It's always been my belief that if anyone involved in minor hockey deserves an award, it's the parent who wakes up at 5 a.m. every rainy Tuesday morning and schleps his or her kid's gear into the arena before heading to Tim's for a double-double and an apple fritter.
Those are the MVPs in my mind. But when I was at the Squamish Minor Hockey awards presentation last week, there were no "Most Valuable Parent" or "Unsung Hero" awards among the "Top Forward" or "Most Improved Player" recognition.
Mostly, the event stuck to the usual sporting clichés: "we had an up and down season," "our room remained positive," and "it was a team effort." Then, when coaches began doling out hardware, the first-person pronoun was no longer used. "We and us" became "he and him" and "the team" became "the player."
Until one Peewee coach, Simon Hudson, got up and confessed that one of the reasons he quit competitive hockey was because he was often passed up for awards. This reminds us that the recognition given to one player is almost always taken at the expense of another.
Of course, the counter-argument is that the awards provide some motivation for players to excel, to push their limits, to become better. But there's a fundamental flaw with this thinking, and Hudson expressed it eloquently: "If you spend your whole life trying to be better than everyone else, you may never know how good you could have been."
In a sense, awards limit us by limiting our imagination of what is possible. For kids, especially, awards can create a mindset that one is only successful if his or her achievements are acknowledged publicly. Instead of trying "to be your best," awards can teach young people that "you've failed unless you're better than the others around you." It takes a very special person to persevere in the face of unrelenting failure. Maybe minor hockey and other organizations should reflect on why kids quit the game. Maybe, like Simon, they just grew tired of feeling like second-rate players.
Apparently, many minor hockey associations -including West Vancouver and New Westminster - have done away with individual awards altogether. And it's noteworthy that Squamish Youth Soccer doesn't have individual awards for each team.
The coaches, managers, and kids involved in the game are mostly doing it for the right reasons. For the parents, they just want to see their kids have fun. Well, that and enjoy an early morning fritter, too.
