While the Window Is Open
Time, Trade-Offs, and Raising Kids in Youth Sports
For the last 10 years, one of my favorite parts of winter has been coaching youth hockey. It’s a way to give back to the game and spend time with my kids. Most of those years were spent leading teams for my older kids, Beau and Bree. Now that they’ve moved into high school and have paid coaches, I’ve jumped back in with my youngest son, Zach’s team.
In Minnesota hockey, the 9–11 age group is called Squirts. It’s a window of innocence that often marks the last time kids will dance to locker room music before heading out on the ice.
Zach’s team won a lot of games, collected several tournament trophies, and finished second in the district.
What stood out at the end-of-season party wasn’t winning. Each player stood up and shared their favorite memory. What came up over and over were knee hockey and water slides at tournament hotels, wall ball before practice, one player who kept everyone laughing, and a teammate’s only goal of the season that had the whole bench going crazy.
I wasn’t surprised. Those are the things I remember from when I was their age. Knees scraped up from hotel hockey and smelling like chlorine.
As a coach, the end of the hockey season brings a familiar question from parents: what should my kid do in the off-season? There are two responses, the one I want to give and the one I actually give.
The one I want to give is simple. We just finished five months of non-stop hockey. Put the gear away and go do other things. If they like playing sports, play as many as possible. Be curious. Try new things. We’ll see you at the pre-season skates next fall.
The answer I give is different. I still point them toward spring and fall leagues and summer camps. If you’re not advancing in the off-season, it feels like you’re falling behind.
We watch a lot of NHL hockey in my house. I’ve never watched a game and thought: these players just aren’t good enough. We need to spend more time preparing our youth to raise the level of play.
Yet the year-round structure we’ve built for kids suggests otherwise.
If that’s not the case, what problem are we actually trying to solve?
The game is already incredible at the highest level.
My kid is competing against yours for a limited number of spots on the top team. If yours is doing leagues and camps and mine isn’t, it feels like I’m lowering my chances.
And you and I choose the leagues and camps, driven by our own competitiveness and the fear that our kids might fall behind. We’d likely agree it’s a little crazy, then give each other a sheepish wave at the rink later that summer.
If every player had to hand over their gear at the end of the season and not return until next year, would you be okay with that?
It might feel like a relief, like a quiet ceasefire.
That might also be the smarter play.
I was volunteering in a high school classroom. The topic was the law of diminishing returns, and I was trying to find a way to make it easier to understand.
So I brought in a large bucket of ice cream, cones, and a handful of scoopers. We timed how many cones we could make in a minute with one person scooping. Then we tried two people, then three, and so on. After a certain point, adding more people didn’t help. It actually slowed us down. We’d hit diminishing returns.
It’s easy to believe more is always better. But at some point, another hour of ice time doesn’t help the way we think it does. There’s no clear signal, no moment when you know your time would be better spent somewhere else.
Add in coaches and programs with their own incentives, and the pressure to keep up, and it gets harder to think clearly.
By the time our kids turn 18, roughly 90% of the time we’ll ever have with them is already behind us.
These years together are a window. It opens and it closes.
We get one chance to fill that time.
In 2020, as COVID set in, I texted Beau’s baseball coach to ask the odds we’d play that summer.
His reply: 1%.
That was all we needed. We booked a small cabin on a lake a couple hours north of the Twin Cities.
We ended up having a shortened baseball season, but it looked nothing like normal. No seven-day-a-week schedule stretching into late July. Just a couple of days each week, with a few tournaments scattered throughout. Everything was optional.
His coach’s message was simple: enjoy your summer.
We invited friends and their families to the cabin, all of us with wide-open summers. No schedule juggling. It just worked.
Mornings on the porch with coffee. Days outside — hiking, biking, tubing on the lake, stickball in the yard, golf and pickleball. We added a smoker, and dinners became big group meals around the picnic table. Bonfires at night. Music, s’mores, everyone hanging out.
What made it special was the people, the shared time, and the randomness of it all. No one had anywhere to be.
The following summer, back at the ballfields, we could feel what was missing. So we made a change, shifting to sporting options that were weekday only, with weekends mostly left open.
You don’t need a cabin to have that kind of summer. You just need the space for it.
The season ends, and we fill it right back in. It’s hard to leave it open — not because it’s clearly the better choice, but because what we lose is harder to see.
What we gain is easy to point to: more reps, more chances to improve.
What we give up is the time that never gets created — the things that don’t happen.
Lately, with hockey over and nothing new started yet, things have opened up. My youngest gets home, grabs his bike, and disappears for hours. He comes back dirty, sweaty, and full of stories.
The path doesn’t always go the way we imagine. I see it in my own house. All three of my kids have stayed with hockey, but everything else has shifted — softball to lacrosse to track, baseball to lacrosse to golf. Their interests change. New things take hold.
Year-round focus, specialized training, and constant progression make sense for a small number of players. Some kids are wired for it, and some may truly have that kind of upside.
It’s just hard to know that early, and easy to act like we do. We’re making long-term trade-offs based on a future only a few will actually experience. There was a time when you were excited for the change of seasons — when putting the bag away felt safe.
My kids are all better athletes than I was. In our area, they’re probably solid B athletes.
I love my B athletes. Competitive, engaged, fun, with just enough edge.
The odds of them playing varsity sports in high school are low.
There’s some peace in being honest about it.
When I meet with parents before the season starts, I remind them that most of our kids won’t play this sport competitively beyond high school.
What we’re really doing is grooming future Thursday night bar league hockey players.
That line usually creates an uncomfortable shift in the room. It should. The bigger job is raising good humans, and it deserves as much thought as the off-season schedule.
Leagues and camps do have value. My kids do them. It’s the weight we put on the decision, the quiet fear that we’re somehow setting them back. The real benefit is staying active and being with their friends.
My oldest son Beau is a math wiz. Ever since grade school, he’s been in accelerated classes. Now he’s a junior taking AP Calculus, tutoring other students, and scoring high on the ACT. It comes naturally to him. It still amazes me.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit it hasn’t once crossed my mind to put him in a math league or a math camp.
The need for his wrist shot and skating will fade, but problem solving will stay with him for life. The pressure and the glamour are elsewhere right now. No one is looking at this.
I don’t think the spirit of what we remember changes much after Squirts.
It won’t be about wins and losses. It’ll be about the people, the time together, the laughs, and the moments nobody planned.
The sport is just a conduit. So is the cabin. So is the bike they disappear on for hours. What matters is having enough variety to encourage exploration and detours.
This window doesn’t stay open forever.