AFTER THEDEFEAT.

Nobody drives two hours to a hockey rink hoping to watch their child's team lose 7–3. Families make those trips because hockey matters to them. They invest in practices, lessons and early mornings because, when the puck drops, everyone wants a chance to win. A bad loss hurts precisely because so much effort went into trying to prevent it.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to win. A close game can give players an incredible sense of accomplishment, and a hard-fought victory can make weeks of practice feel worthwhile. Coaches are competitive, parents are invested, and children care about their results. None of that needs to be apologized for. We should be careful, though, not to confuse how much a game matters with how we are entitled to behave when it goes badly.

Imagine telling a seven-year-old goaltender who has just given up seven goals that the score doesn't matter and they played great. They know the result, and they may know perfectly well that they struggled. Empty praise can sound just as disconnected from their experience as a lecture about every goal. What they need is somebody who can acknowledge the disappointment without making them feel ashamed of it.

Losing is not the enemy of development. Every team gets outplayed eventually, sometimes badly, no matter how carefully it prepares. The deeper question is what the experience becomes after the final horn: an opportunity to understand the game and recover, or another reason for a child to fear disappointing the adults around them.

That's where our responsibility begins. We spend enormous amounts of time teaching young players to skate, shoot, defend and compete. We ought to think just as seriously about what we teach them in the hours after a game, when their equipment comes off and the result can no longer be changed.

ARE WE HELPING CHILDREN PROCESS DEFEAT, OR MAKING THEM EXPERIENCE IT TWICE?

My seven-year-old son sometimes asks me to grade his performance after a game. He wants to know whether I would give him an A, an A-plus, a B-minus or a C. It's a simple question on its face, but every parent who has watched a child struggle knows how complicated the answer can become.

There are nights when I think he played incredibly well, and others when I know he has looked sharper in practice and in previous games. In my head I may have an honest assessment that he isn't going to enjoy hearing. Then I look at the person asking me. He's seven, tired, and looking to his father, not to a scout or a professional goalie evaluator.

Over time I've tried to resist the urge to deliver my full assessment immediately. I might tell him, 'You've had better games, buddy. There are a couple of things we can work on, but let's get something to eat and talk about it another time.' That isn't an attempt to convince him he played well. It's an attempt to choose a moment when the conversation can actually help him.

Most nights we get home and the game slips into the background. Once in a while, though, he remembers the grade the next day and asks what he could have done better. That's a very different conversation. Instead of defending himself while the loss is still raw, he's ready to ask questions about positioning, movement or decisions that he can improve.

I haven't found a perfect formula, and I'm sure I won't handle every game perfectly. But the experience keeps reminding me that honesty and urgency are different things. Just because I have an opinion about his performance doesn't mean I have to deliver it the moment he walks through the doors.

Children need truthful feedback. They also need to know that a poor outing does not change how we see them. 'You've had stronger games, and we'll work on this' leaves room for both accountability and confidence. 'You were terrible tonight' gives them very little except a reason to feel worse.

THE TRUTH DOES NOT BECOME LESS TRUTHFUL BECAUSE YOU WAIT.

That need for patience is especially clear in goaltending, a position where a mistake is impossible to hide. A forward can miss a chance and get another shift. A defenseman can get beaten and hope for help. When a puck slips past the goalie, the entire rink knows immediately, and the child inside the mask has to reset while everybody is still looking in their direction.

From the stands, a goal against can seem obvious. On the ice, the goaltender may have been screened, dealing with a deflection, reading a two-on-one or recovering from a breakdown that began several passes earlier. Some goals are genuinely preventable and some aren't. A parent who is certain they saw the whole story from behind the glass may be missing the most important parts.

None of this means we should make excuses every time a goalie struggles. There are nights when a young goaltender isn't sharp, when their positioning is off or their decisions are slow. Those things deserve attention because learning the position involves being able to recognize and correct mistakes. What they don't deserve is to become a verdict on the person playing it.

Consider the difference between asking, 'What did you see on that play?' and demanding, 'How could you possibly let that in?' The first question leaves room for an explanation, a coaching point and another attempt. The second assumes that a child owes an embarrassed adult an answer. Only one of those approaches is going to help the next save.

Coach Wapps' advice to parents is direct: 'Don't coach the crease.' Your child already has somebody responsible for teaching the technical details. The parent has another responsibility, one that can be harder during a rough game: be the person whose expression and support don't disappear when the puck crosses the goal line.

