Home Ice

“I’m feeling guilty because it’s Katie’s birthday. I will miss my daughter’s eighth birthday for a hockey tournament.”
- Angie Abdou, Home Ice

This book is filled with quotable passages about parenting and sport, but this – this small comment – brought me to a standstill. In Home Ice: Reflections of a Reluctant Hockey Mom, Angie Abdou takes us through a year in the life of a hockey mom, and all the ups and downs that go with it. I have a young son who yearns to play hockey and my review of this book may read more like a personal essay as I grapple with Home Ice’s subject matter in a very real way.

The way my husband and I see it, we have many reasons to avoid minor hockey, all of which Abdou discusses in her book, backed up with credible research and genuine emotion. From terrible coaches who think only of winning, and the downright deplorable Graham James, to the clear evidence that our country is no longer dominating world hockey because of the overly competitive way we are organizing minor hockey, this book covers the major issues affecting the sport and its young players today.

To avoid turning their younger daughter into a “rink rat,” Angie Abdou and her husband have taken a divide-and-conquer approach to parenting their two children. She does all the hockey with their son while her husband does all the activities with their daughter. Now, this has been one of our main arguments in avoiding minor hockey in our own family. We are not prepared to have the whole family tied up for the sake of one person’s activities, but we also aren’t prepared to not be together. To tell the truth, for all its downfalls, this is our main beef with minor hockey. Yes, the culture needs to change, big time, but we also don’t have the time for it. We both work outside the home, with an hour-long commute each way. Sometimes we travel for work and the other is left to parent alone for a few days. It’s hard enough to fit in the more reasonable extracurricular activities, let alone hockey with its multiple practices each week and tournaments on weekends.

When our son asks about hockey, I wonder if he will resent our decision to keep him out of it. Each fall we ask ourselves if we can do it, and the answer is always the same. No.

The message in Home Ice isn’t entirely negative. Abdou is a former athlete and she is surrounded in her daily life by an inordinately large number of former Olympians (okay two, but seriously, how many are in your entourage?). She knows the value of hard work and dedication to sport, and vows to let her son play hockey for as long as he loves it. Home Ice is an open, honest account of minor hockey life and I think parents with kids in hockey, or even considering it, should give this book a try. Thanks to NetGalley and ECW Press for the ARC. It was a great read!