It's essentially a rite of passage that a hockey parent must make to go to the early morning practice. It's something that is passed down from generations of hockey families. The sickening feeling the night before knowing that the alarm needs to be set for the 6 am practice.
For those that aren't immersed in the sport and the practice of waking up the 7 year old next big league (sorry meant to say Beer League) prospect, I will let you in on it. We parents and some people who are crazy enough to be parent coaches (I'm one), will pay hundreds of dollars to a local arena for the opportunity to rise out of the warmth of a blanketed bed, go outside and start the car in -20 weather (so it can be warmer than you will be for the next hour and a half of your life), so you can take up your frozen piece of bench in the practice arena.
It's an especially hateful process if the coach is insane and would like to have his players there 45 minutes ahead of time so he or she can "talk" to the players. Have I mentioned how excited the kids are to enter the dressing room at that hour? Zombies for the most part that stumble in hardly saying a word. They aren't absorbing any sort of instruction in that room at that time.
There is always the one kid of course that appears as though it is actually mid day and just came off of the Aerosmith rollercoaster at Disney. Once in awhile you may even run ino a coach like that as well that yells out "Good Morning...Isn't this Great?!...Woooo Hoooo! Who's excited?!!" There has to be these people or the buzz and rattle of the dressing room heater that is set to not freezing but miserable would be the only thing you would hear.
The parents huddle like cattle in a field, typically in a corner of the arena sipping on coffee and bond over complaints about how early it is for the first ten minutes, and why the U17 teams aren't the ones that have this ice time...they could drive themselves!!
Back to the dressing room. At the U7 to probably about U11 level these players, although they can tie their own shoes, somehow they have no ability to tie a pair of skates. That's absolute truth. They aren't faking it, they can actually not tie a pair of skates. Apparently the gear they wear must be such a drain on their physical abilities and their level of cognition that they are immediately perplexed when they look at the laces criss crossed back and forth with no idea on which to pull. If they do get it right, then the skate is so loose on their ankles they could quite possibly walk out of their skates on the way to the ice surface. This all to tell you that the parent coach ends up tying several pairs of skates. Did you know that the time of day is directly proportionate to how painful it is to tie a kids skates? For some reason, perhaps early onset hockey parent arthritis, as an adult it hurts to tie skates in the early morning. It actually hurts. You can identify anyone that does it rather easily if you wish. Just have a look at the outside of the pinky finger. About 3/4 of the way to the finger tip, on the outside, near the crease of the farthest knuckle is the badge of hockey skate tying honour. The small calloused patch that grows throughout the season. I'm pretty sure that the thickness of the pinky finger on the brave souls who do tie these skates goes up measurably from October to March and then shrinks over the summer due to lack of use.
All of this to watch the first 15 minutes of the practice as the coaches try to coax some sort of motor skill into the young phenoms bodies with a carefully planned out drill with more changes in direction than a traffic circle in Cairo, before they resolve to the fact that they better just stick with the basics for this one.
All of this, and still we do it...and guess what?...the crazy part from what I've been told from the elders in the hockey parent alumni is that once it's all said and done and the kids move on...that it is one of the things you miss the most. It will be awhile before I will get to verify that but for now I'm going to relish the fact that we get a break in the early ice lottery for this weekend and my tender pinkies currently don't miss that part at all.