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After Hours on the Ice
By Neil Peterson | February 24, 2009
When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.
-Helen Keller
The boys’ school I attended as a child, The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, was like most prep schools in the ’50s and ’60s, requiring each student to be involved in athletics. In particular, we had to play a sport each season-fall, winter, and spring.
I wasn’t a star athlete, but just as I still am today, I was competitive. The challenge of the contest appealed to me, so for fall of my freshman year, I tried out for football-and won starting quarterback position on the team.
The freshman football coach, a man named Len Sargent, also happened to be the varsity hockey coach. Toward the end of the football season, Coach Sargent told me he wanted me to play ice hockey in the winter.
Hockey at Taft was king, much more important than football. And I’d never played it before. Heck, I’d only skated a few times in my life! I told Coach Sargent as much. He didn’t care.
“I have a team just of freshman and sophomores that are selected, in part, because of their future potential,” he said, “perhaps even to play varsity hockey.”
I ended up trying out-and making the team. Albeit as fourth-line alternate, but on the team nonetheless.
Neil – fourth line alternate
The only thing I can figure is that Coach Sargent saw a special spark in me that compensated for my lack of experience, and that spark was drive. I was determined to be a great hockey player, even if that meant extra hard work to make up for my lack of natural talent.
Unfortunately, I think “hard work” gets a bad rap today. Everyone wants success-but few are committed to making the sacrifices necessary to reach that success.
I was fortunate to learn from the examples of others when I was still a young man the absolute necessity of hard work. And so, my freshman year, as a newbie on the team who was struggling with learning how to skate-much less how to stick handle and score-I would sneak out of my dorm room late at night, after lights-out, to get additional ice time. I would walk to the rink in the dark and cold, a fifteen-minute uphill walk from my dorm, skates in my arms.
Once I got to the rink, which was locked and dark, I would scale the side walls to get inside. (The rink at that time was covered but not fully enclosed since construction had not been completed on the side walls.) I would then lace up my skates and get on a completely dark rink, maybe a little moonlight shining in, and skate and skate and skate.
Coach Sargent never said a thing about my nightly winter forays and probably didn’t even know what I was doing, but part of me thinks he wouldn’t have been surprised. During the football season, he had looked beyond physical appearances and seen my enthusiasm, my hunger for improvement. And, above all, he knew he had a competitor who loved the challenge.
Sophomore year I made it to the first line of the same team. My junior year I advanced to be the starting defenseman for the junior varsity team. And in my senior year I was one of the regular defensemen on the varsity team. I was never the star, but I was the hardest worker and hustler on the teams.
Coach Sargent (far left, back row), Neil (fourth from left, back row)
Vince Lombardi once said, “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”
Today, I still make that my goal-not necessarily “winning” or being the star, but working hard enough so that, at the end of the day, I can say with satisfaction that I gave it my all…that I skated at night when everyone else was asleep.
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Topics: General, Perseverance, Stories | 1 Comment »
April 27th, 2009 at 9:24 am
[...] a high school student, I’d played hockey at The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut. Now, as a sophomore at Williams College, I was facing varsity team [...]