Our pandemic season — Sam Weinman

In late spring or summer— it all seems to blend together now—Will and I started doing workouts in whatever vacant space we could find around the house. It was basic stuff, pushups and air squats, maybe a few light weights mixed in as well. We’d always close with “skaters”— pushing off from one leg to another as if skating down the ice. When Will would start to fade, I’d create a hockey scenario as motivation.

“Come on,” I’d say. “Ten seconds left in the period.”

Will would always rally then, even the subtle reminder of a next hockey season providing his 12-year-old legs a jolt.

In truth, I had no idea if there would be a next hockey season, or what it would look like if there was. Some time early on in the pandemic, to go with more reasonable fears about illness, my aging parents, and a flailing economy, I began to think about hockey. I couldn’t help it. Our lives had long bent to the rhythms of the season—tryouts in spring, a camp or two over the summer, the uncertain migration back to the rink the first week in September—and I wondered if this, too, would be washed away by Covid. Maybe it was wrong to have such petty concerns back then. But you only know what you know.

The end of summer brought with it a tentative plan for our hockey program. Practices but no games. Temperature checks before every session. Technically kids weren’t supposed to even battle for a puck in the corner, but they would be on skates. It was better than nothing.

From afar, this had all the makings of the worst hockey season we’ve ever had. I’ve coached for more than a decade, and each one of those has been defined by locker room silliness and parents huddled behind the glass at games. Every month or so was a tournament weekend when kids ran themselves ragged running around hotels, and then we all drove home exhausted with Dunkin’ Donut cups strewn across our backseats.

This winter had none of that, and what was worse for me, it was to be the last year. Will was in his final year as a Pee Wee, and when he and his friends moved on to Bantams, the dad coaches among us would retire to the bleachers. I had struggled with that thought already, but now even our final year coaching looked to be a thin facsimile of those that came before. On the list of raw deals from Covid, this one doesn’t even merit a keystroke. But there. I just did it anyway.

It was an unusual season from the start. Kids showed up at rinks fully dressed and in skate guards like they did when first learning to skate. With their faces hidden behind masks, it took me until March to know some wore braces. And for a while, it was just an endless string of drills. Skating, passing, small area games where the kids were confined to one side of the rink. This was all we were allowed. When Terry, our head coach and a dad like me, would gather the kids to talk about the distant prospect of playing games, I sometimes wondered if he was delusional. The virus was raging everywhere. Never mind if we had a decent power play. I was more worried they were going to shut the doors of ice rinks altogether.

This sense of dread— that someone would show up to the rink with a fever, that Covid floated through the cold air of the rink without anyone knowing—was most pronounced in the hours before practice. But by the time we stepped on the ice, it was just hockey. The kids darted around, the coaches yelled. By the time the Zamboni doors opened and we filed off the ice, the predominant conversation was about which drills worked and which didn’t, and who’s game was rounding into form.

One of the quiet challenges of the pandemic was in frequently having to recalibrate expectations. I would travel a broad spectrum daily. One moment you just wanted everyone to stay healthy. The next you wondered why we couldn’t just play that tournament in Philadelphia. This whole dilemma was layered with privilege, I get it. Our pandemic year was always about choices. Plenty of others didn’t even have that.

The season felt like a race, against the virus, against the prospect of quarantine, against the inevitable decision to send everyone home and try again next year. Every ice session we eluded such an outcome felt like a victory. Will was improving, the kids were having fun together. By the time the new year came, I decided if they shut it down now, we still made out OK.

Somehow, the opposite came true. In February came word that we could play games again. Real uniforms, real refs, the score tabulated out in the open instead of in our heads. “Better than we hoped,” Ollie, another dad coach, said. Those power-play drills no longer seemed so pointless.

The early sense was we were a good team, possibly very good—fast, dogged, unselfish. James, our burly, smiling goaltender, was once the quintessential big kid who got in the way of pucks, but at 12, he had become a student of the position—persistent, composed, unfailingly positive. We had pure goal scorers, corner muckers, and a core of defensemen, my son among them, who steered the puck out of danger areas then started the rush up ice. For most of the first four months of the season, we had to settle for beating up on each other. When we finally got a crack at other teams, it was as if we were making up for lost time.

We won our first game 8-0, then the second game by more than that. The trend continued for most of the truncated league season, the only snag a two-game set in which the kids stopped passing in the third period, overstayed their shifts on the ice, then surrendered a late lead both times. The following week we gathered the kids for a pre-practice meeting where we laid out a new plan. The response was resounding. The kids passed more. They changed their own lines like pros. We now knew definitively what worked and what didn’t.

In a season of fluid expectations, ours steadily inched up. First I wanted Will out of the house, then I wanted to see him progress, then when games started and we realized our potential, it was hard to stop. We wanted to keep going. It wasn’t really about winning as much as it was honoring the space hockey occupied in this strange year— how we had wrestled back control of one part of our lives when so much else was beyond our reach. We didn’t think any of it would really matter when we put the kids through hours of practices in the depths of December. But it mattered now, to the extent that any Pee Wee hockey ever really can.

When the prospect of trying to qualify for the state tournament was first broached, there was a brief charade of a debate. The season usually ended in March, but this could mean another six weeks, cutting into baseball and lacrosse and assorted school spring breaks.

It actually wasn’t much of a debate at all. This group was too special, the momentum too strong. We traveled an hour north for the regional qualifying tournament in late March, allowing two goals in four games.

Signing the scoresheet at the end of one game, an opposing coach wished us luck in states. “I’m going to show my kids the video of your team,” he said. “That’s how you're supposed to play.”

