On this Thanksgiving Day our thoughts naturally turn to giving thanks to our family, our parents, our children, our relatives and all of the loved ones in our lives. We give thanks for the food on our table and the good fortune we receive and our health and happiness and general well being. From a Pittsburgh Hornet AAA Travel Hockey perspective, it is also important to give thanks to the people in our lives that make our hockey experience truly special. As such, we believe it is important on this day of celebration to take a moment and give warm and heartfelt thanks:
1. to the parents of our players for their love and devotion to their children and the organization, spending so much time, travel, effort and money to help their children in pursuit of athletic hockey excellence and being the best they can be in their journey toward realizing their dreams. You are the anchor that makes this all happens and deserve all of the thanks and appreciation in the world.
2. to our players, who work so hard and devote so much time and effort in preparing to compete at the highest levels of hockey, attending 3 practices a week, while working so hard to maintain good grades in school and juggling all of the other issues facing young kids today. It is your efforts on the ice and off the ice that makes this entire program such a success and makes this all worthwhile.
2. to our head coaches and assistant coaches and on-ice volunteers who care so much about the children on their teams (more than the parents probably could ever know) and spend countless hours working and preparing their charges to compete at hockey at the elite level and promoting them to the junior and college teams. Consider this the kind word and thanks you should be getting every day for all of great things you all do. Keep up the good work fellas, you guys are the best!.
3. to our administrators, board members and team volunteers that make sure the bills get paid, run the tryouts, order the uniforms, plan the annual banquet, schedule the ice and the referees, run the time clocks, organize the fund raising and do a million other thankless and unappreciated tasks that are needed to keep the entire operation running very smoothly and providing the best hockey experience for our children. The whole thing would fall apart without you folks, many many thanks for all of your efforts.
4. to Robert Morris University and the Island Sports Center that work in a symbiotic and cooperative relationship with our organization so that we may run our program at one of the finest world class hockey facilities in the world. You guys are the hometown champs!. What an outstanding university that any of us would be proud if our children would attend, for hockey or otherwise.
5. to our referees who, like referees everywhere, always get the blame but never the credit for their efforts, and who always put forth a great effort and provide a job well done, and who always are available to staff our games and without which, we would not be able to play hockey. Many thanks guys, we appreciate your efforts and we couldn't do it without you.
6. to the teams and hockey organizations we compete against. While we compete and struggle against each other, we realize the competition against the best makes us all even stronger, and even though some games may be emotional between the teams at time, we never lose sight of the mutual respect we have for each other which is why we give such thanks to our cooperative working relationships with all of our competitors that we have developed over the years.
We would submit that these Pittsburgh Hornet Travel Hockey Thanksgiving Thanks are felt by many of our colleagues within their own organizations in the hockey community and we would encourage our colleagues and friendly competitors in the hockey world to share them with their members as well, to give thanks to the people that mean so much to our combined hockey efforts and to also pass along our warm wishes for a happy Thanksgiving as well from the Pittsburgh Hornets !.
