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After a kind of rough practice session on Friday evening, we had a couple games on our plate over the weekend. By rough, I mean passes all over the place, guys beginning to grumble when you have them run drills after drills practicing basic skills. One of my assistant, Gabriel's dad, had pressed them to put the puck on the net and not everywhere around. As I reported last week, we only put 4 shots on goal in the third period of our previous loss. Sometimes the kids just wait too long and end up losing the puck but sometimes they just don't aim. It then becomes a matter of practicing the basic skill of shooting to the net. Gabriel's dad had any player shooting wide of the net do 5 pushups. Some kids didn't like that...
The fact the practice was at 9pm on Friday evening probably didn't help the mood of anybody. That's pretty darn late in the week to try and keep the kids' attention...
Game #8, home vs Éclaireurs-3
Loïck called me around dinner time on Saturday to tell me he wouldn't be at the game. Said he wasn't feeling well. I wasn't expecting to have any other missing player but Alex Fo never showed up. When I reached him thourgh Facebook on Sunday, he said he was in the woods and his cell had to network to call. Grrr...
Pre-game speech was about us trying to come out and be awake from the start, given that we'd dug ourselves a hole in our two previous games, not counting the one against the girls. We'd even given up a goal only 16 seconds into the game last week.
Well, don't know if it was the very late start of the game, 9:30 pm, or what else but we beat our record, this time allowing a goal in 7 seconds. Yup, you read that right, SEVEN SECONDS!!! DAMMIT, had there been absolutely no players on the ice, and no goalie either, I'm not so sure they could have scored much faster. While that goal at 16 seconds in the previous week was a high shot arount Andrew's shoulder pad, this one was a weak one between his leg. He, much like everybody else, WAS NOT READY! And I was pissed. It all went down from there. We were down 5-1 after one period against a 13th place team I seriously thought we had more than a fighting chance against.
Guys continued their grumbling from the previous day's practice and one or two of them started bitching about not receiving enough passes their while actually eating up the puck themselves.
We're not allowed time outs so I couldn't call one and try to rally the troups midway through the first period. There's only a one minute break between periods but I can assure you I gave the kids an earful between the first and the second periods.
We never really got back in the game but we stopped it from really getting much worse. That or the other team didn't try as hard in the last two periods, heh...
Final Score:
Commandeurs-1: 1
Éclaireurs-3: 7
Don't know why but I took that loss pretty hard, almost on a personal level. I felt ovewhelmed during that game, kinda feeling as if my message of hard work wasn't getting through.
I've said it before, I might have played some hockey and while I do know most of the basics of actually playing the game as an individual, I'm not the best tactician and after that game, I certainly felt I would never be able to get them to play together if they just stopped buying into my message.
A 9:30 start time meant the game ended at 11, or maybe a bit earlier since half of the third period was played in "running time" mode because there was a 6 goal differential. "Running time" means the clock doesn't stop during stoppages of play. Still, we made it back home around 11:15 and I was still so pissed, I didn't go to bed until maybe 12:30 and didn't fall asleep until well past 1:15. Not only was I pissed about the missed opportunities of the past few games, I kept thinking about our upcoming schedule that would include games against the higher ranked teams and I was kind of getting depressed and desperate...
FM
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