A Weekend of Tournaments

This weekend Lucy and her Squirt team are playing a tournament in Sioux City and Dan’s PeeWee team is playing a tournament in Marshall MN. I just talked with Mike on the phone and Dan’s team got fifty shots on goal in their first game, winning 9 – 1.

Under the heading of how cool hockey parents can be, the family of Lucy’s best friend on her team offered to take her to the SC tournament for the weekend so I wouldn’t have to haul Mom and all her equipment to Iowa and take care of her in a hotel. Lucy is thrilled to spend the weekend with her friend and I’m able to take care of Mom here in Lincoln as well as get Grace to her hockey and figure skating practices and a Mites game tomorrow afternoon.
There’s lots of politics in the hockey world as there is in figure skating, but this weekend it seems like the hockey gods are smiling on us.

Just took a call from Lucy and her team won their first game 8 - 2, I think, and their second game 12 - 0. Yikes! Lucy had two assists and she says she got a goal in the first game, but it wasn't counted for some reason. These are the kind of games during which I feel I just have to stop cheering because cheering starts to feel just downright mean.

Grace’s coach suggested that she take the Level 7 test this week. If she passes, and I suspect she will, she’ll have passed two levels in two and a half weeks. Now this might suggest that she’s improving at a miraculous pace, but my sense is that really this rapid progress through the Basic levels suggests that my intuition about her previous club was right on: the head of the LTS program was not testing Grace at the pace Grace was learning. I’m thinking that now she’s skating and being coached at the level she needs. This also tells me that her private coach in St. Cloud did a good job of working with her even though the LTS folks were pokey.

The thing that worries me though is that as she progresses, I need to learn how to parent at these new, more competitive levels. We’ve gone through these kinds of transitions with Dan and Lucy in hockey. In those cases there’s this interesting way that, as a parent, I’ve had to both step back – trust coaches in increasing degrees to provide instruction not only in skills, but in the intangibles like maintaining balance between desire and good sportsmanship, between aggression and fair play. With Grace, I’m wondering if there are new dimensions of her relationship to her coach that I’ll need to learn. I also wonder if relationships between Grace and the other skaters or between me and the other parents will take on some new, heightened quality. I wonder what things will be like when Grace starts building her actual figure skating resume in the Pre-preliminaries.

I’ve started volunteering for Grace’s club, which both gives me pleasure (and something to do at the rink while she skates) and helps me meet people.

More from Zamboni land soon…