Last year about this time I received a phone call from a hockey couple looking for a solution. This couple, let’s call them John and Mary, said they'd found themselves between a rock and a hard place.
The good news was that their son, we’ll call him Junior, was showing promise as a youth hockey player at a local organization.
But there was a problem: hockey was becoming almost an obsession.
He had no interest in any other activities, and he was becoming increasingly disinterested and negative about school.
There was his phone … and there was hockey.
John and Mary knew Junior was intelligent but his grades were only “so-so” because, in their words, "he wasn’t engaging at school.”
Worse, they were beginning to stress about it.
They knew about Bridgedale Academy but assumed that would just be "giving him more hockey," something they thought might simply gloss over the problem, or perhaps even make it worse.
Eventually, however, they spoke to some Bridgedale parents.
And soon thereafter they gave me a call.
We talked for 35 minutes, including about our classical academic curriculum and about how we nurture our students academically and athletically.
Among other things, John and Mary specifically wanted to know how our boys cope with getting up so much earlier in the morning, and being so much more physically active, than in their pre-Bridgedale lives.
They had two main questions:
They presumed that we'd seen at least some hockey burnout and that we didn't really place much of an emphasis on academics.
And so they were surprised by my answers.
I told them:
And I told them:
They liked what they saw and so they signed up Junior for a Shadow Day at Bridgedale, which he of course loved.
And then they enrolled him at Bridgedale Academy for the school year.
John recently told me that Bridgedale has had an "unbelievably positive" impact on Junior.
“He studies now and competes to get good grades. Each school day he’s downstairs ready for breakfast by 6:00am. And it's amazing how much he's developed as a hockey player."
Added Mary, “It’s by far the best school decision we've ever made.”