Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Losing The Hockey Battle

                                                                            From this....
 
To this...
 

                                                                          In just 6 years.
 

I remember when Jacob first came home. He was a sweet and innocent baby who always made his mommy proud. Well, almost always. He still makes me happy and proud but he has been corrupted by his grandfather. His grandfather has been taking him to college hockey games and Jacob is now obsessed.

Jacob spends hours practicing his hockey skills and even made me buy him some street goalie gear. His ultimate goal is to learn to be a goalie. I have tried my best to steer him in other directions but it just isn't working. The child can spend hours watching U Tube videos of hockey skills and how to wear the equipment properly. He wears his inline skates around the house and driving and practicing his stick skills. All of this after just one year of hockey.

My other dilemma is that Jacob is good. There was only one other child able to keep up with him at hockey and that was the coaches son. It's hard for me to say no to a sport that he appears to be showing natural talent at. I realize he will never play for the NHL and probably not even college but he really loves the sport now and he's good at his level.

So what is the problem? Well, a couple. One is that hockey takes a lot of time although my supervisor at work keeps telling me I will make it work if it's important enough to him. The other problem is the cost. The next 2 years won't be too bad but it gets really expensive after that. I can't imagine paying almost $900 for one child's sport in a year. That doesn't even include the cost of equipment or the two or three overnight trips we would have to take for games.

Other sports are so much cheaper and the schedules are more consistent. Yet, I know that he doesn't have the same love for them that he has for hockey. So I am stuck. Hockey is a game that if he doesn't continue to play and build skills, he will be behind his peers very quickly and not able to play later. He can still play hockey and my true love, baseball, but he would have to stop winter swim team and just swim during the summer.

We have until August or September to decide. I guess I will wait and see how summer swim team goes and then decide. He can always start swimming again later and he is now a strong swimmer that I don't have to worry about drowning. Which is really why I put him in swimming in the first place.

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