Will wasn’t supposed to play hockey. When Charlie, his older brother, was four, I had to coax him into playing, every session at that age a negotiation to just get him on the ice. Even as Charlie warmed to the sport, we decided we wouldn’t push Will in the same way. We made no mention of hockey and at first, he didn’t express much interest, either. At age 5, we signed him up for basketball.

Then one day Will called out from the backseat that he wanted to play. He had friends who were skating, and he wanted to see what it was like, so we cobbled together some equipment and I agreed to join him on the ice for his first practice. As a lifelong player, I didn’t need him to ask twice.

Will at the very beginning, just trying to stay upright.

The early days for any hockey player are mostly a battle against gravity. Will was always big for his age -- lean and limber, with long legs that tangled easily, but could also produce long efficient strides up ice. He fell constantly that first practice, but less over the ensuing weeks. Each time we shuffled out of the rink, he would ask when we could go back

Hockey parents are notorious for overestimating their kids’ potential. If our kids were all as good as we thought, the NHL would need a thousand teams. I know Will skates better than I ever did, and has a knack for creative flourishes with the puck. But really his greatest asset is his passion for playing, how it came from him from the start, and has continued that way throughout.

Turns out his friends were all the same way. Each age group in a hockey program forges a distinct identity, and the “2008s” seemed to feed off each other, skating and passing with zeal, chasing after the puck as if a loose piece of candy. I have pictures of them all in the early days of the junior clinic—Will and all his buddies, all kids with red cheeks and oversized helmets who craned their necks to look intently up at the coaches. The dad coaches among us sensed early they had the makings of a good team, and the intervening years suggested we were right. Then came this strange pandemic season, and one last chance to see how good we really were.

We drove north to Buffalo in late April, through a snow squall outside of Rochester, and into our first of three round-robin games. The weeks before were filled with practices and scrimmages, along with the lingering fear that the virus would take one last victory lap and derail the whole trip—sickness, quarantine, you name it. It never happened. When we filed into the rink for Game 1, we even took seats in the locker room for the first time all year.

We burst out to a big lead, to the point that by the start of the third period, we decided we needed to hold back, out of a sense of fairness, or decorum, or perhaps good karma that we’d need later. Our opponent from Buffalo seized on our softening. They scored early in the period, Then minutes later, after Will tried to spin away from a player and fumbled a puck at mid-ice, they scored again. We called the team in. “Never mind,” Terry said. “Go back to normal.”

At the NY State Tournament in Niagara, N.Y.

We pumped in three more goals to end the game, laughing as we left the ice. “Apparently we only know one way to play,” we said.

We played that way the next two games as well, withstanding early goals from upstate opponents before overpowering them the rest of the way. Our spot in the semifinals secured, we had reason to celebrate, but also for concern: on the other side of the bracket, another team was winning just as big.

On Saturday afternoon, with the round robin complete and the semifinals the next morning, I snuck off to a public golf course for a few holes before dinner. Will was happy running around the hotel, and I was restless. On the first tee I was randomly paired with two high school kids who, it turns out, had just completed their high school hockey seasons. We talked about hockey, and their seasons, and how I could only play a few holes because I had to get back for a team dinner.

For five holes, I played better than I ever have. I hit every fairway, then every green. Even par through five holes, I started looking at my watch. “I almost want to keep going,” I said.

The two boys looked at each other, and then at me, their own Pee Wee hockey memories seeming to color their expression

“Team dinner,” one of them said. “You gotta be there.”

I left soon after to drive back to the hotel, where Will and his teammates were gathered in the back playing cornhole and throwing a football. On the patio, the parents looked on over beers and buffalo wings, talking about hockey, the games ahead, a little bit about the next season. It was our last night together as a team, the season would end the next day regardless. As I crouched down for a photo in front of Will, I thought about how foolish it would have been to keep playing golf.

We ended up losing our last game. I should probably get that out of the way now. I could draw out the final day, how we survived a tense semifinal by erupting for three goals in the third to earn a berth in the championship. How in the finals we knew as early as warmups that our upstate opponent would be the best team we played all season. Then how we overachieved for half the game by staying within a goal before their size, speed and skill overwhelmed our scrappy little group.

I could tell you how we characterized our opponents to make ourselves feel better. That some of the players looked old enough to drive to the rink, or that they must have drawn from a broader area than our modest town team. It didn’t matter—they were better. If we had to lose to someone, might as well have been to them.

Down 4-0 heading into the third, we spoke little of whatever tactical adjustments we needed to claw ourselves back into the game. By then reality had already struck. Slumped in a chair in the locker room, Terry even said it out loud. “Man, these guys are good,” he said to our team. It wasn’t that we had given up—in fact we scored two goals to start the third—but we sensed our best hope was in recognizing we had nothing to lose.

Eventually, though, time ran out, and the kids skated off the bench to meet James. There was a runner-up trophy, and then we posed for one last sullen photo on the ice. In the locker room came the inevitable streams of tears and goodbye hugs as we stuffed all the game jerseys into trash bags. We had privately hoped our return home would be by way of a parade for the new state champions. Instead we made the six-hour trek in the dark, Will asleep in the front seat as we pulled into our driveway.

The tidiest storyline would have been to win that final game. That part still stings even now. But I’ve also thought about how that would have missed the point of this season, a year that was about accepting less, and being grateful for what we had. Championships and parades—this is not what Will thought about while he pushed through workouts inside last year. Our team just wanted to play hockey, and we ended up playing the last game the season had to offer. It was our most challenging season. But probably our best season, too.