Week 2 Sortouts wrap-up

For those of you enthralled with the ongoing hockey sortouts for 7-year-old in Kanata, here's the latest. On Saturday afternoon, Lucas has his third session in the sortouts. Unlike last week, which was simply 4 drills, they scrimmaged this week so the evaluators could see how the kids played in an actual game scenario. It was pretty obvious from the start that his group was at or near the bottom in skill level. There were at least a couple of 8-year-olds (Novice level is 7-8) who were likely on skates for the first time, given their slow shuffling around the ice, concentrating less on the puck and more on staying upright. In addition, many of the other kids had limited skating and hockey skills. The plus side of all this is that Lucas looked great out there. Every shift he was on, he had at least one end-to-end skate with the puck while other kids tried to catch up to him.

Due to his play on Saturday, I expected him to bumped up a little for Sunday's session, but as far as I could tell, it was almost the exact same group of kids. This makes me wonder what the point is to the evaluations. But whatever, who am I to judge their pretentious, overly complicated system? Lucas hurt his knee during warmups and missed a couple of shifts, but once he got out there, it was pretty close to a copy of Saturday's session.

He'll have one more weekend of sortouts next weekend. According to the email, it's optional so once again, I'm not sure how accurate the evaluations are. As far as I can tell, kids get placed on how well they skated to a pylon and back last week. That said, considering how well Lucas did play this past weekend, it might not be a bad thing to be placed in the lower level. He's likely to be much more involved than he was last year, and it'll be pretty good for his self-esteem if he's one of the better kids on the ice.

Hockey news aside, here's a couple of pictures from earlier in the year.

This is from Lucas's first visit to Five Guys Burgers. The reason this is special is that he wasn't able to go there until his peanut allergy went away since they use peanut oil in their fries. I doubt we'll be back anytime soon though. The burgers ARE tasty, but I think they are ridiculously overpriced.