Why I'm a Teacher: Part 4

The street hockey playoffs were today.

My team, the Garfield Thunder, came in as the second seed with an 8-1 record. After losing our very first game of the season to the Fair Oaks Sharks, the champions for the last five years, we won the next eight in a row. Our first win was a beauty. We went down 0-2 early in the first period. Rather than hang their heads and give up, my team stepped up, holding them scoreless for the next 35 minutes and eventually scoring three goals for the win.

That's a special thing for a team of fourth and fifth graders. It's hard enough for me as an adult to keep my head up when I'm down. But when you're 9, 10, or 11 years old, you don't have much of a sense of perspective. You don't have a history of experiences to draw from. When you get a group of kids to stick together, to not give up, to just come back and win on pure guts, that's special.

For the next seven games we rolled through our competition. We scored somewhere around 50 goals and gave up only 7. We came into the playoffs riding high, but a big challenge loomed. Our semi-final opponent was the third-seeded Sharks. In six years of coaching hockey, I had never beaten the Sharks. I had faced them twice in the playoffs before, both in championship games that we lost, and here they were, in the way again. I was worried that my kids would be nervous to the point of being scared, especially since this was the only team we had lost to and everyone knew that the Sharks hadn't lost a single game in the playoffs for five years.

Before the game began, I gave my pep talk.

What do you say to a group of kids that you've been spending eight hours a week with after school for the last two and a half months? What do you say to them before the biggest game of the season? You've got 13 pairs of young eyes on you, and what you say is either going to pump them up to go out there and do their best or it's going to scare them so much that they're going to play not to lose instead of playing to win. What you say is going to live in their memories, consciously or otherwise, for the rest of their lives. It will become a part of how they deal with stress, with competition, with opportunities, and with life.

I thought a lot about it the past several days, what to say. What came out probably wasn't so profound. I told them that win or lose, I was proud of them for what they had done this season, that no matter what, I would still love them, that we had put a lot of blood and sweat into making this opportunity and now was our chance to take it a step further.

I also gave them a gift - I had received a donation of a hundred or so fossilized shark teeth a few years back. They were donated to interested Redwood City teachers by an old, long time resident. He had found them in Florida and, based on where they were found, the teeth were estimated to be over a million years old. I told them it was our good luck charm.

The semi-final game began, and it was a battle. We led 2-1 for over half the game, only to have them tie it with about a minute left. On we went to sudden death overtime. The puck went back and forth, we had our chances, they had theirs. I could tell everyone was on the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion as sudden death dragged on for 3, 4, 5, 6 minutes. But when Christopher somehow found the back of the net on a beautiful breakaway, everyone just went nuts. Everybody ran onto the court, jumping up and down. Our huge crowd of parents and student supporters was screaming, everyone was hugging each other, half the team started crying, and we were on our way to the championship game.

None of my fondest memories of teaching at Garfield come from teaching math or reading. Many of them come from coaching. I will always remember that moment, the moment we were all hugging each other in a big screaming, jumping circle. I probably won't remember so well that once we got to the championship game, we lost 4-2. But I will remember Sonia getting hit full force in the head with a puck and seeing the look in her eyes as she willed herself not to cry and to keep playing. I will remember Juan saying afterwards that he appreciated all the life lessons he had learned this season about never giving up and the importance of always trying your best. And I will remember José, still playing his heart out in those final minutes of what was a losing cause, getting knocked to the ground as he hustled after the puck, his stick flying from his hands, and seeing him quickly get up, pick something else off the ground, and realizing he had been holding the shark tooth in his hands the entire time.