One goal, many assists
Dressing a 4-year-old P.K. Subban for his first house league game in an array of confusing gear was the beginning of the road to the NHL. It was also an education for Karl Subban who, in an excerpt from his new book, explains how he motivated his son and built self-confidence outside of the classroom — while using every trick in the book to get ice time for a talented kid
Karl and Maria Subban raised five children, two daughters and three sons. Nastassia (Taz) and Natasha (Tasha) are both teachers with the TDSB. Taz excelled at basketball while Tasha studied to become a visual artist. The Subban boys have all been drafted and signed by NHL teams. P.K., an all-star defenceman with the Nashville Predators, started his career with the Montreal Canadiens. Malcolm, a first-round draft pick, is a goaltender with the Boston Bruins’ American Hockey League affiliate. Jordan was drafted by the Vancouver Canucks and plays defence with their AHL affiliate.
It was a Friday night and I had the hockey bag open on the living room floor. I was taking out the hockey equipment — some of it new, some of it used — donated to P.K. by two of my colleagues, Barb Smales and David Bince. P.K. was 4 years old. He was sitting on the couch, barely able to contain his excitement. It was the night before his first hockey game ever, with the Flames in the Chris Tonks Arena house league program. I had no idea what I was doing.
When I took all the crazy-looking pieces out of the bag for the dry run, it was like putting together a puzzle without the picture on the box. I was lost, and, unfortunately, YouTube tutorials had yet to be invented.
The garter belt mystified me completely, and the straps for the shoulder pads were another problem. I got part of the puzzle solved that night and the rest of it the next morning at the arena where I could steal a glance at how it was done in the dressing room.
For the first few games, I got P.K. dressed at home because I didn’t want to be embarrassed at the arena. It was like learning to drive a car: I was nervous at first, but I got the hang of it and soon enough it became second nature. Not only was P.K. learning a new game, but I was learning a game too: how kids were coached in minor hockey — which could contrast quite a bit with how we were taught to teach kids in the education system.
On that first house league team, P.K. was playing with kids who were two to three years older than him. He didn’t look out of place. At 4 years old, P.K. was already a good skater. Maybe he didn’t have an understanding of the game because of his age, but he could keep up and he could carry the puck and make moves with it.
A key component of the success our daughters and sons have experienced was the value we placed on practice. Practice mattered more to me than games. I realize now that one of the best gifts I gave our daughters, Taz and Tasha, and our sons, P.K., Malcolm and Jordan, is helping them be good at something at a young age. It builds self-confidence.
The next year, we took P.K. to Pine Point Arena in Etobicoke, where he was the talk of house league. The year he turned 5, he was on the 6-year-old all-star team. That year, the team scored 21goals, and P.K. netted 19 of them. A lot of people questioned his age. He was big and looked bigger because I always bought him equipment he could grow into (and that his brothers would later inherit). When he was 6, we took him out of house league and brought him to the West Mall Lightning, a select team. He was playing with the Super 8s, the all-star team for 8-year-olds. We didn’t find out until the end of the season that he was not allowed to play two years ahead.
The seed of my sons playing hockey was planted when I was a teenager in Sudbury. Even though I never played on a real team, I always saw my sons pursuing the hockey dream I couldn’t. It started with watching Hock
ey Night in Canada and skating together as a family. The children were not forced to watch hockey. P.K. was all energy in those days and couldn’t sit still. With me cheering or yelling at the TV, he would run over, jump on me or sit beside me, yelling or screaming at the television like he knew what was going on. The kids became fans of the game because my wife Maria and I were fans of the game. Hockey injected fun, joy and laughter into our family life. So by the time P.K. said to me — while we were watching my favourite team, the Montreal Canadiens, on a Saturday night — “Daddy, I want to play hockey like those guys on TV,” he was already immersed in the sport.
Learning to skate is perhaps the most important ingredient in becoming a good hockey player. Skating as a family was as routine to us as eating family dinners. It was our main family activity during the winter months, and we skated on many different ice surfaces around the Greater Toronto Area.
