Recently in the news we heard about a Montreal-area minor hockey coach who has been suspended for the remainder of the season for ordering his players to do pushups following a 7-2 loss on Sept. 18.
Louis Isabella, coach of the Lac St-Louis Peewee AAA Lions, ordered his players to do somewhere between 50 and 100 pushups following the loss, resulting in his suspension, which runs until May 2017.
Reportedly the Lac St-Louis hockey organization is not against the use of pushups as a training tool they are against using it as a form of punishment, which was the grounds for his suspension.
Personally I feel this is extremely unfortunate for the coach and it reflects poorly on the organization.
While I understand their stance against using pushups as a form of punishment the thing they are forgetting is this is not a house league team featuring players who are looking to play hockey for fun, we are talking about a group of AAA hockey players, which is an extremely competitive level of hockey and happens to be the highest level of hockey these players can play.
If these kids are playing AAA hockey they take the sport very seriously and are looking to grow as players.
Some people may argue that these players may have given their best effort and were just beaten by a better team, which is a fair argument, but again these kids are serious about the game, if they did not want to be pushed as players they should play in a house hockey league where they can play the game to have fun.
In the January 27 edition of the Humboldt Journal I wrote an article entitled, “We’re failing kids by telling them they can’t fail,” in which I explained how we are creating the entitlement issues kids have today because we are treating them like pieces of delicate china.
This is a perfect example of that.
Like I have said, AAA hockey is for the elite players and is for players who are serious about both the game and getting better.
I have no issues with using pushups as a form of reinforcement.
Think about it for a minute, he did not physically harm the players he simply asked them to do pushups and it is not like he asked them to do 500-1000 pushups, it was 50-100.
Doing pushups is allowed as a training tool but it is forbidden as a way of punishment, but does that “punishment tool” not also fall into the training category?
I was recently discussing this with a fellow co-worker who mentioned that they were forced to do pushups when they went offside or were flagged with a procedure penalty in football.
Enforcing the idea that what they are doing is wrong and trying to correct it is what I consider a very fair form of punishment should be allowed.
Besides, do you not think that by having to do pushups after losing, quite convincingly I might add, will not make those players hate losing?
It goes back to my previous editorial, by giving these kids the requirement of doing pushups following the loss we are telling them that losing 7-2 is not acceptable, especially at the AAA level, and we are pushing them to want to do better.
I will be the first to admit, if I was one of those kids and I just finished losing 7-2 and was asked to do pushups I would not be very happy, although I would also not be very happy to have lost 7-2.
But those pushups would also make me hate losing even more than I already do and it would push me to make sure that I did everything in my power to make sure that it did not happen again.
We are getting really soft in society today.
This story makes me want to yell, ‘this is AAA hockey, what do you expect?’
It is time we stop treating our children like precious china, if they want to be competitive they should expect to be pushed, that comes with the territory.
