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Ilya kept giggling at his phone.
The giggle that he reserved for when something truly charmed him. The one that made the actual hehe sound in his throat followed by a little outloud squeal that went up at the end. Shane looked up from what he was doing on his own phone, just waiting to be interrupted by Ilya shoving his phone in his face, laughing and telling him he needed to see this video of a raccoon trying to perch on a bird feeder to eat out of it. Again. After the third time feeling like he was going to be interrupted any second, he finally decided to bite.
“What are you watching?”
Ilya paused his video and finally looked up, “It’s so cute, Shane,” he said, holding his phone against his chest, smiling huge.
“What animal is it this time? And we’re not getting one, whatever it is,” he said, with a small hint of feigned exasperation. Ilya was always angling bringing another animal home, wild or domestic. They had all they could handle with Anya right now.
“It is not an animal this time,” he answered indignantly, “It’s little kids playing hockey.”
“That’s what you're giggling at? You’ve seen that a million times now.”
Ilya shook his head, scrunching his nose thinking about the dozens of kids they’ve hosted at their camp over the years, “No, not those big gremlins. These are little little kids. They’re sooo cute!”
“How little?” Shane asked, scooting over to look at the video on Ilya’s phone. Ilya pushed play on the video. A clip from another hockey camp started playing. It was a video of what looked like 3 and 4 year olds, wearing huge oversized jerseys and big helmets that made them look like bobbleheads. They had shortened sticks that still looked massive in their tiny hands and were trying to run after a puck on their skates, doing more falling than skating on an ice rink. They never stopped happily shrieking, and not to anyone in particular or for any good reason, but more just to hear themselves do it. There were parent coaches in the background in close proximity to help pick them up if they couldn’t right themselves after falling and to give gentle guidance, but it was completely ignored by the preschoolers who were only interested in getting that puck all for themselves. Ilya was right, it was painfully adorable.
He looked at Shane, who was also smiling fondly at Ilya’s phone. He had a crazy idea while he was watching and the reaction Shane had given him was exactly the encouragement he needed to float the question to him.
“What do you think about opening up the camp to kids this age?” Ilya asked, hopefully.
Shane opened his mouth to immediately veto it, and then closed it. This video was adorable. And that was the only reason he didn’t immediately say absolutely not, no way.
“Do you think there would be any interest in it?” he asked, mulling it over and thinking about the possibility.
“Think about how many kids are dropped off that have younger siblings,” Ilya said, “There’s so many with little siblings who have to wait until they age into our program. It would benefit them to have some beginner skills before they can start with us for real, especially if we get to teach them the things we know they have to be able to do to play.”
He wasn’t wrong. They had kids ages 6-13 at their camp now, and some of the 6 year olds came in with zero skills at all, just wanting to explore hockey. They lacked the fundamentals which could make it hard to make groups with the kids who did have some of the foundational skills. They could run a skills clinic, 6 sessions over 6 weeks, on a weekend, for just an hour for kids 5 and under but older than 2…
“Hollander, you are thinking so loudly,” he teased, “Do you want to do it?”
“I mean, do you think we can? Little kids are a lot different than the older kids…”
Ilya cut him off before he could talk himself out of it, “Yes. Not just us though. Maybe we take less kids than normal for first round but yes. Me, you, Ryan Price,” he ticked off on his fingers, “and Pike too, I guess, since he basically has a hockey team at home.”
Shane grimaced a little at the thought of coaching preschoolers. He wasn’t entirely sure he was cut out for it. He had a hard enough time with the older kids, but he was pretty good with Hayden’s kids who had all been this age at one time, so maybe it would be ok? How hard could 12 three and four year olds be?
__________
After much convincing, especially of Ryan, who almost had a panic attack on the spot about helping coach ‘toddlers’, as he called them, they had all their coaching staff committed to 6 sessions over six weeks. Ilya spent a good amount of time reassuring Ryan that he’d be perfect because they needed someone with a quiet, gentle disposition, that he’d have three other reinforcements if something went awry and it was only for an hour every Sunday for 6 weeks, not their usual hours long camp they ran for the older kids every single day during the summer.
They decided to do a 6 week skills building camp for preschoolers ages 3-5. Ilya made the totally right call when he thought that it should be capped at 12 kids, because the response they had was overwhelming. Word had spread quickly that the Game Changers camp was opening up a very limited class geared toward the littlest Game Changers and they’d ended up having to take registrations on a first come, first served basis. Their 12 slot camp was filled 6 minutes after online registrations went live.
