Blind Fool

Naked. Jesus.

Today, for the second Sunday in a row, I showered at the rink after playing a morning hockey game. Why? To tidy myself before participating in a second hockey game as a coach. To show self respect after I’ve sweat like a workhorse. To wash the salts from my skin before I don the leather shoes, creased pants, and coach’s jacket. Not so strange, right?

Here’s the rub. USA Hockey requires all prospective youth coaches to watch several training videos online. Some suggest drills to teach technique—how to skate, pass, and shoot. One video, however, called SafeSport, guides all adults who want to coach youth hockey to understand how to prevent and address abuse. The video trains the viewer to consider all peers as potential abusers. If a circumstance seems suspicious, report it. Don’t ask, don’t tell, just report it. Let the authorities investigate.

The ice arena has shower rooms built between locker rooms. Each team is assigned to a specific locker room. Last week, my adult team was assigned to locker room eight for our seven o’clock game. At eight-twenty, after I’d skated hard for 75 minutes, I sat taking off my sweat-sodden pads when two teen boys pushed open the door from the shared bathroom between locker rooms eight and seven.

“Has anyone seen a pair of gray dress shoes?” said Luke, a boy on the high school team I coach. He and the other boy looked embarrassed.

“You don’t meant these, do you?” I said. From under the bench beneath my body I pulled a pair of gray sneakers.

“Yes,” Luke said.

When Luke and the other boy left, I thought, Dress shoes? But I also thought, Cool— Luke sees that I play as well as coach. I peeled off my sweaty shin guards, wrapped a towel round my hips, opened the other door in the north wall, and entered the shower room. Turning the faucet, I waited for icy water to become lukewarm, and I rinsed.

If I rearranged this for dramatic effect, perhaps I’d start with me standing in the shower—naked—when I realize the boys I coach might open the door from locker room seven and expose themselves to their coach naked. Of course, their coach had not intended to expose his naked self to his teen players. He intended to wash. His locker room, eight, shared a shower room with locker room seven, assigned to his teen players for their nine-fifteen game.

I suppose this post is about misinterpretation.

I won’t go on for so long about Jesus. He wasn’t in the shower room with me. (Or, was he?) Jesus is a word I exclaimed aloud on the team bench while watching the past two hockey games I’ve coached. Hearing myself say the word aloud—paired with the word Christ—caused me to realize some kids on the team are homeschooled, and some families homeschool kids because of religion, and families so anchored in religious beliefs that they homeschool their kid to shield them from ideologies counter to their own might find an adult who exclaimed "Jesus Christ!” when he saw a teen hockey player pass the puck in front their own net so carelessly that a player from the other team intercepted said puck and sniped it past our netminder’s head for a goal—top shelf, where mother hides the cookies—such a circumstance might not earn a cursing coach respect among either the players or their parents. “He seemed like a decent man until he took the Lord’s name in vain,” I imagine one mother saying to another at the moms’ coffee klatch.

Is this where I say something like, “I’m trying my best,” or does that make me sound like a blind fool? Best not to worry, maybe.