Growing up, my brother and I never got to play any organized form of hockey so at age 29 I decided to give it a shot. Joined a div E3 team in a non-contact league and it was alright. I wasn't the best on the team, but I made the odd play, tried hard, got a decent point total in my games played and usually went out for a beer and some laughs after which is more than a lot of the guys contributed. I ended up quitting the team because of schedule conflicts, but I can tell you that there were two kinds of vocal guys on the team. Those who supported the rookies like me and actually did what they could to make the team improve by coaching me and giving me the chances to learn, and those who took winning super serious and did the opposite. I can also tell you one of the negative guys was the captain and would bench the crappy guys like me in situations where we were on special teams, or move us down together onto one "crap guy" line and would completely limit our icetime. That pissed me off the most - at least I was giving effort. If you care that much about winning don't put guys on the ice that just coast and don't even have a drop of sweat on their brow when they take their equipment off, and then bench the guys who are working hard at the game and improving their play. That treatment made it pretty easy to overlook the guys who went out of their way to help and just let my other committments take priority.
So yeah, cheers on making the play. If buddy wants to win the world ball hockey championship, maybe he can take the player who flubbed the pass to a parking lot and practice with him on his own time.
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