The reality that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on kids playing hockey this season reveals a glaring shortcoming in the game’s development: We’ve become a nation dependent on “organized” hockey.
The pandemic hasn’t prevented youngsters from playing street hockey (based anecdotally on the games being played by the kids in my neighborhood on Boston’s North Shore), and it certainly hasn’t stopped them from lacing up their skates for a pond hockey session (of course, the undeniable warming of the planet also has something to do with that, but the hard truth of climate change is a topic for another day).
No, the sad fact is that kids are suffering from a shortage of the organized games that we, as parents, have determined are the best option to our children to experience this great game. We’re wrong. We’re failing our children. And, by extension, we’re failing the game.
To be clear, it’s not that “organized” hockey is inherently bad. It’s not. What’s bad is that we’ve allowed organized hockey — like organized soccer, organized basketball, lacrosse, football, baseball — to become the be all and end all, to the detriment of the actual game.
This is not a new problem, but it bears repeating, and with greater emphasis and alarm. Because our actions are eroding the game we claim to love. We celebrate the NHL’s outdoor games, with all their slick Madison Avenue marketing tributes to hockey’s origins, while we stand by and allow the outdoor game to die a slow death.
Ken Dryden, in his groundbreaking remembrance “The Game,” wrote about his concerns that the grown-ups were ruining hockey for future generations. This was in 1983. That’s right — almost 40 years ago.
“A game we once played on rivers and ponds, later on streets and driveways and in backyards, we now play in arenas, in full team uniform, with coaches and referees, or to an ever increasing extent we don’t play at all,” wrote Dryden. “For, once a game is organized, unorganized games seem a wasteful use of time; and once a game moves indoors, it won’t move outdoors again. Hockey has become suburbanized, and as part of our suburban middle-class culture, it has changed.”
Dryden estimated that by the time a young man reaches the NHL, if he started at 6 or 7, he was already the veteran of close to 1,000 games (assuming that boy played more than twice a week, roughly 70 times a year between September and April). Remember, this is data from 40 years ago. The problem has only gotten worse.
“It is more games from a younger age, over a longer season than ever before. But it is less hockey than ever before,” he noted, correctly. “For, every time a 12-year-old boy plays a 30-minute game, sharing the ice with teammates, he plays only about 10 minutes.
“And 10 minutes a game, anticipated and prepared for all day, traveled to and from, dressed and undressed for, means 10 minutes of hockey a day, more than two days a week, more than 70 days a hockey season,” wrote Dryden. “And every day that a 12-year-old plays only 10 minutes, he doesn’t play two hours on a backyard rink, or longer on school or playground rinks during weekends and holidays.”
Why has this happened? Because we’ve allowed for-profit entities — ice rinks and often hockey programs — to abdicate the game, and dictate how our kids will “play” (and, yes, USA Hockey has been complicit). But there’s more, since organized hockey and pick-up games aren’t mutually exclusive, even though we often treat them as if they were. Much of it has to do with our own fears, and our reluctance to just let our kids head out into the neighborhood as long as they’re home before dinner and/or sundown. We want to make sure our kids are safe, which is perfectly understandable (and leaves us susceptible to the less-than-sincere entreaties of these “select” programs).
Dryden takes it a step further, touching on something even more pervasive.
“It all has to do with the way we look at free time,” he wrote. “Constantly preoccupied with time and keeping ourselves busy, we treat non-school, non-sleeping, or non-eating time, unbudgeted free time, with suspicion and no little fear.
“For, while it may offer opportunity to learn and do new things, we worry that the time we once spent reading, kicking a ball, or mindlessly coddling a puck might be used destructively, in front of TV, or ‘getting into trouble’ in endless ways,” wrote Dryden.
Our well-intentioned but ill-advised solution, said Dryden, was to organize free time, filling the void with sports, or music lessons, or theater, or even things like ballet and Irish step dancing, “fragmenting it into impossible-to-be-bored segments, creating in ourselves a mental metabolism geared to moving on, making free time distinctly un-free.” By denying our children free time, we’ve handicapped our kids, the best as well as the average.
“It is in free time that the special player develops, not in the competitive experience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching-manual, hockey school skills,” Dryden wrote. “For while skills are necessary, setting out as they do the limits of anything, more is needed to transform those skills into something special.”
To be absolutely clear, this is a youth sports issue, not strictly a hockey issue. Soccer is a great example. The late, great Diego Maradona, arguably one of the top five soccer players ever, grew up destitute in an Argentina slum. The same holds true for myriad superstars in the world’s most popular game, from Pele to Ronaldinho to Zinedine Zidane. In a similar vein, how many basketball greats grew up poor but were able to develop their breathtaking skills by simply playing. All … the … time.
“The Italians have a phrase, inventa fapartita,” wrote Dryden. “Translated, it means to ‘invent the game.’ A phrase often used by soccer coaches and journalists, it is now, more often than not, used as a lament.”
What Dryden is talking about is young players “inventing the game” from their own fertile imaginations, their own creativity, instead of constantly being told what the rules are, what to do, and what not to do. Dryden talks about “watching modern players with polished but plastic skills.” That’s what often results from the “work” of organized practice and games, with their constant oversight and corrections, as opposed to the simple joys of unstructured “play.”
“In the name of team play, there is no time or place for individual virtuosity, they say; it is a game now taken over by coaches, by technocrats and autocrats who empty players’ minds to control their bodies, reprogramming them with X’s and O’s, driving them to greater efficiency and work rate, to move systems faster, to move games faster, until achieving mindless pace,” Dryden wrote.
The solution, to me, is both elegant and fun. Given the pandemic-related restrictions — and more and more evidence is emerging that indoor hockey is a particularly efficient breeding ground for this potentially devastating virus — parents should look at this time as an opportunity. A silver lining. Get back to the game’s roots. Encourage kids to play, outside, on the streets or the playgrounds or the ponds.
Don’t coach. Don’t referee. Don’t even watch. Let them create their own rules, their own games (inventa fapartita). Have some faith. The “real” game won’t pass them by, not as long as they’re actually playing (as opposed to toying with EA Sports NHL 21).
What’s the payoff? Tune in next issue, when I let one of Dryden’s Hall of Fame teammates tell us. ′
Longtime “Goalie Guru” columnist Brion O’Connor transitions to a new general hockey columnist role with the debut of “At the Buzzer.”
