The boy-child’s draft skate was tonight, so we got to see him in context with the other players in his league again and there was some improvement over the first draft – which I didn’t blog about because it was still close to the whole divorce-thing starting and I wasn’t doing much of anything.
Suffice to say that in his first draft he was the slowest, suckiest one on the ice – much like his old man is in his lessons. So, after a season of play and about six weeks of skating three to five days a week since the end of that first season, was there an improvement?
Some.
He’s still slow – both skating and reaction time – but his skills, in general, have definitely improved and in several drills he was not the worst one out there. That’s an improvement over the first time and not bad, I think, for just a few months. So what drills was he not the worst at?
First one I noticed was skating down the ice – hop over the blue line, hit the knees across the center line and then hop over the other blue line. He had trouble getting up off his knees, but so did lots of other kids and he made it up faster than some of them.
Next was skating backwards – goal-line to goal-line – still in the bottom quarter, but not dead last.
He did best at the drill where he had to skate to the center-line and stop then step sideways back to the blue-line, reverse direction and side-step back to center. I’d say he was in the top half of this one – a lot of the kids had trouble stepping instead of skating.
So he’ll probably be picked last or close to it again in this draft based on overall performance, but he’s worked hard and gotten a lot better.
