Sizing up minor hockey

Interesting thoughts today from Toronto Maple Leafs assistant captain Mike Komisarek on his size difference being a factor in making a hit on Colorado Avalanche Mark Olver look worse than it was intended to be.
He tells the Toronto Star, "I hit the guy, I thought the puck was there. I thought it was pretty good time. The only thing that might have hurt me was the height difference ... I go in and have my elbow to my body and try to get my shoulder to his chest. If that's not a clean hit then I don't know what is."
His comments follow the hit by Boston Bruins captain Zdeno Chara, the biggest guy in the NHL, in Montreal.
It begs the question, should minor hockey be organized according to body size and ability, not birth dates, especially during the early years of checking?

Charity work a way to build teams

Many minor hockey teams have community-minded parents and coaches who organize ways for the the kids to do charitable work as a team-building exercise. Ours is no different and for years has had a tradition of volunteering with the London Food Bank. In fact, community newspaper or website stories about teams volunteering are the most popular topic that pops up with my minor hockey web crawler.
Here's one of Glenda's shots of the boys taking a short break while working at the food bank.

Benched

I remember the first time my son missed a shift, almost like I remember where I was when JFK was shot.
He was a senior tyke, assigned to a team after much debate because he was new to hockey and, just like his dad, his skating was suspect.
The head coach was a prototype child-first veteran of minor hockey and all was well when he was behind the bench. After all, it's not hard to coach tykes. The buzzer sounds every two minutes and the kids change. Everyone plays the same.
But not on this day at Nichols arena when the head coach was away and his uber-competitive assistant was at play.
The 2IC dutifully rotated the house league seven-year-olds until the dying minutes. With the regular season game hanging in the balance, and our team trailing by one, he tightened the bench in an oh-so-exciting pro move. Left waiting for their turns were my son and another boy. The assistant coach double-shifted his own kid.
Twit.
Ice time and attitudes, quite rightly, change as kids move through the age groups or jump up to competitive hockey. In competitive minor hockey, deploying the skills of kids in different situations is part of the coach's essential toolkit. The point is to win games, always, not to carefully balance playing time.
And sometimes kids bench themselves either during the course of a game. As they get older, understandable distractions start taking hold. Girlfriends (more about their impact in a future post), part-time jobs and yes, even homework, conspire to keep teens out of entire games.
Makes missing a shift in tyke seem like child's play.