Budding Superstars?

Connor and Mika had their first real ringette game yesterday. They played down the South Shore a bit near Upper Tantallon. That's not too far from Peggy's Cove, if you need an iconic landmark, and out here you never seem to be too far from an iconic landmark.

Connor started in goal and Mika was a roving forward -- at that age all of the skaters are roving forwards, really. Mika really threw herself into it and battled for the puck, er, ring on every shift. She's a bit smaller than most of the others so she didn't win any of the battles really. The league that she's in covers 5-7 years olds with a few 8 year olds thrown in. So I was proud of her that she could keep up with the flow of play. The fact that she touched the ring at all was a success.

Connor loves playing nets but has only been practicing with the big pads for a couple weeks now. He seems to understand the position well enough for his age -- he doesn't flop around in the crease, but will dive or butterfly at more or less the right times. He has to work on staying at the top of his crease, though. There are a lot of breakaways and two-on-no-one breaks at this age and he tends to back up when someone is breaking in on him alone from the blue line.

He lost the game 3-2, and doesn't really like losing but I told him before the game that he was playing a good team (rumour had it that they actually new their positions, and they did) and that if he only let in 3 or 4 goals he would have done his job. I would estimate that 80% of the game was played in his zone and he made more than half a dozen really good saves. So he wasn't taking it too hard, but still felt motivated to get better at it.

The next teams that played finished with final scores of 7-3 and 8-2, so his stats were good despite the loss.