Stay in Hockey for your whole life
I tell all the kids I coach that if they stick with hockey throughout their lives they will meet many wonderful people. I'd like to share a little of my own experiences.
When I went to college I didn't know anybody and was intimidated and unhappy with all the changes. The first few months were pretty lonely, and I even thought about leaving school. It was a rough period for me. Hockey practice started in late November, and it was the one thing I looked forward to, and it kept me in school. The first week practice started I made twenty friends. I was the worst player of the 20, but I didn't care, and they didn't seem to care. Everyone treated me as a teammate, and a friend. Many of these 20 teammates are still my friends today. My four years in college were filled with tremendous memories, and many were hockey related.
I selected the MIT Sloan graduate school in business because it was not only a great school, but it had a hockey club where graduate school students could play. I am probably the only person in history who selected the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan school of business to play hockey. Most of the students at Business school were there to graduate and get a job making the most money possible. I can't remember much about them, but I can tell you the first and last names of every player on our hockey team. We had some great times.
After graduate school at MIT (Boston), I moved to Los Angeles, where again I didn't know a soul. But I wasn't worried about making friends this time. I knew my ace in the hole. The first day I got to town I went to the local rink and signed up for a men's league team. We played a game the next day and I met 15 people. Then I signed up to coach a Bantam team, and made a bunch more friends, both players and parents. I felt like I belonged in that town, and I hadn't been there a week yet.
I moved to Vail with my family in 1987 and the story is the same. Many of my best friends in this town are hockey players on my men's league team, or kids I've coached, or their parents. My non-hockey friends are always amazed when some 10 year old comes up to me on the street and wants to reminisce about a trip we took to Florida, or some other hockey stop. The non-hockey friend will ask, "how do you know that kid so well?". The answer is simple, "we're hockey players".