Congrats to you both, Mike! :-)
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YES!!!! Took pulling her out of school for a half day and some begging, as they tried to cut the line off 1 person before the Little One was up for her pic, but Mom made it happen!!!! The Little One was soooooooo excited!

Big thanks to Trevor Lewis for bringing the Cup back to SLC!!!

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Freaking sweet.
So we are almost done with preseason here. 2 more games this weekend. The 05 Squirt team is 4-0 with a 37-7 goal differential. It should be 39-4 but you always get a little jobbed playing in certain teams barns. It looks like we will be moved to the A division because we have beaten the 2 A division teams we have played, but Norcal threw 2 more A division teams at us this weekend. It looks like they are hoping for a slip up to find an excuse to not let a group of 05s in the 04 division. Tomorrow they are playing the 2nd best team in the A division on paper. Sunday we are playing alower A division team that tied a team we beat last weekend.

Our line configurations are interesting. 1st line has weak center with 2 strong wingers. 2nd line is Ms line with him at center and a strong right winger. His left winger is our weak kid. 3rd line is similar to 2nd. Our D pairings are one strong with one weak. Basically given this make up we have 3 really good kids on the ice at any given moment and 2 kids that generally do more good then harm, but not always.

Tomorrow will be a big game for the boys. The team much like last weekends 04 opponent is bigger then our boys. That said our team is very fast, passes well and a lot, and shoots well. This is how they have been successful so far. Our big problem is our weaker kids dont play positional hockey well so the others cant go all out for fear of getting burned. Even with that they have been successful. We will see what happens.
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Focking long season already. In reality once we got bumped up into higher division all the kids we play against are 1 year older and all played travel last year. Our crap kids our getting worked like mules on the ice all gane long. M and 3 other boys are scoring but thats pretty much it and 2 of them are defensemen. Too good to play our age level. Not quiet good enough to play older kids because our weak kids get exposed badly.

Took a beating from the number 2 team today. 2-1 after 2 periods. 7-1 by the end. Sucked because M had some great chances but could not finish anything today. In a way its good. Some of the boys have never been on a losing team so its teaching them a lot.
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Focking long season already. In reality once we got bumped up into higher division all the kids we play against are 1 year older and all played travel last year. Our crap kids our getting worked like mules on the ice all gane long. M and 3 other boys are scoring but thats pretty much it and 2 of them are defensemen. Too good to play our age level. Not quiet good enough to play older kids because our weak kids get exposed badly.

Took a beating from the number 2 team today. 2-1 after 2 periods. 7-1 by the end. Sucked because M had some great chances but could not finish anything today. In a way its good. Some of the boys have never been on a losing team so its teaching them a lot.
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Hope things turn around Mike, tell M to keep his head up!


Few photos from the Boys game tonight.... Pink jerseys are related to a "Fearless in the Fight" Breast Cancer Awareness Night... Big game against BYU, where we CRUSHED them....

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Not a great pic, but laying some wood in the corner... Love the expressions of the guys behind the glass...

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Mom with his jersey, which she purchased at the auction. The team signed them after the game & they were given to the winning bidders, which went on during the game. Fun stuff.

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ever notice ... your boy has one ear about an inch higher than the other ???

good looking boy ... mom is short or boy is large .

derrek
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Crazy, 18 years, never noticed that... Going to have to look today, confirm....

He's just 6'2" at this point, wearing skates still in the photo, so looks taller.
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Can't believe it's been almost a year since I posted here. My kid got a spot in Pittsburgh, but it was evident from the start that the team had issues. By the middle of December the team was down to 10 skaters and they had a vote whether or not to play that final weekend before Christmas break. We ended up making the decision to pull him off of that team and got him rostered on the U18 team back in Cincy...makes me sad things didn't work out in Pittsburgh :-)

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Sorry about the team issues, Scott. Hope you have a positive experience with the Cincy team!

I feel for you, choosing programs/teams can be so tough and so fluid, it's nuts. Just trying to put your kid where they are comfortable & have a chance to be successful, it's nuts. Positive JuJu to your son, I'm sure he'll crush wherever he's at!
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Oh and welcome back... Been dead!
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EJ still cant believe hes come so far from when we girst started talking. So Crazy. I know Abbs been tearing it up also.

Scott that really sucks. What age level was the Pittsburgh team? We had to pull M off a team as a Mite because of a psycho coach but im sure its nothing like what you went through.

As for M the team has gotten better. The house kids we had to have are improving and some of the selfish kids have bought in to passing the puck. We tied our last league game and have a chance against both teams we are playing this weekend. We scrimmed a Peewee B team last week and smacked them around. In fairness that team sucked.

Lastly just like last year he got asked to play in the narch winter nationals roller tournament for his old inline Jr Sharks team. Thats next weekend. Should be fun and hopefully they win it all again.
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Tier 1 U16. He had friends in Pittsburgh (4 hours away for us) and he wanted to play Spring Hockey there. Mario Lemiuex's brother Alain owns the Selects and coached the U16 National team last year and a guy named Gallis coached the American team. Alain coached the Spring team and was impressed with Cam. So, Spring went well and we looked into fall teams and made the decision to try out over there (I also do some business in that area so I made arrangements to combine work with practices).

During tryouts Gallis left and went to another organization, and Lemiuex decided to coach U12 since most of his National team were 97's and moving up to U18. It wasn't a huge deal because Cam still knew some of the kids that made the Selects team so we stuck with it. But it was obvious early on that other than Cam and 1 other kid, none of the boys had played Tier 1 before.

So the team wasn't great and even that wasn't a huge deal, Cam got tons of ice time and exposure in a different part of the country from where we were used to. He even got a call from a college coach that happened to see him play in Rochester NY one weekend.

Right away the team had issues with injuries, and I mean lots of them. I lost count of all the 'consussions' and players out for weeks at a time. It never got better. So in the end I left it up to him and he decided he wanted to play closer to home. We had already talked about next year and he was going to try out for the Cincy U18 team anyway, so I got kinda lucky and they had a spot open and already knew Cam from being in that organization for 5 years so they added him onto the roster to finish out this season.
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Last 2 tournaments for the Little One, one with the boys, one with the girls. Two banners, really one I guess, the girls tourney just gave them a trophy, no banner....:-)

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Finally get to post a winning pic! This is Cam's new team, Cincinnati Swords U18, after a AA tournament a couple weeks ago.

Cam is second from the left in the bottom row:

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Nice! Congrats to Cam & to you!
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Sneaking in some adult league...

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Almost cringing this weekend... Program Tournament, so Little One will play both teams for 3 days... No conflicts, so she can play every game. We'll see how he legs feel. No feeling super confident on the tourney in general & we're defending champions with the Boys.
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Terrible tournament last weekend....TERRIBLE. 0-8. Concluded with the Little One being run head first into the boards on a little break, which I got a sequence of -

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Hope this weekend is better.... The Boy's Utes are hosting ACHA DII Nationals! (Going 1-2 in pool play would be fine, 2-1 would be great, 0-3 ugh, 3-0 near impossible)

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