Rest 4.5:D8 (D408) Persistence pays off

Today we had another of our CAHA weekends.  We were scheduled for 2 games.  Our first game was against the #2 team in our division (#3 in the country).  My son played his worst game of the year (as did the team) and we lost 16-0.  After the game, the coach sat the kids down in the locker room and explained to them the things they needed to start doing better. He talked about earning the respect of other teams.  He spoke about how they must turn things around and now.  He let them know exactly what it was going to take for them to make a move and to earn some respect.  He also asked them to play all 3 periods of the next game hard to show respect for his friend, our other coach, who wasn't present for the morning game due to work obligations.

After that discussion we all went to breakfast and then on to the team manager's house.  On the way to the team manager's house several parents called to complain about the long "tirade" of the coach.  This created some major drama.  The parents seem to have the opinion that the coach doesn't know what he is doing.  I was quite amused in some respects by all of it.

Prior to our evening game the same coach came in and gave the kids another speech.  He basically made them tell everyone on the team what was something they had done wrong in the previous game and how they were going to fix that in the next game.  He reminded them of their promise from the morning game.  He pushed them to play all 3 periods hard.

Well, those kids went out and took the ice against a team they lost to 13-1 just 3 weeks ago.  After the first period we were down 2-1.  After the second period we were down 2-1.  The final score was a 3-2 loss for our team.  So many firsts happened during this game:  the first time we took the first shot on goal of the game, first time we had more than 15 shots on goal, first time in an official game where we scored more than 1 goal, first time we played all 3 periods of a game, first time we were in a game for all 3 periods.