The Life of a Hockey Family / La vie d’une famille de hockey
There’s a certain smell that lives in every hockey family’s car.
A mix of wet gear, Tim’s coffee, and cold air that clings to the seats no matter how many air fresheners you buy.
C’est l’odeur de la saison.
Being a hockey family isn’t just a pastime it’s a rhythm, a heartbeat that starts in October or earlier or never stops. It’s early mornings, dark highways, and kids half-asleep in the backseat with their sticks and dreams beside them. It’s the familiar faces at the rink parents who have become your second family, and volunteers who make the whole thing possible.
The Road Trips / Les voyages
You know the route by heart:
Sherbrooke, Sorel-Tracy, Ste-Foy, Québec City and back again before Monday morning.
Each city has its own rink, its own smell, its own hot chocolate recipe. You learn which ones serve real cocoa and which ones are just warm water with sugar. You find the best poutines, the hidden cafés, and the arenas where the fries taste like cardboard but somehow hit the spot anyway.
The rink becomes your weekend home.
Tu t’installes dans les estrades, café à la main, manteau d’hiver encore fermé.
You cheer, you chat, you freeze and you wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Because these weekends, these miles, they’re not just about hockey. They’re about family time in motion.
Small Victories / Petites victoires
Not every game ends in celebration. Sometimes it’s a tough loss, a long car ride, or a quiet child staring out the window.
But that’s where the real lessons live.
Hockey teaches perseverance, humility, teamwork and how to get back up when life knocks you down.
You start to see the small victories:
* A first goal.
* A player who finally ties their own skates.
* A kid who high-fives a teammate after a tough shift.
* The bench exploding when the shy player scores.
Ce sont ces moments-là qui comptent.
They’re not on the scoreboard, but they’re the ones your child will remember.
Parenting Through the Teen Years / Grandir ensemble
And then, one day, your little player isn’t so little anymore.
The gear’s bigger, the skates are sharper, and the voice in the backseat is deeper.
Now you’re doing it all with a teenager, one who has their own life, school, friends, and a growing independence.
The drives, both long and short, start to mean something different.
They become a quiet space between two worlds: their world and yours.
It’s where you talk about life without trying too hard, where laughter sneaks in between songs on the radio, and where you both pretend not to notice that time is moving faster than you’d like.
Sometimes it’s silence. Sometimes it’s a debate about a bad call or a favorite NHL player.
And sometimes, it’s just the sound of tires on wet pavement and a wrong turn that turns into a memory, a story you’ll both laugh about years later.
You start noticing the road signs, the glowing gas stations, the random pit stops that mark the geography of your hockey years.
What used to feel like endless drives now feel like gifts.
Moments that let you see your child, your almost-grown child , not as just a player, but as a person finding their way.
The Family Behind Every Shift / La famille derrière chaque présence
Behind every kid on the ice is a family in the stands, parents juggling schedules, siblings bundled in blankets, grandparents following the livestream from home.
C’est du travail d’équipe, même à l’extérieur de la glace.
You learn to celebrate together. Maybe it’s a team dinner at Boston Pizza, a stop at St-Hubert on the way home, or a hotel hallway filled with laughter and mini sticks.
You make memories that have nothing to do with trophies and everything to do with time spent together.
And yes there’s the bad arena food, the lukewarm coffee, the missing gloves, and the 6:00 a.m. alarms. But there’s also the pride in your child’s eyes, the friendships that form between parents, and the feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself.
More Than a Game / Plus qu’un jeu
For every family in Quebec from Côte Saint-Luc to Laval, from the South Shore to the Saguenay hockey is more than a sport.
It’s how we build community.
It’s where kids learn courage, discipline, and empathy.
It’s where parents learn patience, laughter, and unconditional love.
Years from now, you won’t remember every score.
But you’ll remember the cold air, the smell of cocoa, the sound of skates on the ice and the joy of watching your child chase a dream with everything they’ve got.
Because being a hockey parent isn’t about raising a pro.
It’s about raising a person.
Un enfant qui apprend, grandit, et découvre le plaisir du jeu/one rink, one drive, one memory at a time.
All Memories Are Equal / Tous les souvenirs comptent
In the end, hockey doesn’t care about age, size, or division.
U9 or U18, single letters or elite, home rink or visitors, the joy is the same.
The memories don’t measure themselves in goals or levels.
They live in the moments, the laughter after practice, the smell of wet gloves drying by the heater, the sound of your child calling, “Did you see that, Dad?”
These moments don’t know what level they played at, or where the game was held.
Because whether it’s a first wobbly stride or a final junior game, every child and every parent shares the same heartbeat of the sport: pride, connection, and love for the game.
That’s what endures.
And that’s what makes every memory from U9 to U18 absolutely equal.
Author: Geremy Miller