Once the cold weather settles in, the reflecting pool at Nathan Phillips Square becomes an outdoor rink. It is among the first outdoor skating surfaces to open each season, an occasion that marks the unofficial start of winter in the city.
Even though P.K. was an above-average skater for his age, I wasn’t satisfied with his ability. I knew that the more he did it, the better he’d become. The winter he was in senior kindergarten, 1994-95, the goal for P.K. was to skate every day — and the earlier in the season that started, the better. That meant hitting Nathan Phillips Square at 10 p.m.
I would have preferred driving downtown earlier in the evening to skate, but my job made that impossible. I had applied for a vice-principal position at Runnymede Collegiate’s adult night school program. It started at 6 p.m. and lasted until around 9 p.m. I needed the experience as a vice-principal because I was working toward becoming an elementary principal. On those weeknights, I would leave school between 9 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., drive home, change, then wake up P.K., who had gone to bed wearing his snowsuit. Then we’d get in the car and drive downtown.
Public skating would end around 10 p.m., and the crowd would slowly thin out, gradually ceding the space to the shinny players, who would stride onto the ice with sticks in hand. Soon they would outnumber the pleasure skaters, and in no time P.K. would be in the middle of the ice, on his knees, carrying out the shinny ritual of picking sides. All the sticks were thrown into a pile, and P.K. loved to pull them out one at a time to make the teams. The shinny spirit was on full display, with the older players passing the puck to the kids and letting them score.
I never played at Nathan Phillips Square, but I’d walk around the rectangular rink watching P.K. and thinking about how hockey was making him feel the way it had made me feel as a kid growing up on Peter St. in Sudbury playing shinny. He’d been bitten by the hockey bug, and he saw himself as one of the players. The tourists also enjoyed seeing this little black boy skating late at night with the adults. We’d stay until1or 2 a.m., then get a slice of pizza and go home. There wasn’t full-day kindergarten at the time, and P.K. attended the afternoon class, so he could sleep in the next day. We carried out this ritual every night for two or three weeks until the city rinks in north Etobicoke opened.
When you feed a dream, you make it stronger and more likely to happen. That is what Maria and I did as parents. We watched games together on TV and made time to be with our children as they practised, trained and played. Over time, I realized the importance of not only feeding the hockey dream but also building those life skills associated with being a good person.
The hockey lesson plan for the boys focused on four activities: skating, shooting pucks, stick handling and playing shinny. These activities were loaded into their GPS, and we did them year round. My boys had the most fun during the shinny games. Shinny was like their favourite dessert: they couldn’t wait to have it and could never get enough.
I was always there when the boys were on the shinny ice. When Malcolm and Jordan were learning to skate, I would skate with them on the perimeter while P.K. played in the middle with the older boys. As soon as Malcolm and Jordan were ready to participate in the shinny games, I was like a lifeguard sitting in the distance. I never had to come in and rescue them; the older boys looked out for the younger ones. Unlike in their organized hockey games, adult interference was never seen or heard. There were no referees, linesmen, goal judges, fans or scorekeeper, and no one was benched. This was hockey in its purest form, kids playing because it was fun.
Children love to play. That’s how they spend the majority of their waking hours. Starving young children of the opportunity to play is denying them a rite of passage. Maria and I took full advantage of our daughters’ love for basketball and our sons’ passion for hockey as a tool not only to teach them the importance of being good at something but also to grow life skills. Hockey skills make you a good hockey player; life skills make you productive, happier and healthier over your lifetime.
In 1993, we moved from Brampton to Arborwood Dr. in Rexdale in north Etobicoke, near Woodbine Racetrack. Our house had four bedrooms and a big backyard. We didn’t pay a million dollars for it, but it was worth a million bucks to us. More than just a roof over our heads, it was a place where our family ethic of working, learning and playing could thrive. The saying that the home is the first school and parents the first teachers was made for us. Malcolm and Jordan were born while we were living in Rexdale.
