Under no circumstances will hockey practice ever be cancelled. Ever. Even on days when school is cancelled, practice is still on. A game may be cancelled due to inclement weather because of travel concerns for the visiting team, but it would have to rain razor blades and bocce balls to cancel hockey practice at your local rink. It’s good karma to respect the game.
This one was like a replay of the third round-robin game.
Final Score: West Coast Warriors 2, Devil Dogs 0
“They couldn’t buy a goal,” one of the moms said.
“Are you allowed to buy goals?” I asked.
“We need to make a new rule for that,” she said.
The Warriors went on to lose 5-1 to NorCal Riot Black in the 16U final. That score surprised me, since NorCal couldn’t score on the Devil Dogs and the Devil Dogs couldn’t score on West Coast.
I’ve got to find out if any parents stayed to watch the final. How did NorCal get 5 goals on the West Coast boys? Whatever they did, the Devil Dogs should start doing it . . .
At hockey tournaments, especially travel tournaments, there’s a lot of down time between games. I usually bring a book to the rink so I have something to do. Nobody else does this. Nobody. In hockey circles, I’m known as the guy who brings books to the rink.
This weekend, we’re at a tournament in San Jose. One of the dads from our team — I think he’s a copier salesman — says to me, “I can’t understand why anyone reads fiction.”
He says it, not in a rude way, but not in a complimentary way either.
I say, “Oh. Well, I can’t understand why anyone lives his whole life inside his own head and never gets curious about what life looks like to other people.”
So I probably won’t have to talk to him the rest of the season.
Later the same day, this guy knocks back a couple of double Scotches at a team dinner and proceeds to make gay sex jokes — loudly — the rest of the evening.
The Devil Dogs are running into hot goalies. They’ve been shut out two games in a row, this one a scoreless tie against undefeated NorCal Riot Black.
Final Score: Devil Dogs 0, NorCal Riot Black 0
The tie is good enough to put the Dogs in tomorrow’s single-elimination round against the West Coast Warriors — who beat them yesterday — with the winner playing NorCal Riot Black in the final.
The West Coast Warriors are a team of big kids from British Columbia. The Devil Dogs had some trouble dealing with their size and speed. And the Warriors’ goalie played a great game.
Final Score: West Coast Warriors 2, Devil Dogs 0
The final round-robin games are scheduled for tomorrow. Depending on how things go, the Devil Dogs could be the top-seed for the single-elimination round or they could get knocked out of the tournament. Their game is against NorCal Riot Black, who are undefeated at 3-0.
Everybody wants to score goals; nobody wants to play defense. Everybody wants to make a big play; nobody wants to make the little plays.
The kids came out too revved up, made a lot of mistakes and were fortunate to win the game.
Final Score: Devil Dogs 5, Silicon Valley Quakes 3
The boys calmed down and played the best game I’ve ever seen them play — and I see every game.
Final Score: Devil Dogs 4, NorCal Riot Red 0
Two round-robin games left, against what look like stronger teams.
Revision Devil Dogs, my kid’s roller hockey team, won the AAU West Coast Winternationals 16U AA championship yesterday.
The Top Scorer award went to a boy from the second-place team who had 11 goals and one assist in the four round-robin games.
Eleven goals and one assist?! Pass the puck, Gretzky!
A basic fact of team sports is that a concern with individual stats interferes with winning.
My son’s team won the tournament, my wife gave blood, and I bought 3 snickerdoodle cookies for $5 at the charity booth and ate them.
All in all, a triumphant day for the whole family . . .
High school roller hockey starts tonight. To prevent the use of ringers, each kid has to turn in an enlarged color copy of their school ID card.
I reminded my son about that requirement last night as he was doing homework in his room.
“Why don’t you go ahead and make the copy now while you’re thinking about it?” I said.
“I’m not thinking about it,” he said.
“You are thinking about it.”
“What am I thinking about?”
“Okay, do it your way,” I said, and left.
“What did you come in here for?” he called after me.
Hilarity is really going to ensue when he shows up for the game tonight and can’t play because he doesn’t have a copy of his ID card . . .
After a visit to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, we stopped by a Subway where an Asian woman with a strange accent made our sandwiches.
“Have you been to the Hockey Hall of Fame up the street there?” I asked her.
No answer.
“It’s great!” I said. “We came all the way from California to see it.”
“I came from Buffalo,” she said.
“Really? Where’d you come from before Buffalo?” I asked.
“I saw Niagara Falls,” she said.
I already knew that, but one of the TV stations at the hotel seemed to be showing nothing but ball hockey — no skates, just guys running around with sticks trying to hit a ball into a net.
I asked a Canadian: “What’s up with all the ball hockey games on television?”
“It’s the playoffs!” he explained.
The Devil Dogs would have liked to be playing today but weren’t after last night’s 2-1 quarterfinal defeat to the Cougars.
In the semifinals, the #5 seed Cougars got smoked 6-1 by the #2 seed Detroit Mission Stars 92, while the #1 seed Adrenaline, another Michigan team, beat the #6 seed ISCA Grizzlies from New Jersey 10-4.
In the final, the Stars beat Adrenaline 5-2 to win the gold medal. As the highest-seeded semifinal loser, the Cougars earned the bronze medal.
Everyone who’s played a sport for a while has been on the wrong end of last-minute losses. If you can’t take the occasional tough loss, you always have the option of not playing the sport.
