Who Do You Play For?

                            Who Do You Play For? 

For those of you who are still getting to know me, our son, Christopher, was a hockey goalie from the age of five through the end of his first year of Juniors hockey, when he lived away from home, rode the bus, spent a lot of time we weren't supposed to know about driving to northern Minnesota to see his girlfriend, and finishing high school online.  As anyone who has had a child with a career will know, this has lots of ramifications for your entire family. We were no exception.  

One of the results of this lifestyle was an ever-present. low level of stress, that you don't even realize is there until you don't live with it anymore.  We all have funny ways of dealing with stress.  Doug and I used to know if there was a high level of child stress (either hockey-centered or not) if we went downstairs at night and found our two younger kids asleep on the floor in front of he television, watching the movie Miracle on repeat.  You wear out a lot of DVDs this way.

Bear with me.  I am going to share.

So, why this?  Why now?  First, there certainly is stress involved in getting the final submission in, thinking about the logistics of traveling half way around the world with a lot of people and a lot of stuff, and trying to get us all prepared for some of the cultural things we have talked abut here.  I could use a night of subliminal Miracle.

Beyond that, Who Do You Play For?  We tried out for a lot of teams over the years, and one of the toughest things to deal with, on and off the ice, I think, was transitioning to new teams and new families that we all might have had rather ambivalent relationships with before. Who Do You Play For?  and How Do We Do It?

I have been thinking about this a lot as we have been working on getting our submission done, trying to work out who is responsible for what, and trying to nudge us toward the next phase of the CPC.  (There is a lot of work to be done in the next two weeks--it isn't vacation, folks.)

As with most teams, we have multiple loyalties, coaches and owners.  A lot of time, money, and work has gone in to getting us this far.  I'd like to re-focus us at this point.  Who Do You Play For?

First, most importantly, we will only do good work if we play for these little guys:

Next, we have people we are indebted to in more ways than one.  Whose names are literally and figuratively on the back of our shirts?