There’s a moment, walking into the rink after a long day, when the doors open and the cold air hits you. I’ve never found a better way to say what it does than this: it permeates your soul. Whatever the day held — the meetings, the decisions, the weight of a job where everything eventually lands on your desk — the cold air greets you like an old friend.
Hello. I’m home.
I’m a beer league goalie in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. That sentence would have surprised the younger version of me, and it definitely would have surprised my knees. But it’s one of the truest things about my life, and tonight I want to tell you why.
An Hour Early, Forever
Somewhere in my self-taught goalie education, I read that the goalie just gets to the rink an hour before everyone else. That’s how it works. Nobody explained why. I locked it in anyway, and it’s been my rule ever since.
So most nights I’m the first one in the locker room. I pull on the bottom half of my gear and then I just sit there for a while, letting my head empty out. A lot of nights I’m coming straight from work, from a day full of things that all felt urgent, and that quiet hour is where the day drains away. People imagine hockey locker rooms as nothing but stink — and look, the room has a funk to it, I won’t lie to you. But it’s a funk that recharges the soul.
Then the team starts rolling in, and the room fills with the kind of conversation you can’t find anywhere else in adult life. No agendas. No titles. Just people who love a game, giving each other a hard time. I get the top half of my gear on a few minutes before ice time and head out. Some nights I even skip warmups, because I kept getting hit in the head during them, and getting hit in the head has lost its charm.
How a Defenseman Ends Up in the Net
I didn’t grow up in the crease. I played defense in high school — never great, but I loved being on the ice with people who got it, and I never stopped craving that feeling.
Then, years into beer league, we kept hitting the same problem: game night, no goalie. Nobody wanted the job, and a hockey game without a goalie is just an argument with skating. I’m always up for a challenge and I love learning something new, so I decided I’d take it on.
It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
That first game, I felt so dumb. I showed up two hours early because I’d spent the previous few days watching YouTube videos on how to put goalie pads on — an accredited institution I like to call the YouTube Goalie Academy — and I still barely got myself dressed. No training. No idea what I was doing. And suddenly I was the guy who was supposed to stop everything.
Here’s what I remember most, though. My teammates knew it was my first game in net, and they were nothing but supportive. I didn’t stop all the goals. I don’t think we won. We had an absolute blast. I’ve been to real goalie camps since, and I’m a lot better than I was that night — but I’m still a typical beer league goalie, and proud of it.
The Loudest Silence in Sports
If you want to know what the position feels like, let me take you inside a shootout, because it’s the best and the worst of goaltending compressed into about eight seconds.
The whole game comes down to you. I have a ritual: I center myself in the net, tap each post with my stick so I know exactly where I am, and scoot out to the top of the crease. Behind me it’s chaos — my teammates banging their sticks on the boards, everybody screaming, the whole bench living and dying with each shooter.
And then the skater starts in, and all of that noise just… disappears. It goes quiet. You’re dialed in on one human being, and the best advice anyone ever gave me is running through my head: be patient. That is brutally hard when someone is skating at you with bad intentions. But if you can wait the shooter out and stay on your angles, you’ve got a chance.
I’ve won games in that silence. I’ve lost games in it too. Both are why I play.
Everybody Fights for the Blame
Here’s my favorite thing about hockey players. When a goal goes in against us, everybody fights for the blame. The defensemen skate over saying “that was mine, I let him through.” Somebody else insists they lost the coverage. It’s beautiful.
But make no mistake — everyone in the building saw that puck cross the line. The light goes on. The other bench celebrates. There is no hiding in the crease.
And that’s the closest thing hockey has to my day job. When you make the wrong call as a CEO, the whole world sees that too. The net keeps teaching me the same lesson leadership does: you cannot let one goal define the rest of your night, or your life. As Ted Lasso says — be a goldfish. Take the lesson. Let go of the sting. Get set for the next shot.
The game doesn’t go on if the goalie doesn’t show up.
The crease teaches one more thing, and it might be the biggest one. A skater can miss a night, and the game rolls on; the bench just gets a little shorter. The game does not happen if the goalie doesn’t show up. So you show up — at fifty, with knees and hips that file formal complaints about the positions you put them in. You show up on nights when the other rink’s goalie backs out and one game becomes two. I’ve had weekends where I played four games back to back, and walked like a man twice my age on Monday, and I’d do it again tonight.
Your team needs you. You go. That’s the whole lesson — at the rink, and everywhere else in life.
The Rink Family
Nobody in our league actually cares who wins. Sometimes it’s fun to fight for something — and yes, adult league has its bitchy nights and its almost-fights, which are mostly two tired men hugging angrily. But the game ends, you have a beer with the guy you were chirping, and it’s over. That might be the most civilized conflict-resolution system I’ve ever seen, and I’ve sat through a lot of meetings.
And it’s not just the guys. Allie is one of the best players in our beer league — she’ll work the puck through an entire team, stop you cold, and do it all with a smile on her face. For a few years I served on the board of the Inland Northwest Girls Hockey Foundation, and our first class of girls is heading off to college right now — girls like Ailey and Sam, who we’ve been skating with for five years, watching them get so good it takes your breath away.
People sometimes ask why women’s health and women’s opportunities show up in everything I do. This is part of the answer. When women and girls get their shot, everybody’s world gets bigger.
Playing With Jake
But the best thing the net ever gave me is that I get to play hockey with my son.
Jake started playing at twenty. He grew up on soccer, during years when I’d stepped away from hockey — one of my few real regrets, because I think if I’d kept playing, he’d have grown up in skates, and maybe my other kids too. But we got here, and that’s what counts.
Now we share the ice, and I get to watch him do the thing he does everywhere: bring people together, lead without trying, and have more fun than anyone out there. Nothing makes me happier than playing hockey with my son. Even when he scores on me, it still makes me smile.
Home Ice, Forever
People say goalies are weird. We are. You have to be a little weird to volunteer to stand in front of the puck.
But the net gives me the one thing in my life that is a hundred percent mine. At work, I depend on dozens of people, and everything is still ultimately my responsibility. In the crease, my attitude, my preparation, my patience — it’s all on me. And there’s a strange peace in that: the peace of knowing you can show up and be there for everybody.
George Bernard Shaw said we don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. I plan to play as long as this body lets me. And I’ve got a running joke that isn’t entirely a joke: when I’m gone, I want some of my ashes sprinkled under the ice in Coeur d’Alene.
Home ice, forever.
If this one landed
The Beer League Goalie Manifesto is the unserious version, which is to say the one I actually believe.
There are records about this too. Hockey Tunes and Penalty Box Confessions.