A goaltender needs resilience, but resilience isn't built by constantly reminding a child that they let everybody down. It's built through preparation, honest coaching, repeated chances to improve and the security of knowing they can have a bad game without losing the respect of the people closest to them.

I have enormous respect for coaches who take youth development seriously. They spend time preparing practices, managing different personalities, teaching complicated skills and trying to help children compete at a level that challenges them. A good coach understands that the job is as much about communication and judgment as it is about hockey knowledge.

That's also why poor coaching deserves to be called out clearly. There are adults who confuse yelling with leadership and humiliation with accountability. They believe that if a child is embarrassed enough in front of teammates, the lesson will somehow sink in. Whatever the intended message, that kind of behavior has no place in youth hockey.

A coach can demand effort, bench a player for ignoring an assignment and have a difficult conversation about preparation without attacking the player's character. The child should understand what the expectation was, how they fell short and what improvement looks like. Being cruel doesn't make the lesson more serious; it makes the person delivering it less effective.

I also understand that coaches hate losing. Their decisions are tested, their preparation is exposed and parents often second-guess them as soon as the game ends. But the pressure adults feel is theirs to manage. It cannot become a license to berate a ten-year-old in a dressing room because the coach is embarrassed by a score.

Organizations have to draw a meaningful line here. Repeated verbal intimidation, personal insults and public humiliation should lead to intervention and consequences, even when the coach has a winning record. Players are expected to meet standards of conduct; the people in charge of them should be held to at least the same standard.

Competitive hockey needs demanding coaches, not frightened children. If an adult cannot regulate their own emotions after a youth hockey defeat, they have no business teaching players how to handle adversity. The way a coach responds to losing is itself part of the lesson.

YOUR ANGER IS NOT INSTRUCTION.

At this point someone usually asks whether we're making competitive hockey too soft. I don't think so. Protecting the fun has never meant pretending everybody played well, handing out compliments that weren't earned or teaching children not to care about the result. You can love the game, work incredibly hard and still be furious about losing.

The difference is whether the pursuit of winning makes a child more committed to hockey or gradually teaches them to be afraid of mistakes. Those are not the same kind of motivation. A player who wants the puck in a difficult moment is in a very different position from one who hopes it never comes their way because they can't bear the reaction if they make a mistake.

Coach Wapps makes this point in his message about protecting the fun. The goaltenders who are still enjoying the position at sixteen didn't get there through one great speech. Their relationship with the game was shaped by countless smaller moments, including how the people closest to them behaved when things didn't go as planned.

It's worth remembering, too, how few children will make professional hockey their career. They should be encouraged to chase ambitious goals, especially when they're willing to do the work. But adults need to keep that possibility in perspective instead of using it to justify endless pressure and unrealistic expectations.

The vast majority of young players will eventually spend their time on something other than competitive hockey. What they take with them could still be extraordinary: discipline, friendships, the ability to accept feedback and the confidence to try again after getting something wrong. We shouldn't sacrifice those benefits in pursuit of a destination most children will never reach.

When a child gets beaten badly on Saturday and still wants to put their skates on Sunday, that says something worth paying attention to. It doesn't mean the loss felt good or that they don't want to improve. It means disappointment hasn't taken away the part of the game they love.

I know how much it means to watch your child have a great game. I feel it, too. I love seeing my son make a difficult save, enjoy a victory and come off the ice proud of what he's done. And when he struggles, I'd be pretending if I said I never feel disappointed.

The responsibility I keep coming back to is making sure my disappointment doesn't become his burden. I want him to prepare, work hard, accept coaching and recognize when he could have played better. None of that should require him to wonder whether I'm still proud to be his father after the game.

I think that's the distinction every parent and coach has to make for themselves. We can ask children to take the game seriously without making them feel that our approval is something they have to earn on the scoreboard. We can be honest about losing while refusing to turn it into humiliation.

One day the schedules will change. Our children won't need a ride to every practice or help getting their bags out of the car. Many of the games that felt enormous to us at the time will be forgotten, scores and all.

What may remain is how those years felt. Did they have someone they could talk to when they struggled? Were they allowed to be disappointed without being mocked? Did the adults around them help them become more accountable, or merely teach them to be afraid of criticism?

Winning is worth pursuing. Losing is worth learning from. But if we do this correctly, the thing our children carry forward won't be a record of every game they won or lost. It will be a healthier understanding of competition and the confidence to face difficult moments without losing themselves in the result.

So after the next defeat, before the analysis and before the speech, look at the child walking out of the rink. They don't need a different parent because the score changed. They need the one who brought them there.