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The title of the book is PEE WEES: Confessions of a Hockey Parent. The author is Rich Cohen.
The title sounds innocent enough, but trust me, this is the very best book written on what it’s like to be a sports parent in this day and age since Bill Geist’s classic LITTLE LEAGUE CONFIDENTIAL. And that book was published way back in 1992.
LITTLE LEAGUE CONFIDENTIAL was a first-person account by Bill Geist about being the head coach of his son Willie’s LL team – yep, his son Willie – these days, of course, Willie is a star on NBC News – but Bill wrote with great amazement and eye-opening astonishment as to what it was like to run a team of 11 and 12 year olds in Ridgewood, NJ, and what it was like to deal with the nutty and less than objective parents of those kids.
But again, that book came out in the 1990s….that’s a generation or two ago. And I recall when I read it, I said to myself: “Yes, someone has finally written an account of sports parents who have lost their perspective about their kids in sports.”
Fast forward to now. Rich Cohen, who is an accomplished bestselling author and who writes books on a variety of topics, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone, turned his attention to one of his sons, Micah, who is an aspiring travel league hockey player at the Pee Wee level, which is 12 and under, and playing in Ridgefield, CT.
Trust me on this: whether it’s little league baseball, or travel ice hockey, or AAU basketball, or any other competitive youth sport that your kid plays, you will fully identify with what Rich describes in this book in both painful, as well as extraordinarily humorous, detail.
In short, you laugh at the parental antics and behavior, simply because you don’t want to cry.
PEE WEES covers an entire season of 12-year-old Micah Cohen, as he progresses through tryouts, which team he plays for, the coach and two assistant coaches (who are parents of kids on the team), and the various ups-and-downs of what it’s like for his Dad to be a devoted sports parent. Cohen goes into clear detail regarding the passion and emotions that not only he, but all of the other Moms and Dads go through as well. Remember, this is a season that starts about Labor Day and goes through right until mid-March. Games are on weekends, and practices (often very early in the morning) are three times a week.
Then there’s the unique sociology of having to become hockey parent “friends” with the other parents whose kids who are on the team. You as a parent find yourself migrating to certain parents who, ideally, are not as emotional about their kid’s playing time as perhaps you are. But there’s clearly a caste system working here: that parents of A team players don’t often associate with the parents of B team players. It just isn’t done. Even if the kids themselves are friends with players on both A and B teams.
The ultimate question is….. Why does one care so much?
Read more on this story at askcoachwolff.com.