This past week my son was at his annual west coast prep camp that he started participating in several years back as a player where many top level players in hockey go for 10 ice sessions, games, dryland with some of the top coaches in the game.

Marc Crawford, Phil Johnson, Ryan Walter, Barry Smith and many other NHL coaches, NCAA Div I, II and II as well as Junior A/B coaches participate in the camps that run for a week at a time to get instruction to take their games to the next level.

I never will forget the first camp he attended as a player, at 12 years old in his second year of peewee and how much he packed, a full hockey bag, a duffel bag almost the same size, a backpack, sweatshirt, pants only to find that the particular week in Port Alberni was 38 degrees and even though worked hard on ice, was much cooler than outside.

As it was his first year at the camp, like many hockey coaches, I wanted to see first hand how a top-notch camp was run so I went over for a day and watched many of the ice sessions lead by the professional coaches so I could then share with the volunteer coaches in my clinics tips and tricks to run efficient practices.

I connected with my son later that day and he said the experience had been AWESOME, although was starting to experience skate bite from his laces and was not a big fan of scrambled eggs and avoiding the table with peanut butter (due to allergies to peanuts)

I offered to take him for dinner before I was going to head to catch the late ferry to return home and he said he would rather hang out with his new “buds”

Each year he would return to the camp, even after he decided not to play winter hockey, and this was the first year after he aged out of minor hockey and was asked to come as an on-ice instructor/captain for one of the younger age groups.

This particular week, one of the guest coaches was Brendan Morrison, former NHL player who started his career with the NJ Devils and was traded and played the majority of his career for the Vancouver Canucks, played on the top line with Marcus Naslund and Todd Bertuzzi in their respective career years in points individually and as a line. They were called the west coast express as a result and qualified for playoffs (unlike last 3 years where the Canucks have not made the playoffs and recently lost their president Trevor Linden due to power struggle with owners).

One evening Brendan participated in a panel session interview and offered up a couple of tidbits that my son shared when we had dinner the night he came back;

1. Brendan shared that he absolutely did not believe in early sports specialization and
2. He believed in free-range parenting as a father of 3 girls and a boy and encouraged to play, get outside without supervision

My son could relate to both as we have numerous conversations on the subjects over the years both in my role with PARADIGM sports but also as a parent and coach as many know from contributions I have done for various news articles and affiliate blogs.

Needless to say, it was refreshing to hear that a former NHL player, Hobey Baker Award winner as top NCAA player who had a long career was against specialization and advocating for kids to play as many sports as possible until they found the one they loved.

Early Sports Specialization continues to be a hot topic, so much so that I was asked to contribute to another follow-up article on the subject for a national Canadian Magazine that is supposed to be in an upcoming edition which I will share out once it goes to print.

I was also surprised they got on the subject of free-range parenting, whom Lenore Skenazy made famous when she launched her site www.freerangekids.com to combat helicopter/snowblower and lawnmower parents where kids have been taken to police offices due to “reports of abuse” when parents encouraged them to take the bus, subway, play in the park on their own without their immediate supervision.

This I also am 100% in support of, I remember one of the reasons that kids don’t get their 2000 steps in today walking to/from school is due to the white van as parents fear their kids will be abducted.  Kids need to have play time unsupervised, need to learn how to fall and get up on their own, even if it means there will be some bruises, scratches along the way.  If parents don’t encourage kids to do so, how will they fair when they face real adversity later in life?

Our backyard since both my kids were very young was a myriad of sports balls, bats, sticks, hoops and we live a couple of blocks from a ball field and park that my wife and I would tell our kids to go to get their daily dose of activity in addition to the various sports they played.

We even encouraged them to walk to/from schools, 30-45 minute walks each way, but would drive them to school if the weather was really, really nasty (the same our parents did)

Whenever I have done talks on the subject, I have shared the video that is part of this weeks newsletter from Bill Meiers show when he interviewed Dave Barry and talked about free range parenting and how his mother would share …..

“Don’t Drown”

Like Dave’s mother, my mother would say to me or my brother before we left for the day to scour for garter snakes, go to ball fields, lacrosse boxes, fish in streams, jump our bikes over ramps, climb and fall from trees and so on … BE HOME FOR DINNER.  Other than that it was fair game, kids need more of that now more than ever, thanks to sports being adultified which has to lead to the specialization epidemic, they need their free play time.

Although free-range laws have not been passed in Canada to the best of my knowledge, both Utah and Arkansas have now incorporated legislation to protect parents who aspire their kids to be just that, KIDS and encourage them to walk to/from school, play in the park or backyard unsupervised (within reason).

At what point we find the happy medium where kids play again without fear of criticism from adults or adults are permitted to let their kids walk home from school without having police and social services knocking on their doors remains to be seen.

Hopefully, it happens sooner than later, we need to let kids BE kids again.

Let’s all work together to bring the game back to the kids … where it belongs.