Good luck. What area are you in? He will love it
We live in Southwestern Ontario in a small town with about 2500 people in it. It's a very nice community.
Hank my son is similar to you little guy, hates falling. I made a point of watching hockey with him and in every game, we saw the pros fall flat on their arses. He felt much better knowing that even the pros fall!
My guy is also lighter than all the other kids, nowhere near as fast, but he still enjoys hockey, even the ungodly Sunday morning practice. Good coaches make a difference; not good as in can win the league title, good as in let the kids have fun.
Yeah, it sounds like our boys are very similar. Hudson is close to being the smallest kid on the ice and by far the slowest. What's funny is, he's not that slow but he's so concerned about falling that he takes very little strides and concentrates so hard on staying upright.
This weekend we had our first two practices and Hudson did awesome. He never complained once and had a big smile on his face the entire time. He
did have trouble getting up on his own and he has a habit for giving up too soon on anything if it's a challenge. But he tried hard and on the second practice he was able to get up all on his own a half-dozen times. I found a neat trick to help him do this. Because he has a propensity to hold his stick fairly high on the shaft, he wouldn't get the needed leverage to prop himself up using the stick as a crutch. So I took some white tape and taped an area near the bottom of the shaft and told him to slide his bottom hand over the taped area and use that to push up on. That seemed to do the trick.
The practices were pretty informal but I liked it that way. The first 10 minutes they let the kids buzz around and shoot all the pucks and tennis balls they wanted. After that, they'd separate the kids into two groups with the stronger skaters on one end and the weaker on the other. Since my son made up 1 of maybe 10 poorer skaters he had a lot of room to move out there. They worked a lot on going down and getting up. Like I mentioned he struggled with this early on but got a lot better as the practice progressed.
Near the end, they did a drill where one of the coaches would stickhandle with a tennis ball and he'd challenge the kids to get it. So what does my son do? He slashes the coach in the knee when he couldn't get near him. My wife and I had a big laugh over that.
All in all, it was a great first weekend. He smiled so much. He particularly loved shooing loose pucks into a wide open net or just swatting at pucks in general. It was awesome to see how much fun he was having out there.
I don't think Hudson will see any game time until close to Christmas but I'm totally fine with that. How Tyke works in our minor hockey association is that after 2 weeks of nothing but practices, they take the better players from the weaker ones. When the games start, the better skaters play in a game over 80% of the ice. The other 20% is sectioned off with bumpers for the weaker kids to continue practicing and getting better. Depending on quickly the kids develop, they'll slowly start moving the kids over into the games so eventually all the kids are playing by years end.
Almost all the coaches said that by Christmas there's usually only 1 or 2 kids that aren't ready for games yet, with all of them playing in January.
I don't care if my kid is the last one (which is a good possibility). If he continues to smile and have a great time, then I'm happy. It's a hoot watching him skate out there. I also think it's funny when he hits the glass with his stick to say 'hi' to complete strangers in the concourse. Hahaha.
EDIT: I forgot to add about your comment regarding the coaches. You're right, they do make a world of difference. We've got some excellent coaches who are patient and provide fun drills for them.