“See? I told you people would want to come,” Ilya said excitedly, playfully punching Shane’s shoulder.
Shane shrugged him off, “Ok, so we have campers now. What the hell do we do with kids this little? None of them are skating yet, probably.”
Ilya shrugged, “What did we do when we were kids? I didn’t start hockey until I was older and I could already skate. I did drills on my first day at camp.”
Shane shook his head, “No, we have to start smaller. No skates for the first three weeks, at least, I think. I think we should focus on the hand eye coordination stuff, but for little kids.”
He pulled up a browser tab on his computer and searched for hand eye coordination games for preschoolers.
“See, something like this,” he said, pointing to a section of a website that had 4 or 5 bowling pins set up to knock over with a ball.
Ilya looked over his shoulder at the screen and frowned, “Bowling? Shane.”
“It’s not about bowling. It’s about getting the ball to go where you want it to. To knock down the pins. Getting the puck to go where you want it to, into the net. Building that hand eye coordination with something simpler than a tiny little puck and a hockey stick,” he explained.
“Ok, so we will play games the first couple of weeks, and then maybe give sticks near the end?” he asked.
“Big maybe on the stick part,” he said, remembering what Hayden’s kids were like at that age. Everything light enough to be swung through the air could be, and usually was, used as a weapon. They were already going to be in over their heads a little bit running this experiment with the super little guys, the last thing they needed were 12 tiny terrors brandishing stick weapons.
“Hand eye coordination games on the ice but with their boots on instead of skates, and then the second half of the camp could maybe be spent on actual skates, learning the basics of skating? Learning how to fall, getting back up, keeping your balance without holding onto anything,” he said, ticking off the early skills he’d hoped weren’t too lofty of goals for these little guys. He couldn’t remember much of his early preschool years, but he did remember learning to skate when he was still very young and very unafraid of falling. He was thankful he had that skill mastered by the time his parents had him enrolled in actual hockey camps. He was able to focus more on learning how to play instead of navigating how to control his body for the level of physicality needed to be able to actually play a game of hockey.
He wasn’t sure of much, heading into this new territory coaching these little guys and girls, but he felt confident they had a good start, a good plan, and good coaches.
How hard could it be?
_____________
As it turned out, it was really fucking hard.
After they released their last camper to their parents, Shane flopped onto the bleachers just outside the ice rink.
“Holy shit,” he muttered, looking around the rink that had seen complete, unadulterated mass chaos fueled by twelve preschoolers who took advantage of their coaches having no earthly idea what they’d truly gotten themselves into. There were bowling pins strewn everywhere, foam balls tucked in the curved corners of the rink, balloons dotted around the ice, a left behind hat that was ripped off during a temper tantrum (this one had caught Shane off guard) and three tiny mittens, none of which had a match, so three kids were without their other mitten.
This had been way harder than he anticipated. This age group had an attention span of about 2 minutes, and once that time was up, they were onto the next thing without any regard for the schedule or routine Shane had carefully planned out in his head. The guys had all been used to coaching the older kids who were able to focus their attention for extended periods of time, so they were in total shock at what had just happened here.
Everyone except Hayden Pike.
“I feel like that went pretty well!” he said to the group.
Everyone looked back at him in exhausted disbelief. Was he for real?
“Pike, that was a disaster,” Ilya said, leaning on the boards with his arms crossed at his chest, not even trying to hide his annoyance for this man.
“Hayd, what do you mean ‘that went well’?” Shane asked, frowning, “That couldn’t have gone any worse.” He leaned forward on his knees, with his head in his hands, feeling very defeated, and humbled by, the twelve 3, 4 and 5 year olds that had totally wrecked any sort of semblance of a plan he had in his head or on paper. His plans that seemed so rock solid on paper were actually a disaster in their execution.
“Well,” he said, brightly and holding up a new finger for each point he was making, “One, nobody got hurt. Two, we didn’t have to call anyone’s parents to come get them early and three, only one kid had a meltdown. I think that was a pretty successful day!”
Ryan looked at Hayden, eyebrows knitted together, “I think we have very different ideas of what successful looks like,” he said quietly.
Hayden huffed out a laugh and turned to Shane, “Okay, you want this to go better next weekend?” he asked.
