Last Monday, I and my two other friends volunteered and we were coaching children and adults to skate and play ice hockey. The first hour the children from ages 5 to 12 had lessons. It was great to give back to the community, but also I realized how hard learning to skate and play hockey is. Since I played ice-hockey for 15 years a lot of things come for granted. I do not think about most anything except the games. I don’t have to think about the balance, how to cross over, how to stop. I do it subconsciously, like breathing or heartbeat. Yes, I was in their shoes too way back, but I completely forgot about how I was failing on the ice and crying because I hit the ice too hard.
Secondly, I realized the importance of parents for children in doing some kind of sport and how things have changed since I was playing. Lately, I’ve read a lot of articles about the children’s success of doing a sport is directly derived from the ability to financially support the children. Unfortunately, it became the unspoken rule and that is not how it was when I was 6 years old. I remember that the club that I was starting to play for provided an equipment for the first 2 years, so anyone could afford it for the first 2 years. The coaches were great, so everyone has the same conditions. These kids that we were teaching to skate and play ice-hockey will never have the chance play hockey or do figure skating at respectively high level because for whatever reason they did not have the opportunity, which leads me to a conclusion.
If you played sport at higher level like AAA, varsity, or college level, you can make a big different and a happy day for bunch of kids, even you were never a professional in that sport.
The second hour, we were teaching adults to skate, which was fun to see people enjoy the sport for the sake of playing the sport.