PEE WEES

An exploration of the hypercompetitive world of youth hockey.

Cohen’s latest, a mashup of memoir, The Mighty Ducks, and The Bad News Bears, is as much about the irrational, overbearing behavior of parents as it is about the kids who play the sport. If the author’s heartfelt, often brutally funny depiction of peewee hockey is accurate, then soccer moms and baseball dads have nothing on the frighteningly obsessive mania of hockey parents. Cohen ushers readers into a hockey-obsessed corner of the country, Fairfield County, Connecticut, where his adolescent son plays on a peewee team consisting of a mix of boys and girls ages 11 and 12. The author shows us a youth league system so ruthlessly competitive that it divides the players into a hockey hierarchy that consists of four different skill levels: AA, A1, A, B. Of course, with each level comes a corresponding social status for both parent and child. “If a kid who’s been on single A slips to B,” writes Cohen, “he will be ostracized, his parents cast out. If you talk to them, it’s the way you talk to a formerly rich man who has lost everything.” We follow Cohen through the ups and (mostly) downs of one season as experienced from the unique perspective of a dedicated hockey dad: the constant travel, the sociopathic hockey parents, and, for his son’s Ridgefield Bears, many losses. Though the author, who clearly loves the sport, revels in his comic observations of his son’s experiences on the ice, there is a note of serious lament about the overall state of the game as it's played now. For Cohen, hockey in America has become something of a lost cause, mainly because self-interested adults remake the sport “in the image of the grown-up world.”

An alternately charming and acerbic portrait of another youth sport spoiled by adults.