Our home was very lived in, and rich with things to do. The moment you walked in the door you saw toys, hockey sticks and mini nets scattered here and there. The house was set up like a kindergarten classroom, with a number of learning or activity centres. There were plenty of books. There was an assortment of physical education equipment and a piano in our living room. It was just as easy to pick up a hockey stick as it was to sit at the piano and bang out some noise. They could always find paper, pencils or crayons to draw or colour. Independent play was important, and we never forced one activity over the other.
The backyard on Arborwood Dr. served three main purposes. First, it was a safe place for our children to play during the warm weather seasons. Second, it housed our grapevines, Bing cherry and pear trees, and my vegetable garden. The third purpose it served was for skating.
For about 15 years, the backyard rink was part of my winter routine. Making the 30-by-30-foot rink was a test of my patience, resilience and ability to work hard. The easy part of the process is nailing or joining the boards together and putting the rink tarp in place. Once the tarp is laid, water is run on the surface to keep the tarp down and in position for the deep freeze. Sometimes winter came before Christmas, and I was able to make a solid base, but one or two days of above freezing would bring me back to the starting line.
Starting over is something you have to get used to when you’re making a backyard rink. You need consistent cold temperatures and a certain amount of snowfall. Progress is always slow, so it can be difficult to see. Wetting the surface a little bit each day is the key. Sometimes I would get up at 3 a.m.; that’s when it’s the coldest, and therefore the best time to spray the surface.
The Subban backyard rink allowed the boys to skate every day and develop a skating ability that separated them from most players their age. It was their job to skate and my job to maintain the skating surface. Whenever my backyard rink was out of commission, I would take the boys to a city rink. I knew the skating schedule for every rink around Toronto and Mississauga. Distance was no deterrent — if it was open for public or family skating, we were there.
If I was tired, or the kids were sick, we might have only 10 minutes to skate, so that is what we’d do. That was our mindset all along — to be better. I tried to teach my students the same way. You work to get better, not to get As. Otherwise, once you get As, why would you keep working? Never mind the letter — you can always be better.
Malcolm and Jordan followed P.K. into organized hockey. They got their start with the Etobicoke Bulldogs Hockey Association. All three joined house league around age 4.
To me, house league hockey is like kindergarten. Everything is new. Your coach is like your first teacher. Teammates are like classmates. There is new equipment and a uniform to learn and use. There are rules and routines to learn and follow. And some children start kindergarten ahead of their classmates, having been exposed to a rich and stimulating environment at home during their first five years.
Like those children who get off to a good start in kindergarten, all of my boys found success in house league. Playing, practising and training in hockey was routine for them by their fifth birthday. The house leagues were made up of teams, and each team organized its players into A, B and C lines. The A line was the top group, B was the average group and C was for those players who could barely stand on their skates. From year one, P.K., Malcolm and Jordan played only on the A line, already able to skate and carry the puck.
The games were played on Saturday mornings, and to this day I can still smell the peameal bacon cooking at Pine Point Arena. We all looked forward to a bacon sandwich after the games. The smell of that bacon was the only thing that could momentarily distract me from my sons’ hockey games on those Saturday mornings.
I will also always remember the passion displayed by the parents the minute we walked through the arena door. It reminded me of the first day of school after summer holidays, when super-charged students returned with energy and anticipation. Parents and young kids would be cheering, yelling, shouting and hollering throughout the hockey games, and with the spirit of competition in the mix, it made it very easy for adults to get lost in the moment.
“Shoot it! Dump it! Skate! Skate! Focus! Focus!”
Loud cheers for goals and wins and silence for goals against and losses defined the rhythm for each game. I wasn’t a yeller or screamer. I may not have always displayed my emotion in the stands, but it came out in other ways. One winter, P.K. was very sick with the flu on a game day. My head — along with Maria’s voice — told me he should not play, but my heart said he should. All morning I looked for signs he was getting better, but P.K., re-
I always told my kids that dealing with racism on a personal level is like many other distractions in life: the minute you pay attention to it, you take your eyes off your destination. You’ll never get where you want to go.
mained in the clutches of a high temperature and displayed little energy.
