Eight years ago today the hockey world was rocked by the news that Herb Brooks had been killed in a car accident in his home state of Minnesota. It was crushing news for the entire hockey community. Herb Brooks was a legendary coach who helped orchestrate the greatest sports moment of the twentieth century - the American victory over the Soviet Union in ice hockey at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid.His famous pre-game speech was memorialized in the movie Miracle. Although Coach Brooks is gone, his legacy lives on in The Herb Brooks Foundation. Coach Brooks believed firmly in a “back to basics” approach that was the opposite of what many youth hockey players were doing. Heavy schedules with lots of games and lots of pressure were the norm. Coach Brooks believed in four hours of practice for every game. He believed in focusing on fundamentals. He believed in making the game fun again for kids.
Today, organized sports have become a hotbed of parental over-involvement and pressure. Collegiate scholarships and the lure of millions of dollars for professional athletes are such strong motivators that parents push their children to extremes hoping to get the next Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods. They lose sight of the fact that children should be playing for fun. Unfortunately, the result is that many kids don’t have fun, and they eventually quit or get burned out. Getting children involved in athletics and keeping them active is a cause shared by many great organizations.
The White House has also gotten involved with promoting active and healthy youth, Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!”, a campaign whose goal is “solving the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight,” is teaming up with the NHL and USA Hockey to sponsor Try Hockey for Free Day on November 5th, 2011. This will be an excellent opportunity to introduce young people to the sport. The NHL also has an initiative called “Hockey Is For Everyone” that provides support and unique programming to non-profit youth hockey organizations across North America that are committed to offering children of all backgrounds opportunities to play hockey. These initiatives would have made Coach Brooks very proud.
“Maybe I’m sort of like the players - there’s still a lot of little boy in me.”
Herb Brooks - On August 11, 2003 we lost America’s coach but eight years later, his legacy lives on. RIP Coach Brooks.
