Growing Old in the Cold: An Observation On a Boys Squirt Hockey Practice

I. Preface (Leighton):

Growing up in a hockey arena has made an inevitable impact on my life. As a child, I learned discipline and commitment from it. It was something that I hated with my whole heart and slowly I learned to love. Hockey is a sport that in order to become good, it takes years upon years and lots of work. Similar to most of the older hockey players in Buffalo, when I enter the Buffalo Civic Center, I automatically recognize almost all of the adults and the people who work there. Spending so much time at one place brings everyone closer together. It’s like a family. Everyone cares for each other.

There is a significant difference between the boys’ hockey program and the girls’ program though. These differences are evident in the ways that boys act towards the game, the way that they are coached, and their different personality towards hockey. Girls and boys are very different and that is inevitable. While observing the Squirt Development Camp, I expect that the practice will be much more aggressive than a female practice and the lines that the boys will form will be relative to their individual skills. I also expect that at the end of the practice, they will play some sort of competitive games.



I. Preface (Jillianne):

When I was younger I would view the sport of hockey as a functional opportunity to get away, and enrich my mind and skills. To this day it plays a big role on my everyday life and I have never strayed away from the idea that it is enriching and developing. The Buffalo Hockey Association is a place where everything is an organized, everyone is familiar with one another and with everything, and everybody shares one common interest, hockey.

As you are at the younger levels, the association is co-ed, the years the genders split, are the key stages in a childs hockey career. I have partaken in the girls program, and I barely had enough time to keep up with my own team, let alone watching the boys. Here and there our practices will share ice time, but the halves divide along with the teams. There is an obvious reason why the genders split, and that is because of the vast amount of difference.

As for the differences, I assume that before the drills/ individual warmups and such, I think knowing boys, they know the abilities that they are most confident in and they will try and show what they can do off. Which means the ones that can skate the fastest will spend most of time skating, and for the boys that have a good shot will sit at the net and keep shooting. The boys that are playing the game for fun will be socializing. I think the superior players and the players with most potential will definitely show. At this young age of developing skills for the future, the kids are more focused on what they can do to make them individually better, not a team. So I believe that in small games or scrimmaging when a kid gets an opportunity to have the puck, he will use it and not think about passing it and letting someone else have a chance.



II. Background Information:

The Buffalo Civic Center has two ice sheets. One of the arenas is referred to as the “new” rink. This ice sheet is the most renovated rink the center has. The new rink was added on to the original complex which is referred as the “Peterson rink”, or the old rink.

Most hockey players, ameliorate themselves, by following a certain path of levels in the hockey association. The first level is called Mini-mites. In mini-mites, you stay local by only playing in your city. It is meant for kids age 7 and under. Mites, is very similar to Mini-mites, but it is designed for kids that are 9 years old or younger. Traveling hockey begins after Mites when you reach either Squirts, if you are a boy, or U10’s if you are a girl. Skaters are at this level for two seasons. For most people, their Squirt and U10 season occurs while they are 9, and 10. After this, the boys move on to Peewees and the girls will advance to U12’s. Alike the other years, players stay at this level for two years. During the seasons when they are 13 and 14, boys will play bantams, and girls will move on to play U14 hockey until they are 15. Some, choose to play High School Hockey when they reach the U14 level depending on their preference.



III. Observations:

When we first walked into our local Buffalo hockey arena, we were immediately surrounded by cool air. We made our way up the bleachers of the new arena, to the top of the stands and into the observing bench. The players had just gotten on the ice, and were coming on the ice one by one. They were doing individual warm-ups. We first noticed that a few of the players have a different colored hockey socks then most. Two players had red socks, and one player had blue. We presumed that this meant that these players may have partaken in an out of season team prior to this practice. We then noticed a girl in this squirt practice, which was very unusual. She was skating around by herself, and we noted her as the ‘Lonely Girl.’ Everyone else on the ice were males, including the coaches,

During the individual warm ups, the net would slowly fill up with pucks from the players shooting the. When there were no more pucks left to shoot, the players would go into the net and grab a puck just for themselves, even though they are already in the net and could easily take out the rest. We presumed that the players only worry about benefiting themselves as a player.

There were five coaches on the ice. One coach blew the whistle and all of the kids gathered around him. He was bearded, and held a clipboard so we assumed he was the head coach, and we called him the bearded coach. The bearded coach was making hand motions and drawing on a white board, and then motioned for the kids to line up against the wall. Once all the kids were in their places, the bearded coach blew his whistle and the kids started their first drill.

