When your child starts playing ice hockey, nobody warns you about the admin.
You expect the early mornings. You expect the cold rinks. You expect to spend an unreasonable amount of time learning what all the different bits of kit are called and why the one your child desperately needs is never available in the right size.
What you don’t expect is to become the keeper of an entire hockey season.
Fixtures arrive. Then they change.
Training times move. Extra sessions appear. Tournaments are announced months in advance, then suddenly seem to be happening next weekend.
There are camps, trials and team events. Away games need routes and parking plans. Skates need sharpening. Kit gets outgrown. Payments need making. Coaches send important information in messages that you absolutely intend to remember and absolutely will not.
Before long, your child plays hockey and you appear to have taken on a second job in logistics.
A hockey season is too big for a calendar
I did have a calendar.
In fact, at one point I had nine sheets of A4 stretched across three kitchen cupboard doors, trying to capture three separate teams’ worth of games.
And honestly? It worked. At six o’clock in the morning, standing in the kitchen with a coffee and contemplating the week ahead, it was perfect. I could see the whole season spread out in front of me. I could see where the clashes were, which weekends were already ridiculous and what was coming next.
It was rather less useful when I was standing at the rink and someone asked whether we were available for a tournament. I’d know the answer was there. At home. On a cupboard door.
This was the problem I kept coming back to. I didn’t just need dates in a phone calendar, and I didn’t just need a giant overview of the season. I needed both.
I wanted to see the shape of the whole hockey year when I was planning ahead. But I also wanted to be able to pick the whole thing up and take it with me. Because hockey information doesn’t conveniently arrive when you’re sitting at home with your calendar open. It arrives at the rink. In the car. In a WhatsApp message. During a conversation with another parent. Five minutes before training starts.
And that’s before all the other stuff that isn’t a fixture at all.
When were the skates last sharpened?
Which bit of kit is starting to look suspiciously small?
What did we pay for that camp?
When is the next tournament?
What was that thing I was definitely going to remember from the team WhatsApp chat?
Hockey information has a habit of ending up everywhere. Some of it is in the phone calendar. Some is in emails. Some is in team apps. Some is in messages. Some is in screenshots. And, in my case, quite a lot of it was spread across three kitchen cupboard doors.
I wanted one place for the whole hockey season to live — and I wanted to be able to take it with me.
I didn’t want a generic family planner
There are plenty of brilliant planners out there.
But I didn’t want a family planner with a small box where I could write “hockey”. I wanted something built around the way a hockey season actually works. I wanted to be able to see the shape of the whole season, but also plan one busy week at a time. I wanted space for fixtures and training, but also all the things that happen around them.
I wanted to keep track of team information without searching through old messages. I wanted somewhere to note skate sharpening and kit changes. I wanted to keep an eye on the money disappearing into hockey without pretending that if I didn’t write it down, it somehow hadn’t been spent.
And I wanted somewhere to record the good bits too.
The games. The tournaments. The moments that mattered. The things my children achieved.
Eventually, I stopped looking for the planner I wanted and made it myself. The Cold Rink Club Ice Hockey Parent Planner is now available on Amazon.
A planner made for a hockey season
The Cold Rink Club Hockey Planner is designed to keep the practical side of a season in one place.
There’s space to map out the year ahead, keep important team information together and plan each week as the season unfolds.
The weekly pages are the heart of it.
Because hockey weeks are rarely just about hockey… There’s school. Work. Family life. Training. Games. Travel. The thing someone needs to remember to take on Thursday. The thing you need to buy before Saturday. The early start on Sunday that will be much less painful if everyone knows about it before bedtime on Saturday.
I wanted enough structure to make the planner genuinely useful, without creating another thing that needed to be managed perfectly.
This is not a planner for beautifully colour-coded lives.
You can colour-code it, obviously. I fully support a good highlighter system.
But you can also scribble in it. Cross things out. Change the time. Write “LEAVE BY 6.15!!!” in enormous letters. Add a last-minute training session. Make a note that the skates need sharpening before the weekend.
A hockey season changes. This planner is designed to live through it with you.
More than fixtures and training times
The practical pages came from all the little bits of hockey life I wanted to stop carrying around in my head.
There’s space to keep track of kit, because children have an inconvenient habit of growing.
There’s space to record skate sharpening, because “I think we did them quite recently?” is not always the most reliable system.
There’s space for the financial side of hockey too.
I considered leaving that out. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
But between subs, game fees, camps, tournaments, travel, hotels, kit and the mysterious ability of hockey tape to vanish into another dimension, the costs are part of the season too. I wanted somewhere to keep track of them.
Not to make anyone feel guilty about spending money on a sport their family loves. Just to make it easier to see what has been spent, what is coming up and what needs planning for.
The bit I didn’t expect
I started making the planner because I wanted to organise a hockey season.
But somewhere along the way, I realised I was also creating a way to keep one.
Hockey seasons are long when you’re standing at the beginning of them.
Then suddenly, they’re over.
The children are a little bigger. The kit is a little smellier. There are new friends, new stories and new places you never expected to spend a Sunday morning.
There are games you’ll remember for years and others that blur together.
There are first goals, big saves, tough losses, ridiculous journeys, tournament weekends and moments when something they have been working on finally clicks.
That’s why I wanted space for highlights and memories as well as schedules and lists.
At the end of the season, I don’t want this planner to be something you throw away because all the dates have passed.
I want it to be the story of a hockey year.
The practical stuff. The chaos. The progress. The bits that mattered.
The hockey mum planner I wish I’d had
I made the Cold Rink Club Hockey Planner because it’s the planner I wish I’d had when we started.
Back then, I was still learning how hockey worked.
Now I know that the actual hockey is only part of it.
There’s the planning. The packing. The travelling. The remembering. The organising. The standing in the kitchen late at night wondering whether anyone has taken the water bottles out of the kit bags.
There’s a whole life around the rink.
And I wanted somewhere for all of it to live.
If your hockey season currently lives across a phone calendar, three WhatsApp chats and several kitchen cupboard doors, you can find the Cold Rink Club Ice Hockey Parent Planner on Amazon here.