But I have to admit that the coaching decisions at the end of last night’s game are going to haunt me for a while. Putting the wrong team on the rink in the last minute cost the team a medal. In my opinion.
Notice that I’m saying the right players weren’t in the game — not the “best” players — because different players are best in different situations. Are you ahead? Are you behind? Are you tied? That determines who should be on the rink.
For example, if you’re protecting a one-goal lead, having your big, fast guys on the bench in favor of smaller guys and scorers does not give you the best chance to win the game. In fact, it gives you the best chance to lose the game. If you’d been next to me with a minute left in that game, you would have heard me say that exact thing: “They’ve got the wrong lineup out there.”
Casey was crushed by losing the game in the last minute and doubly crushed by having to watch it from the bench. You can’t know what would have happened had he been in the game, but in his heart, he knows what would have happened.
Team chemistry on the Devil Dogs was really good this season. Some of the boys are model young men and some aren’t, but as a group, they were a team in the best sense of the word. Most of the boys were in the hotel lobby last night till 2 a.m. talking amongst themselves and with a few kids from another team. They’ll bounce back. They’ve bounced back most of the way already . . .
Quarterfinals: The Devil Dogs led 1-0 most of the game, but gave up two goals in the last minute to lose 2-1. They’re out of the tournament.
My son was crying after the game when he came out of the locker room — not weeping, but he had tears in his eyes. Don’t tell him I told you. He never cries after games. I was this close to crying myself when I saw him.
I’m now going to violate my policy of never questioning coaches’ decisions. Hockey’s a team game, but if I’m going to lose a game in the last minute, I’m going to lose it with my strongest players on the rink.
I was looking out there with a minute left and a 1-0 lead and I couldn’t see how having the two biggest, fastest kids on the bench gave the team the best chance to win that game. The fact that one of those kids is my kid may be clouding my judgment but I don’t think so.
The last-minute goals came on defensive mistakes. The Dogs have a good goalie who can stop the kind of shots he faced in the last minute, as long as you don’t let kids on the other team stand in front of the net and tip them. It’s not that complicated. Would having different players on the rink prevented those goals from being scored? I say yes, but again, I admit that I’m not totally objective.
It’s pretty sad around here right now . . .
Seedings are up for single-elimination. Devil Dogs seeded #4 and will play the #5 seed New Jersey Cougars tonight.
Cougars were undefeated in round-robin — two wins and two ties. The ties were strange: they tied the #2 seed Detroit Mission Stars 92, but they also tied a not-so-good California team that got knocked out in round-robin . . .
“What did the coach say to you guys after the game?” I ask my son.
Long pause.
“I can’t remember,” he says. “But I absorbed it.”
The Devil Dogs beat the Revision RBK Buffalo Wings Black 4-0 in the morning game. That clinched them a spot in the single-elimination round, which starts tomorrow.
In the night game, they lost to the Detroit Mission Stars 92, 4-2. The Stars were also undefeated coming in, and by winning the game, will get a better seed than the Devil Dogs in single-elimination.
A little background on age divisions in roller hockey: The Devil Dogs play in the Bantam division. You could think of it as a 16-and-under division but in roller hockey, the season runs almost year-round and the divisions are actually based on birth year.
This year’s Bantam division, for example, includes kids born in 1992 or later. Most Bantam players are 92s (born in 1992) or 93s (born in 1993) because 94s and younger can play a division lower in the PeeWee division.
When a team has a year in the name of the team — like Detroit Mission Stars 92 — it means that all the kids on the team were born in that year. One advantage of having a team with all kids born in the same year is that the team can stay together from season to season, without having some kids “age up” to the next higher age bracket.
The Devil Dogs Bantam team has only one 92 player, mostly 93s, and a few 94s playing up a division. As a result, the Stars players were a lot bigger, a lot stronger and a lot faster, but I didn’t think they were better hockey players. The game really came down to the Stars goalie outplaying the Devil Dogs goalie, who ironically had won the goalie skills competition earlier in the day.
The Dogs have to play their best game to beat a team like that because of the physical mismatch but they can do it.
They should seed somewhere in the middle of the eight-team single-elimination round, but anything can happen in single-elimination . . .
There’s a picture of kids playing hockey on the back of the 5-dollar bill:
Photo by Alfred Benway
The Devil Dogs played their first two round-robin games today. In the afternoon game, they beat the Motor City Moose from Detroit, 5-3. Devil Dogs scored the first three goals, but the Moose came back to 4-3 down before the Dogs scored a late goal for the final margin.
After the game, we came back to the hotel, barbequed some burgers and hot dogs, then drove back to the arena for a 9 p.m. game against the Mission Mayhem, a local team from here in Ontario.
Devil Dogs won, 3-2. My son had a nice goal. A teammate tried to saucer a pass to him as he skated to the front of the net, but the pass stayed airborne all the way. He took a short baseball swing at it and batted it in out of the air. When an NHL player does that, it’s a definite SportsCenter Top 10, but the boy said after the game that he had that one all the way.
Tomorrow, two more round-robin games against teams from Buffalo and Detroit. Everyone says the Detroit team, the Mission Stars 92, is a very good team, so the Buffalo game tomorrow morning may determine whether the Dogs are able to advance out of the round-robin . . .