Shane groaned and finally lifted his head from his hands, “I don’t even want to do this next weekend.”
Hayden patted him on the back, “Come on, bud. What it was today is not what it’s going to be like the entire time. We’re going to fix this.”
Shane sure hoped so.
That night, the coaches got together at Shane and Ilya’s to put their heads together over some pizza and a few beers. To Ilya’s sheer amazement, Hayden Pike was actually the expert they needed to get a plan together for the next week.
“Okay,” he said, swallowing a sip of beer, “kids this age need to move every couple minutes. So I think what we need to do instead of working as a group is divide and conquer. We need skill stations. There’s 4 of us and 12 kids, so that means we each have three kids.”
“Wow,” Ilya deadpanned, “Pike can do math.”
Hayden ignored Ilya’s comment and kept talking, “We each have a station and they rotate on a whistle with our help. So someone sets a timer and when the timer goes off, we gather our group and bring them to the next station. Once we rotate through all the stations, then we can have free play or an organized type of group game, depending on how everyone’s doing after structured time.”
Shane nodded slowly, thinking about the logistics of it. It made perfect sense to him. Three kids at a time, in one smaller area, really being able to work on a targeted skill.
Shane looked around the table at everyone else, and shrugged, “It’s the best plan I’ve heard so far.”
Ryan nodded in agreement, “It’s definitely worth a try. It sounds like it might actually work?”
Ilya nodded, “We can try it. Anything else has to be better than that absolute disaster that happened today.”
_____________
The next Sunday, the four coaches arrived at the rink early to set up their stations. Shane was in charge of an agility course that involved hula hoops arranged on the ice in a diamond pattern that the kids would jump in and out of and mini traffic cones to zig zag through. Hayden took over the bowling station. Ilya was on a game where each child had their own balloon and had to keep it in the air as long as they could without it falling back down and they collectively decided Ryan would float around from station to station to help as needed and just be an extra set of hands should something go wrong.
At some point around the half hour mark, Shane realized the relative calm that had settled over the rink. Yes, they were all screaming at the top of their lungs, but they were happy shrieks. Everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing, in their own groups. Everyone was learning and working hard. Nobody was crying, nobody was throwing a temper tantrum. It was the best version of organized chaos he could ask for. With his station under control, he allowed himself to sneak a peek to Ilya’s station. He was running around pushing everyone’s balloons up just out of their reach just as they were floating back down to them after they’d popped them up into the air.
“Mr. Lilya!” one of them named Riley exclaimed, jumping with both feet, “That’s MY balloon!”
Shane’s heart clenched and legit almost stopped beating for a second. Mr. Lilya. That was the most precious thing he’d ever heard. He’d always recognized that Lily was a name that was incredibly close to Ilya’s name, and that Ilya had chosen that purposefully but to hear a child put the two names together so seamlessly with a mispronunciation was honestly the most adorable thing he’d ever heard. His jaw dropped a little and his eyes darted to Ilya’s face. Ilya heard it too, he looked down at Riley and then to Shane to see if he’d heard it. Judging from the huge open mouth smile on his face, he’d heard it. Shane’s heart was absolutely bursting from the cuteness of it and he was sure that Ilya’s was dancing in his chest just as much as his was.
The hour passed by quickly this time and with a clean up game implemented in the last 10 minutes of the hour, the rink looked better than when the kids came in. There were no temper tantrums this week and still only one hat left behind.
The coaches gathered by a bench on the other side of the boards. Hayden looked quite pleased with himself and they all noticed it.
Shane smiled, “Ok Hayd, I gotta say. That went a lot better. I feel a lot better about next week too. Like, I’m not dreading it.”
Ryan nodded too, “Yeah, that was fun. Enjoyable, even? I enjoyed them this week. I didn’t think I’d ever say that after last week.”
Ilya couldn’t even pretend like he wasn’t impressed with how well everything went when they followed Hayden’s plan.
“Pike, it hurts me to say this. But you had a good idea. Just this one time though,” he said, as friendly as he could muster, but deep down actually really thankful for what he’d done for their littles camp today.
Shane bumped into his shoulder, “Ok Mr. Lilya,” he said, smiling a little, “Be nice.”
Ilya smiled broadly and kissed Shane on the cheek. He would never hear anything that cute again as long as he lived. Even though he didn’t want to have favorites, Riley was definitely top of the list for that one.