The first players started to skate, and then we heard someone yelling. We noticed that a coach in a grey hood was already yelling at the kids to “GO!” we labeled this coach as the ‘yeller coach.’ Looking at the players lined up on the board a few of them were talking to one another, and the lonely girl budged someone in line. Lonely girl found a friend now, and she keeps talking to him smiling, and laughing. When the boy she was talking to closes the conversation she stands back a few steps and stares at him. When she was backing up she tripped and fell, a sure sign of a 10 year-old crush. It is now the lonely girls turn to start the drill and she doesn’t know what to do. She then has to restart the drill, which is one of many side effects of a crush.

After this drill that took up the entire ice, the bearded coach blew the whistle and everyone met in the middle. He called off names and everyone he called off went in a separate spot on the ice. Each of the four stations did different drills and had different coaches. When the players reached the yeller coach’s station, their body language was much different than it was at any other station. The kids at this station began to mess around and show a disinterest in the drill they were taking part in. Yeller coach continued to yell as the skaters went through the drill. At all of the other stations, the boys were attentive. We then concluded that the players had a lack of interest in the coach, rather than the drills.

While observing, we noticed that while the players were waiting in line for a drill, most of their focus was spent on messing around. Many kids were tripping each other, throwing punches, and just conversing. We made the assumption that because these players are only 10 years old, that this behavior was their way of having fun during a hard practice.

At the end of the practice, the players took their jerseys off, and met in a huddle to do a cheer. We assumed that the cheer brought unity to their team. Once the cheer was over, coaches and players stayed on the ice to pick up pucks, and move the nets. When the zamboni backed out onto the ice, both the players, and the coaches got off of the ice.

IV. Conclusion:


Watching a squirt practice, brings out very many differences between a normal girls’ hockey practice and the average boys’ hockey practice. Most girls at age 10 would not be doing particular things that the boys took part in. Our practices were run from one end of the ice during a skills clinic rather than using the entire ice during the whole practice. Boys actions during their practice were much more aggressive and competitive than any practice that the two of us have taken part in.

The Squirt players all proved to us that they are still deficient in their listening skills, and their attention spans. The players cared about the drills that they were about to attempt, but waiting in line patiently, posed to be a problem. There inability to pay attention while waiting, was something that we looked past when we were making preconceptions. We assumed that it would not be a problem. Even though the players were corrupt to each other during their practice, they all left as one team.

Buffalo Hockey Association has allowed for everyone who is a part of the association, big or small, to be brought together over the common bond of hockey. No matter who can be seen in the Buffalo arena, there are always people there that genuinely care for the sport.

Insecurities

Bigotry and judgment are the height of insecurity.

Jasmine Guy

The book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe describes how life is all about your insecurities and how it is important to overcome everyone one of them. But before you can overcome insecurities, you must discover them first. This book, shows the life of Okonkwo and his struggle to discover himself.

Okonkwo, is a well known man in his tribe who had both wealth and status. Along with his status, came many wives, many children, and many problems. He hid his insecurities the same 
way as modern leaders do today. On page 144 of Things Fall Apart, Nwoye betrays his father by saying “He is not my father.” Okonkwo kept this to himself and did not tell anybody about this experience. He wanted to hide all of his insecurities and everything that made him feel like a failure.

Life is about discovering the person that you are, and following the set of values that you create for yourself. Many people find out what they believe in during their adolescent years. I believe that this is the time that people discover how they feel about the world and every problem in it. You begin to discover your life, because you have begun to experience it. You begin to understand all of the horrible things that can happen to yourself and other people. At this point in your life, the actions that you make, have consequences.

Being a child, consists of copying idols, wanting to be exactly like your parents, and learning from the mistakes that you make. As a child, in most cases, you have very little responsibility. As you grow up, things that were told to you in your childhood are put on display. Some of these things have different meaning now. You set different goals for yourself then your parents had for you. Your adolescent years, are about discovering these goals. Okonkwo discovered his goals for his life a little bit earlier than most people. He described his father as a failure. On page 13 of Things Fall Apart, Achebe describes this by saying "[Okonkwo's] whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness." The rest of the book follows about revealing the person that Okonkwo was.

The entire plot of Things Fall Apart describes how a person finds himself. Okonkwo pushes his goal to never be a failure or to be somebody who is was lazy and opinionless to the maximum. Slowly but surely, he begins to fall apart. He tries to make his son feel the guilt of not being a true "man". The culture that Okonkwo was raised in, made him believe that because his father was not the most powerful, and although he did not always speak his honest mind, he was not a man. One of Okonkwo's sons begins to follow in his fathers footsteps and he has difficulty dealing with it. This was one of Okonkwo’s insecurities.

Life is short which means that by the time you find yourself, you have little left to live. It is not possible to be your honest self when society and people that you love are constantly expecting change and better things from you. Society causes you to become more insecure with your struggles within yourself. Everybody has a clear destined path, but it takes time and experimentation to find out which path that you belong on. Every mistake that you make on your quest to find your path can become an insecurity if you let it. Overcoming insecurities, requires you to be 100% devoted to the goals that you set for yourself. Being confident in yourself, your likes, and your goals, is most important about being secure with yourself.

