Ryan has never been able to fully explain to us why certain shots-on-goal totals in NHL games trigger for him bouts of extreme anxiety. Maybe if I understood why it bothered him so much, I could better help him through these episodes, but the explanation doesn’t really matter. What matters is the anxiety is real. […]
Read more "A Safe Space"“Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.” It’s a quote famously attributed to legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. Thankfully, Mr. Lombardi wasn’t speaking of youth sports. He was a professional coach, paid to deliver results with players whose job it was to play football. He was not speaking of, […]
Read more "Show Me a Good Loser"It feels like a year since I last posted, but it has only been five days. We were supposed to fly to a family gathering this weekend. That was the plan, anyway. Winter air travel is always dicey. We’ve been pretty lucky over the years to avoid bad delays, or when they happened we were […]
Read more "Grounded"Our child, clearly dogged by anxiety, goes over school supplies on the last day of summer vacation. Items are frantically sorted, color-coded according to an arbitrary system of the child’s own making — one that must be followed at all costs. But, there is a problem. There’s one too few binders or one too many […]
Read more "Flipping the Script"Yesterday was the day. Time to pay off “the bet.” Ryan was targeting July 4 for weeks — dating back to when I was on the road for the Stanley Cup Final. My pay-off for losing our epic street-hockey series was to serve as the color analyst (to Ryan’s play-by-play) for a Hockey Guys game. […]
Read more "Satisfying ‘The Bet’"
Pucks and Puzzle Pieces 