Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Coaching your son, or against him?
The Sutters are the closest thing we have to Canadian royalty in hockey. Six of the seven brothers played in the NHL (the oldest one stayed home to take care of the farm, and all the boys, during the NHL summers, came back home to tend the farm), some of them have been or are NHL coaches and/or GMs. If a scout compares you to a Sutter, it’s about as big a complement on your toughness and passion as you can get. What’s the equivalent in baseball? The Alous, if you doubled the number of brothers, maybe?
And now, their sons are playing in the NHL. Here’s Brent, the dad, talking about coaching his son Brandon in juniors, and about to coach against him in the NHL:
In the story, Sutter, who had coached his son in junior hockey with the Red Deer Rebels of the WHL (a team Brent Sutter owns) dressed Brandon down for his play after his son had a bad game one night in Lethbridge, Alberta. “It was on the bus on the way home, and I was like, ‘You know what? It’s really probably more of a time for someone else to be coaching him,’’’ Sutter recalled. “And I was looking at it more as a dad part of it. It was a tough thing, at the time… Whether (the confrontation) helped him or not, I don’t know. I felt bad about it, and as a dad, I was very sensitive toward that. I knew it hurt him and - it did. It affected me.’’


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