I dressed P.K. under protest from Maria, and he played that morning to please me. But as I watched my sick and lethargic son trying to skate, I realized I’d made a big mistake. Frankly, I was embarrassed.
Afterwards, I apologized to Maria, though regrettably not to P.K., and vowed not to repeat this mistake. I was reminded of my golden rule of working with children: always make decisions that are in the best interest of the child and the child’s health. To this day, when I start to blow my own horn about my great parenting moves, Maria will bring me back to earth by reminding me of the decision I made that Saturday morning.
My greatest challenge during those minor hockey years was capping my emotions after the games. Whenever the boys’ teams lost, I felt I’d lost too. When they won their game on Saturday, I felt great for the week. It was this roller coaster of emotions that triggered P.K.’s coach, Coach Richard, to tell the parents of the 6-year-old all-star team (P.K. was 5 at the time) to take better care of ourselves or we were not going to make it through the minor hockey years. He was right. We could not continue the way we were going, using up so much energy agonizing over winning or losing. I always felt hock- ey brought out the best in us — and sometimes the worst.
Coach Richard dispensed other valuable advice. He told parents during a team meeting that the coaches did not recognize superstars. He didn’t single out any one of us, but P.K. was their best skater and scorer, and I left the meeting feeling that Coach Richard was saying to me, “Karl, P.K. doesn’t need to feel at age 5 that he is a superstar.” He was so right. We learned over the years that the goal of hockey parenting was not making superstars, it was making better hockey players.
For a hockey team to win, kids have to do certain things on the ice, but one of the things I learned is they are not always ready intellectually, socially, physically or emotionally to do the things we want them to do on any given day. When P.K., Malcolm and Jordan started hockey, they could skate well and they could stickhandle, but they weren’t always ready to go into the pack where the puck was. I had to have faith that the necessary skills would come over time, as each boy developed at his own pace.
I learned from teaching that kids go through different stages of development and have different characteristics. The younger they are the more concrete they are in their thinking. As they get older, they transition into a more formal type of thinking. The minute I was able to translate this knowledge to hockey, I realized I needed to just let go and enjoy the ride. Have fun. I learned this lesson with P.K., and by the time Malcolm and Jordan came along I wasn’t so intense. With P.K. being the first, his hockey took a lot of our energy.
It also took time. Our lives were divided into three parts: home time, sports time and work/school time. Sports time was the most demanding and challenging. Three boys playing and practising hockey all over the city and two girls playing rep basketball meant Saturdays and Sundays were always a blur. We missed some of the girls’ games because we would drop them off and then pick up them up later. When the girls became older we were comfortable with them being driven by other parents or taking public transit, often with their teammates. For many years we had only one car. It was only when Taz started at York University that we got a second vehicle, and she helped out by taking her brothers to practices and games.
I never believed in bribing my children to get them to achieve. But that didn’t stop others, such as my mother’s brother, Uncle Owen. He was visiting us from Sudbury on a day when P.K. was about to play a house league game at Pine Point Arena. Before we walked out the door, Uncle Owen took a $5 bill out of his pocket and waved it in the air, saying to P.K., with a big smile on his face, “You will get one of these for each goal you score today.”
Maria and I considered this kind of outright bribery a no-no, but we let it go this time. My uncle was not with us every day, and we did not feel this one-time event would have a lasting effect on our son’s motivation. P.K., of course, had a great game. He scored five goals and couldn’t wait to collect from Uncle Owen.
On the drive home, I took advantage of this meaningful math moment. We spent the 15-minute car ride counting by fives. Uncle Owen learned something too — that was the last time he offered money to P.K., or his brothers, to score goals.
There are two types of motivation — extrinsic and intrinsic. Uncle Owen’s transaction with P.K. is an example of extrinsic motivation. When the reward comes from the outside, children lose interest over time and their drive for playing evaporates. Intrinsic motivation comes from within. When you play out of interest, and because it is fun and enjoyable to be with others, you are doing it for yourself. And when you do it for yourself, you do it more and for a longer time, and you get better.
