Ringette

Starting from last Saturday, our family is traveling down the Ringette road to kids’ sports. Yes, Grady decided to play ringette this year. There was an open-house session where Grady checked it out with a bunch of his friends (of course) and he liked it enough to commit to it. I’m looking forward to it, but I have a few reservations…

1. The name. As a few other parents (Dads specifically) mentioned, the name has a certain feminine tone to it. I tried to explain that our language has hundreds of counter examples where girls have to use masculine names or labels in the activities they do. My thoughts fell on deaf ears though. The consensus is that the name should be changed to “Death Ring” or perhaps “Sonic Ring”.

2. Along the same theme as above, the promotional material told us several reasons to join ringette. The number one reason was to develop our child into a more confident girl. I’m glad the boys didn’t notice that one.

3. We managed to get hockey pants, gloves, jersey, shoulder pads, shin pads, elbow pads and socks all for $60 used! Unfortunately we also managed to get a new helmet, cage, neck guard, jock and bag for $220 new. Cage was $70 and I managed to get the helmet for $50 off.

One nice thing about ringette is that the practice is at a very comfortable 5:30pm on Fridays two blocks from our house. Game times are relatively civilized with times typically on Saturday afternoons and sometimes 8:30am Saturday morning.