Ethnography Preconceptions

Jillianne Hovland and I will cooperate together in the completion of our ethnography project. The main focus of this project is to observe the differences of our experiences throughout youth hockey. Both Jilli and I grew up playing hockey in Buffalo but as we have gotten older, the program has changed dramatically. We grew up playing girls hockey through the Buffalo Youth Hockey Association. Girls and boys programs are completely different in this association.
The goal for the project we are beginning, is to identify how the Squirt Player Development Camp is run, how the boys react, the atmosphere of the people playing and observing along with their comments, and also the ice sheet and how it is used. To complete our observations, we will be observing their practice and conducting interviews with three to four of the boys and also two coaches. We will be in contact with the coordinator of the Buffalo Civic Center as our broker.
As I have grown up in the association, I know how much of the girls program is run and how it works. I do not have any brothers or any relatives that play boys hockey for our association. USA Hockey has implemented  ADM  (American Development Model) into youth practices. Both girls and boys use this model in certain practices that are usually done weekly. Another thing that happens in youth hockey is that before tryouts there is a series of practices that are considered "clinics" to prepare you for tryouts.
I have many preconceptions as I begin to think more about how this observation will go. First off, I believe that at the beginning of practice the boys will come out and show off all their moves and spend the beginning of their practice socializing with their friends. The better stronger players will line up towards the front of the lines. Next, I would assume that because it's a development camp, the majority of the practice will be individual skill based. I believe that at least 10 minutes of the practice will be competitive games and races. When we interview the players, I feel as though some will feel stressed with the thought of preparing for tryouts and finding out the teams that they will spend their year on, where as other boys will feel excited for the season and not have a worry in the world to which team that they make. The coaches that we interview will share a different take on these camps. They will notice all the incorrect forms and "bad" things that the kids they are coaching are doing wrong.
Overall, I feel prepared to start observing and learning about the boys youth hockey program. I have quite a few preconceptions that may or may not be true. Playing girls hockey, I have a background that will help me piece together what is happening on the ice and understanding the reactions with different people.

"I Am From" Poem

"I Am From" Poem 

I am from hockey sticks

from antibacterial soap and disinfectant wipes

I am from the brick rambler

with a warm vanilla scent

I am from the apple trees

The river birch

whose long gone limbs I remember

as if they were my own.

I am from Christmas gatherings and a large family

from my Dad and little Larky

I’m from hand-me-downs and organic food

and from the nightly news.

I’m from “Santa Claus is coming” and “nice jobs”

and Bob Marley music

I’m from weekends in a hockey arena

I’m from Minnesota and Germany

Pineapple water and tacos

From our trip to Hawaii

with the clear and wavy ocean water

whose pictures are kept close

In my heart forever.  

Happiness in Unexpected Situations

"I, the son of a dear father murther'd,

Prompted by revenge by heaven and hell, 

Must (like a whore) unpack my heart with words 

And fall a-cursing like a very drab, 

A scullion! [...]

That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaim'd their malefactions [...]

Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks;

I'll tent him to the quick. If he but blench,

I know my course. The spirit I have seen

May be a devil; and the devil may hath power" 

-The Tragedy of Hamlet (2.2. 1660-1674)

Grief and sorrow are the backing force behind why people feel that they deserve justice. Grief and sorrow have another side though; they can be formed from guilt. The quote from act 2 scene 2 in The Tragedy of Hamlet, show both sides of grief and sorrow. Hamlet is grieving over the death of his father and he feels that his fathers murder is not just. That feeling of revenge puts him in a position where he wants to get back with his uncle who killed him.  Later in the verse, Hamlet describes his plan to make his uncles guilt come out. Guilt eats you up and causes you to feel sorrow for what you have done in the past. Hamlet has realized this and used it against his uncle. Hamlet's mourning process continues throughout the story.

Grieving and mourning is a long process that brings back memories, and brings along horrible days of mixed emotions. Everybody has a "bad" day every so often, and that is what the mourning process is; an accumulation of bad days back to back. In those days, you say things that you don't mean and you act in ways that you normally wouldn't. Hamlet says that "I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us" (3.1. 1817-1820). Leading up to Hamlet's speaking, he had a relatively bad day. He had taken part in a disagreement with Ophelia who is what he believes to be the love of his life. Hamlet had made this comment about himself that he may not have said if he were in his normal state of mind. 

In this time in the mourning process, everything that at one point made you feel happy, seems to turn against you to become grief . Shakespeare describes this as "The passion ending, doth the purpose lose. The violence of either grief or joy, their own enactures with themselves destroy. Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament" (3.2. 2086-2089). Essentially, this means that grief and joy may bring us to action but, when the feelings of grief or joy are done, our encouragement to continue acting, disappears. This causes us to realize that joy turns into grief.