While I think there are many benefits for kids playing sports, Maria and I had strong beliefs about the importance of our sons taking their hockey seriously as they got older. One day, Maria was having lunch with a high-school friend and the conversation turned to their kids playing hockey. When her friend said her kids were playing only to have fun and get exercise, Maria explained how our approach was different: “If they only want to have fun, I will leave them in house league. If they only want exercise, I will give them a gym membership.” Playing hockey was expensive, and we wanted a bit more of a return on our investment. We believed the bar you set is the bar they achieve, and you get what you expect. We expected more. A whole lot more.
One day we were at the Vaughan Iceplex in Toronto for a spring tournament. P.K. was about 8. He came out of the dressing room crying. He said a boy on the ice called him the N-word.
We had never experienced this before, so we’d never had any conversations about the N-word. My parents had never had that discussion with me, either. This never would have happened in Jamaica (where I lived until I was 12), and in Sudbury (where I lived until university), they never came home and complained about anyone saying something racially motivated to them. And I had never had anyone say it to me.
Maria and I reacted the same way. We said there was no need to cry because it was only a word. We probably said something about “sticks and stones.” There weren’t too many kids playing hockey who looked like P.K., so I’m quite sure he knew he was different. But now someone had communicated it to him in a way he didn’t like.
The message I gave the boys regarding incidents like this evolved over time. It’s such a sensitive thing. For me, the younger they learned to deal with these situations the better. Racism is a fact of life. People may not like other people for a variety of reasons: our height, the clothes we wear, our weight — who knows? Everybody’s different in some way, and being different doesn’t make you defective.
I always told my kids that dealing with racism on a personal level is like many other distractions in life: the minute you pay attention to it, you take your eyes off your destination. You’ll never get where you want to go. So why give it permission to distract you? If P.K. had taken the time to take on all the negativity that has been thrown his way, he would not have gotten where he is today. He has always just pushed it aside.
My feeling is that the best way to deal with racism is to develop your potential. There are people who don’t believe in you because of the colour of your skin, so the best way to show them and show the world is to become something.
The most important belief you have is the belief in yourself. What a wonderful lesson to teach our kids. It (regardless of what negative thing “it” might be) only affects you if you give it permission to affect you. If someone throws a banana on the ice, am I going to stop playing hockey? Come on.
There was a coach when P.K. was young who told him after a tournament that he was never going to make it in hockey. P.K. had two options: believe the coach and stop playing, or carry on. I like to say, “You must go through something to become something,” and that means you have to face adversity. Those hard challenges are your exams. If you don’t pass them, you are not going to make it. The price you pay is the training you do, the sacrifices you make and the critics you deal with. And there will be many of them—the voices saying you are not fast enough, you are not that good defensively, you lack hockey sense. As I told him one time: “There are three senses you need to understand to make it in hockey: hockey sense, common sense and nonsense. You use your hockey sense on the ice, you use your common sense off the ice and you have to know what to do with the nonsense, because a lot of it is nonsense.”
That is the feedback I give to all of my children, because I needed them to deeply understand this when I was no longer their coach and their trainer. I wanted my advice to be the streetlight at night when it’s dark and the sunshine that lights their path during the day.
The minor hockey years played a major role in our lives. Those experiences were crucial to my children’s hockey development and to our education as hockey parents. The biggest takeaway I have from that time is that hockey matters but people matter more. P.K., Malcolm and Jordan loved playing hockey, but, most importantly, they enjoyed the time hockey made for Mom and Dad to spend with them.
Adapted excerpt from How We Did It: The Subban Plan for Success in Hockey, School and Life by Karl Subban and Scott Colby (Random House Canada, 2017). Reprinted with permission from Random House Canada. How We Did It, by Karl Subban and Scott Colby, is available for sale online at StarStore.ca/subban