Memories | | Page 2

Over the past eight years, I’ve been involved coaching and taking my son to minor sports, mainly soccer. I’ve watched him play for club teams and various school teams over the years. I’ve written about some of my thoughts on what I’ve seen in minor sports in this blog and in other newsletters at KCS over the years: treatment of referees by spectators as well as the behaviour of some coaches are topics that I’ve observed and commented on. Upon reflection, I realized that I’ve never written about the players. And this brings me to a story of watching my son play basketball with five guys he never knew before he stepped on the floor with them on Easter weekend.

My thirteen year old son, Brandon, and I went to work out at the fitness facility our family joined. We started off together doing various exercises and then he went off to shoot baskets in the gym. Earlier this year he decided that he was going to play on the school basketball team for the first time. The playoffs were starting the next week so he wanted to go and practice dribbling and shooting for a while. After an hour or so I finished what I was doing, and with the help of an oxygen tank, made my way up to the gym. When I arrived, I noticed Brandon was involved in a 3-on-3 game with some other boys, who ranged in age from 12-15. I sat and watched for twenty minutes.

To me, this was sports at its essence: a group of children getting together to play a game. It reminded me of my childhood when a bunch of us would congregate after school or on the weekend to play road hockey, soccer, football or baseball. We’d set a time to meet and then we “figured it out” from there. So many times, other kids we didn’t know would wander by and get invited to play in whatever game we were playing. Brandon and these five other boys ended up together on the court not knowing each other when they arrived. They picked teams, changed them when necessary, and called their own fouls. They congratulated each other on great plays and shots; they competed, disagreed, laughed and poked fun at each other for over an hour. Amazingly this was all done without listening to the input of others on the sidelines. They just played.

I think for my son, he likely took away other memories than I did from that Saturday; as a thirteen year old, he’s likely forgotten about the game in the same way he forgets about the things I ask him to do around the house! But for me that game allowed me to witness something about Brandon’s personality: it showed me that he has the willingness to get together with others he doesn’t know for a brief moment in time, and because they shared a common interest, have a good time. It also reminded me what my role is as a parent of an athlete: to get Brandon to his games and training on time, let his coach do the coaching, and let Brandon tell me about the training or the game afterwards. The rest is really up to him.

Derek Logan
Head of School

Last Wednesday, I went to our boys floor hockey tournament in Oakville with Mr. Marshall. As I expected, the boys were competitive, terrific sportsmen, and represented KCS in the way I’ve come to expect over the past thirteen years.

The boys were playing our arch rival, Mentor College, in the semi-finals. Mentor had squeaked out a 5-4 victory in the round robin portion of the tournament against us, and following the game I heard a number of their players say in front of our boys that they were expecting to play Fern Hill in the finals. Our boys had other plans for the first 21 minutes of the game. We were up 6-2 with six minutes remaining…but we lost 7-6. I was disappointed for the boys, but fifteen minutes later, they had “recovered” from the defeat and they were back to being their usual selves on the bus ride back to KCS.

As we were driving home, and I was thinking that this is what Ron Wilson and Randy Carlyle must have felt like this year, I remembered a particularly memorable defeat that my Dad reminded me of just a couple of years ago when he said to my son, Brandon, “You should ask your Dad about the time his team lost to Ottawa in hockey.” I remember him saying this and thinking to myself, I’ve forgotten about this loss for the past 30 or so years, and yet you’ve kept this in your memory bank for that long. One of the messages of this exchange is that the things we do as kids can often stay with our parents longer than it might stay with the child who actually does them. Anyways, when I was either 14 or 15 we were playing ice hockey against Ottawa. We were winning 4-0 with two minutes to go in the game. When ended up losing 5-4 in the first minute of overtime. My Dad had remembered this event and triggered my memory about it two years ago when he was speaking with my son. The KCS boys on Thursday brought it back. I have a message for the boys: You’ll forget about this in time. Your parents might not.

Derek Logan
Head of School