Nobody can go through life only grieving over the death of somebody such as a father or mother, nor could they go through life having endless joy. Everybody gets hit with melancholy or happiness at least once in their life. This is the cycle of mourning. You experience grief, sorrow, guilt, revenge, justice, and finally, happiness. Bad times start the mourning cycle, and good times end it. Each time something major happens negatively to you, the process restarts. You will find happiness once again though. The No Fear Shakespeare version of The Tragedy of Hamlet, says that "Joy turns into grief  in a blink of an eye, and grief becomes joy just as quickly. This world is not made for either to last long in, and it's no surprise that even our loves changes along with our luck" (3.2. 185-190). Joy turns to grief and grief turns into joy just as easily.

Justice

Justice, as defined by the dictionary, means something that has the quality of being just. That something, must be rightful and lawful. Even though most people know the dictionary’s definition of justice, many people believe that justice is similar to revenge or to becoming "fair" with another person. Justice requires a punishment when revenge comes into play. This means that to receive justice a compromise must take place.

Most compromises are brought to courts across the world. In every court case, there are two parties, the defendants party and the plaintiff party. Because there will always be two parties, how can justice be attained?

"An eye for an eye" is an older way to phrase justice. If you are a drunk driver and you paralyze a man that you hit while driving your car, although you may serve a few years in jail, how is it just to the person that you paralyzed? If the judicial system were to utilize the eye for an eye analogy of  justice, your punishment would be equal to the crime that you committed. The society that we live in, makes a smaller compromise of justice by sending people to jail for reduced periods of time. Often times, the compromise does not bring closure to the victim.

Human beings need closure; we crave the feeling that a person who has hurt us will feel the same way that we feel or have felt in the past. We have an emotional side to the things that have affected us, therefore, justice is a very difficult thing to attain. It is nearly impossible to make a perfect compromise with the right amount of punishment that will please two different people or two different groups of people.

Punishment is the driving factor behind why people avoid committing crimes. Punishment is necessary though when justice needs to be reached. On page 4 in the book The Republic, Plato describes that “When a man thinks himself to be near death and cares enter his mind that he never had before; the tales of a world below and the punishment which is exacted there of deeds done here were once a laughing matter to him, but now he is tormented with the thought that they may be true: either from the weakness of age, or because he is now drawing nearer to that other place, he has a clearer view of these things; suspicions and alarms crowd quickly upon him, and he begins to reflect and consider what wrongs he has done to others.”

You cannot simply reach justice in any court case. You cannot undo what you have done. If you deal drugs and get caught, you will never reach a just standpoint from anything in the world because you cause an abrupt change in the way something or someone operates for each use of your drug. If you murder someone, you will never reach justice either because you will never be able to bring back the person that you killed. People forgive and forget, but you cannot undo an action that you have committed.

Nonfiction Project (Fear)

Fear is a complex subject. It is different to every person that you will speak to and each of these people will be afraid of something different. The project that Jillianne Hovland and I conducted, had a goal to discover and learn more about the secrets of fear and how fear effects people differently.

Together, we tackled the broad subject by learning about how stories effect different people. We interviewed Bob Gasch, who is a storyteller in our area, to learn about fear and surprise that he uses in his stories.  This is the interview that started our story; it gave us an excellent base to begin further research.

Continuing in the process of creating this project, we looked at different websites that focused solely on fear and how to understand it. What we took out of this is that there are two main types of fear but it all serves the same purpose; the purpose of the feeling of fear and its emotions is to keep us out of danger and harm.

The next step in forming our project was by far the most difficult. It required us to interview many different people on their fears and how they effect them physically, mentally, and emotionally. After each interview, a conclusion was drawn about fear. Every time we had an interview, the conclusion had very similar characteristics about their reactions to fear, but there were very many that had no resemblance of each other whatsoever.

Most people felt a pit or a drop in their stomach when their fear was brought into play. People who's fear was taken by surprise felt the fear a different way than those who put themselves into the situation. The surprised cases became nervous and developed a fear that has lasted for many years. People who were expecting the situation, described their feelings as a "huge adrenaline rush", and even an "adrenaline high". They liked what they were feeling.

I hope that when people listen to the podcast, they take out that fear is different to everybody. You cannot judge somebody because of what they are afraid of because everybody is afraid of something. I would also hope that people would be better informed of what they are feeling and how that it effects their body and their emotions.

During the creation of this project, I have not only learned more than I expected to, but I have discovered more things about different people. I now know why I like to watch a scary movie or go on a roller-coaster that may make me sick. This project forced me to pursue one topic and learn as much as I could about it. I accomplished what I wanted to discover about fear.