waited upstairs for Shane.

When he came out, I said, “So, how did that go over?” Shane said, “Well, they made fun of you after you left.” Fair enough. Still, the next week they played like a team.

For the rest of the season, I praised good plays and once every few weeks, I’d yell “Pass to the open man” or something like that, from the bench. The kids played hard and ran their own game. They looked like they were having a good time.

The parents noticed. One mother said, “They’re playing with such joy. The select games are so stressful, but here they’re just having fun.”

The same wasn’t true of Curtis’s House League team at East York, the Ice Dogs. We finished the season with one win and one tie. We didn’t even have a regular goalie. Because the league was short netminders, they rotated between teams. One of the goalies, AJ, was in his second year between the pipes. AJ was smaller than the other boys and quiet. He was working hard to learn the position, but not being on a regular team must have been isolating. After games, whether he was on our team or not, I’d seek him out and tell him, “I like your grit. I know it’s tough right now, but goalie is a hard position to learn and you’re doing well. You’re getting better all the time.”

Near the end of the season, I found AJ after the game. He’d been the other goalie for the other team. Before I could say a word, AJ handed me a small silver key chain. I thanked AJ, although I couldn’t read the inscription on key chain at the time. I went upstairs to find better light. It said, “A great coach is hard to find and impossible to forget.”

The next week, AJ’s mother told me the goalie had given the award to two just coaches. I thanked her and AJ. This was the perfect finish to my time coaching at East York Hockey. But I still had to finish the season with Shane’s Leaside team.

Team Blue finished third in the regular season, qualifying for the championship bracket. For our semi-final game, we had three defenders, five forwards and a goalie. Shane was not one of them. He had tested positive for COVID-19 and was in isolation. I announced the starters, and the players figured the rest out on the fly. We won our semi-final handily, 6-1, qualifying for the championship game against the first-place team, Green. Shane would be able to play and if I tested negative and was symptom free, I would be able to coach.

Shane and I arrived Sunday night to find a full locker room. Everyone except our goalie was there. I barely recognized a few of the players who hadn’t been there in months. I would have to make some coaching decisions this week, setting the three forward lines and two defensive pairs. I put our regulars on the first two lines and on defense. Then I left to fill out the scoresheet for the ref. Shane told me that a few of the players said they appreciated my showing up the previous week even when my son hadn’t.

I came back in and told the players that after the game, the teams would have to line up on the blue lines, “So the other team can get their silver medal and we can get our gold.”

Then I gave my first pregame speech since the beginning of the year. “You’ve played great all season. You can beat anyone. Just have fun and play your game. Maybe pay a bit more attention to defence.” That was it. Matei, one of the regular defencemen, added, “Be aggressive out there.”

The game was fast and fluid. Our team’s passes were crisp, and we got back on defense. Six minutes into the game, Evan, one of our regulars, scored the game’s first goal. The bench erupted. I was way more vocal than I’d been all year, patting the players’ backs when they came off and yelling encouragement.  The team was vocal too, pounding the boards when our goalie made a big save.

In the second period, a puck trickled past Ryan, our goalie, but Matei scooped it out before it could cross the line and fired it to a teammate. Our bench cheered and banged the boards. We held our 1-0 after two periods. I still had butterflies.  

With six minutes left, Green scored. The game was tied. Our team didn’t get down, though. One of the players asked me if we’d play overtime. Matei said “Yes. Three-on-three.” I had no idea if he was right. The ref skated by the bench and said, “Get your three-on-three lineup ready.”  I started putting combinations together in my head. This game was making me work.

Sure enough, the game ended in a tie. I put Nigel, our best forward, out with Evan, who had scored, and put Matei on defense. All three had come to most games. Then I stacked up lines of three behind them, not knowing how long the overtime would last. Before I knew it, there was one minute left.  The ref skated by and said, “Get ready for a shootout.” The clock ticked to zero without a score.

The ref said, “It’s a best two-out-of-three shootout. If it’s tied after that, the shootout goes to sudden death.” That means if one team scores and the other doesn’t, it’s over.

I looked down the bench. Liam, who had come frequently, but not all the time, said to me, “Can I be in the shootout?”

I asked,” Are you good at this?”

He said, “Yeah, pretty good.”

Since I like to reward initiative, I made Liam the third shooter after Nigel and Matei, then started lining up players after that.

Both teams shoot at the same time. In the first round, Nigel scored, while at the other end, Ryan stopped the Green player, who tumbled over him.  We were up 1-0. If we scored, and Green didn’t on the next shot, we would win.

In the second round, Matei couldn’t get it past the goalie and a Green players scored on Ryan. We were tied.

Third round. Liam’s turn. My head darted back and forth across the ice as the skaters approached the nets. Ryan made the stop at one end. At the other, Liam swooped in, took his shot, and hit the net. We win! The bench erupted! Players hugged each other and cheers echoed around the rink.

We shook hands with the other team, watched them get their silver medals, then I handed out the gold medals to our players. We posed for team pictures, then I got Ted to take few pictures of Shane and me.

I was elated, far happier than I expected to be. I was happy that Shane finally got to play on a championship winner. I was happy for our team that played with joy. And yes, even though I had somewhere between little and nothing to do with the victory, I was happy that I was a championship hockey head coach.

I walked into the dressing room, thanked the team, cheered for the goalie and the players who were finishing their organized playing careers, then fist bumped everyone and went upstairs to wait for Shane.

While I was waiting, a gentleman approached me. He said his son was on the team and he wanted to take a picture of his player and me before he left. I said, “Sure”.

The father said. “The boys had fun this season. They needed it. It was a very tough year in our house. Very hard for my son.”

He didn’t volunteer details and I didn’t ask. A few minutes later, his son came up, and we posed for our picture. It was Liam, the boy who asked to take part in the shootout, the boy who scored the championship clinching goal.

Shane walked up the steps from the dressing room and we stepped into the brisk night air. He was bursting with happiness. “This is my championship. I played in this championship. And I played my game.” There was no better way to close out his hockey career. Any regrets he had were washed away in this victory.  

I was happy too. This was just one of thousands of house league games played across Canada that night, but as we walked through the parking lot with our gold medals around our neck, we felt like champions.

As I walked with Shane, I thought about my years on the bench. I had never wanted to coach hockey. I had never felt qualified. Yet, my coaching philosophy - show up, find a way to be useful and make the game about the players – turned out to be effective. This season alone, I’d encouraged a developing player and enabled developed ones.

I also thought about what coaching did for me. I remembered, years before, watching one of our players, teeth gritted and skating hard, chase down an opponent on a breakaway, and thinking, “Wow, the kid is determined.” Then I realized it was Shane. I recalled that just a few weeks earlier, Curtis crashed hard into the boards right in front of the bench. I stuck my head out to see if he was okay, and as Curtis slid down the ice, he looked at me, smiled, and gave me a thumbs up. I thought about AJ suiting up, even though he wasn’t part of a team, and giving his all every night. And I thought about Liam, enjoying a shining moment of glory during a challenging year. What a privilege it was to be part of all that.

I finally recognized my hockey coaching career for what it was – an unqualified success.

Craig Colby is a television executive producer, producer, director, writer and story editor. He runs a storytelling consulting and production service for businesses. Craig can be reached at craig@colbyvision.net.

More Stories.