I know it’s just mid-summer, but soon enough the hockey season will be in full swing and then you know what else will be in full swing? The hockey emails!  Oh yes, soon all hockey moms’ inboxes are going to be inundated with emails from the team. I should know because I am a hockey team manager and I’m about to inundate your inbox with emails.

 

So listen up, hockey moms! I would like to provide a word of advice to hockey moms about the emails for the upcoming season. In my experience as a hockey mom and a hockey manager, emails fall into one of these categories:

 

This is the parent who hits ‘reply all’ for every single email they send. They dig through their emails to find the most recent all-team communication and hit reply all asking if anyone is available to bring their kid to practice because they can’t make it themselves. Then, another parent ‘replies all’ that they actually cannot drive your child to hockey, and another parent can drive your child to hockey but needs another parent to drive their kid home from hockey and still another parent decides to add to the email string with a unrelated question like, ‘does anyone know if the tournament schedule is posted yet?’ FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE STOP.

 

If you send a detailed email about an upcoming event and then very kindly reference an attachment with additional crucial information, it would be really helpful if you ACTUALLY REMEMBERED TO ATTACH IT. Thank you.

 

If it’s about anything within our Universe, The Soapbox Writer will have an opinion about it. And it is absolutely vital that the entire team knows their opinion about it. “You know I don’t want to complain about the association executive because I know they’re all volunteers …” Except you do. Go on. About the Universe. And the association executive. WE DON’T CARE.

 

The novel writer is the poor cousin of the soapbox writer. The subject line of the novel writer’s emails usually reads IMPORTANT which is smart because it catches my eye. But I’m not that smart because then I get sucked in and I can’t get out. These emails start out pretty cheery but then go on and on and on and on about the last game, the last team dinner, the sale at HockeyLife, the officiating at the game, the hours of the skate sharpening clinic at the local arena, the amount of ice time allocated to one of the lines. You can bet that pretty soon I am banging my head on my keyboard. At least the soapbox writer has a point (I just have zero interest in it). JUST GET TO THE POINT!

 

This parent starts out writing great emails. They are succinct and timely. Except they fail to actually deliver the one piece of critical information the team needs – like where the game or practice is being held. Even better are the emails that deliver inaccurate information about this game or practice only to send around another email two minutes later asking parents to ignore the last email and read this one. The Preoccupied Parent email I love the most is the hockey mom who intends to send an email to another hockey mom gossiping about a certain hockey mom’s FireBall whisky consumption at the last hockey party not realizing that she’s sent it to the whole hockey team. PLEASE PROOFREAD YOUR EMAILS BEFORE HITTING SEND.

 

The Lonestar Superstar
The type of email writer has only one child in hockey but fails to realize that many parents have multiple kids in hockey. Their subject lines read “The Game Tonight” (when you have two or three games tonight). Unless the whole team knows exactly who you are and what team you’re talking about, TELL US!

 

The last person I want to offend is a feminist. Many women do not change their last names when they marry. I know this because I did not change my name when I got married. (This is a source of some frustration for many of my kids’ coaches because they have to learn to pronounce my last name!) I’ve learned though that if I sent out a ‘reply all’ email out to one of the hockey teams my kids was on, I know enough to sign my email with my name but then my child’s name in brackets afterward. Because it pretty rare when hockey parents introduce themselves at the beginning of the season like “ Hi, I’m Astra Groskaufmanis – I’m Connor Chisholm’s mom”. Usually it’s “Hi, I’m Astra (no last name) – I’m Connor’s mom (when there are three Connors on the team). So go ahead and keep your last name, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD TELL ME WHO YOUR KID IS!

 

I get it. You don’t want your work email box to be besieged with all the (occasionally unnecessary) hockey emails you get through the course of the hockey season. So you hand out a Gmail or Hotmail email address for the team distribution list. Which you never check. NOT HELPFUL. This is also the parent who does provide a work email for the distribution list but routinely cleans out their Inbox of all non-essential emails (i.e. deleting all hockey-related emails). ALSO NOT HELPFUL.

 

As you can see, I’m quite the expert on hockey email etiquette. Having been a hockey mom for fourteen years helps, but so does the fact that I’m guilty of writing at least one of the stereotypical emails highlighted above at least once in my hockey career! I’ve been around the arena once or twice and I’ve learned a lesson or two along the way.

 

So three cheers for the hockey emails – the shorter the better!

This blog was originally posted on August 3, 2015