Hockey Is In A Sad State
I was watching the news the other day to find that Charlie Stephens was traded from the St. Mike's Majors to the Guelph Storm. Last year, Stephens was the #1 pick overall in the OHL Entry Draft. He demanded to be traded because this was the year NHL scouts would be watching him, and St. Mike's is a losing team. It's only their second year so not much can be expected of them. But they wanted to keep Stephens to stay serious. A side note. Probably all players on the Majors attend St. Michael's School in Toronto. The team has instituted a policy stating you must take all your courses, or you can't play. So on advice of his agent, Charlie Stephens dropped some, maybe most, of his classes. That makes him ineligible to play.
Now, this is directed to him and his agent. What if St. Mike's kept him? No one's expecting much from St. Mike's this season, so with or without him, they're expecting little. By not trading him, he doesn't go to school and get an education. By not playing, NHL scouts can't watch him, and they don't know whether they want to draft him or not. Since they don't want what they don't know, he doesn't play. No high school education, no professional hockey career. No money. So to any prospective juniors out there, or agents, just remember, it's the player's life to screw.
Hockey has become a business. I'd like to ask a lot of players - when you were kids, what was your dream? You always wanted to play hockey. You get to have fun for the rest of your lives. You get fame. You live away from home for 9 months, your team pays your travel and accomodation those 9 months, but you don't have enough money to live for those 3 months? You have families to support? Your wives are too incompetent to get their own jobs? Your kids don't go to school? You know, both my parents work, our household income doesn't even come close to half a million like most working families. Yet, I live a spoiled life. I have season tickets to junior hockey, I see tonnes of pro games every year, I get fed three meals a day, I have plenty of clean clothes, for the last 13 years I've lived in a fair-size house, not a mansion, not a bungalow. Just a nice two-storey place. I have cable TV with most of the trimmings. I have two phone lines. I've got a few computers (it helps my Dad works for a computer company). I go to public school where I have lots of friends, and for the last few years, my parents have made relatively the same amount of money, and I've been a very happy teenager through all of it. But 3 or 4 million isn't enough to support your families?
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