The Hardest Hit is the first book I've written in a Children/Young Adult series about Sam the Hockey Player.

In The Hardest Hit, eleven-year-old Sam Parker is a hockey player entering the first year in which body checking is allowed.  His natural fear of getting hit is temporarily overshadowed by finding out his parents are getting divorced. 

Determined to keep them together by being a hockey superstar, Sam instead suffers a bone-crunching check from the school bully in his first game of the season.  The resulting pain and fear brings out the worst in Sam as one difficulty after another piles on.  Even his best friend, Jill, doesn’t always seem to understand what he’s going through. 

Sam has to learn how to get up after life knocks you down – both on and off the ice. 

I am currently seeking agent representation for The Hardest Hit.

First Chapter of The Hardest Hit:

“Summer sucks,” I said. 

“Yup,” Jill agreed. 

Jill’s my best friend and has been forever.  We met at learn-to-skate classes when we were three or four years old and started playing hockey together at five.  She’s been on my team every year.  It’s cool to have a friend you can talk to about anything.

The two of us sat on the curb in front of Jill’s house, exhausted and sweaty from a round of street hockey.  The hot August sun beat down on us.  A tangled pile of hockey sticks and gloves lay on the ground of to the side.  I moved my foot back and forth absent-mindedly listening to the rollerblade wheel scrape the pavement.  Jill tore off her elbow pads and sighed heavily, wiping the sweat from her forehead and grinning a little. We didn’t usually keep score.  Instead, the rule was ‘last goal wins.’  Jill had just roofed one to the top of the net, so she was the winner for now. 

“I mean it,” I said.  “I can’t think of one good thing about summer.”

“There’s no school,” Jill offered.

I furrowed my brow.  She had a good point.

“And we get to go to the lake sometimes,” she added.

“Okay,” I relented.  “There are a couple of good things about summer, but mostly it sucks.”  I didn’t have to tell her why.  Jill knew.

Summer meant no hockey.

Every year in late September, practices started.  By October, we were playing games and the season lasted clear into April.  The end of the season wasn’t so bad, because there was almost always at least one weekend tournament sometime in May that we could play in, but once that ended, the hockey drought began.  The NHL playoffs on TV helped take some of the sting out of it, but that was over by the first week of June, which left a long three months of no hockey.

“Summer sucks,” I repeated.

“Yup,” Jill agreed.

“You two are stupid,” said a third voice from behind us.

I turned.  Nate Bridger stood a few feet away astride his battered mountain bike.  His closely cropped hair glistened with sweat.  He squinted from the sun as he stared in our direction.  He was a grade ahead of us in school.  He’d always been bigger than me, but now I was surprised at how much he’d grown just since school let out.  He had to be twice my size now.  The way he threw his weight around on the ice last season was bad enough, but now he was a monster. 

I swallowed and hoped he wasn’t looking for trouble.

“Stupid?” I asked carefully.  “What do you mean?”

Nate snorted.  “Summer is the greatest invention in the world.  There’s no school.”

“Yeah, I said that already,” Jill said.

“Also,” Nate said, “you get to go camping in the back yard, swimming at the pool and you can ride bikes all day long.  There’s no homework and you can stay up super late and then sleep in the next morning.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but—”

“There’s barbeques,” Nate continued, ignoring my interruption, “and baseball games at the sandlot that go on for way more than nine innings.  Plus, on the Fourth of July, we get fireworks.”

“Sure, fireworks are cool,” I admitted, “but—”

“And it’s warm out,” Nate interrupted.  “You don’t have to wear hats or coats.”

“That’s true,” Jill said.

“And that means not getting sick,” Nate said.

“My cousin Drew got a bad cold last month,” I said, hoping to poke a hole somewhere in Nate’s theory.

“Did he get better?” Nate asked.

“Yeah.”

“Well, if it would have been winter, he probably would’ve died or something.”

I scowled.  “That’s a mean thing to say.”

Nate snorted again.  “Mean?  I thought you were a hockey player.”

“I am.”

“Well, if you know anything about hockey, you know that you gotta be mean to play.  And tough.”

I pressed my lips together, considering.  That wasn’t what any of my coaches have ever said.  My Dad, either.

Before I could answer, Jill spoke up.  “Hockey is about skating and passing,” she told Nate.  “It’s about playing together, as a team.”

Nate shook his head and eyed the two of us.  “Whatever,” he finally said.  “Maybe that’s how they play in the girls league, but in Pee-Wee, there’s body checking.  It’s real hockey, and you gotta be mean and tough.”  He jerked his thumb toward his chest.  “Like me.”

“Body-checking?” I asked.  “I thought that didn’t start until Bantams.” Bantams started at thirteen, which seemed like about a century away right now.

 “They check in Bantams, too,” Nate said, “but we start in Pee-Wee.”  He squinted at me.  “You didn’t know that?”

I wasn’t about to give Nate Bridger any satisfaction, so I answered, “Yeah, I knew.  I just forgot, that’s all.”

He smiled.  I don’t know how he did it, but when Nate Bridger smiled, he looked even meaner than when he glared.  “Well, don’t ‘forget’ when you’re on the ice, Spam.  And keep your head up or you’ll get your clock cleaned.”  He stood up on his pedal and pushed it forward, then turned around.  “See ya, girls,” he said over his shoulder as he rode away.

“Jerk,” Jill muttered after him.

I shook my head.  “That’s one more thing I don’t like about summer,” I said.  “Nate runs loose on his bike, riding around and shooting his mouth off for three months.”

And calling me Spam, I thought.  Which I hate.

“Yup,” Jill agreed. 

“He doesn’t know anything, anyway,” I said. 

“Not much,” Jill agreed. 

“He’s a stupid bully.”

“Pretty much,” Jill said.  Then she crinkled her nose.  “Well...he was probably right about the weather.  Warm is nice.”

I shrugged.  “Yeah, okay.  Probably.”

“And the swimming,” Jill added.

“Yeah.”

“Fireworks, too.”

Fireworks were cool, but I didn’t feel like acknowledging that much of anything smart ever came out of Nate Bridger’s mouth.  So I changed the subject.  “Well, he doesn’t know anything about hockey, that’s for sure.”

“Not much.”

I thought about body-checking and what Nate said about being mean.  I had seen the pros check each other pretty hard, and sometimes they even got into fights.  But youth hockey was nothing like that.  Still, Nate seemed pretty sure of himself.  “You don’t think he’s right about what he said, do you?” I asked Jill.

Jill took a deep breath and sighed.  “Well, there is body checking in Pee-Wee.  That’s why I had to switch positions to goaltender this year.”

“Really?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.  “I thought you just wanted to wear all those cool pads.”

Jill grinned a little.  “That, too.  But my Dad said that the boys were getting too big in Pee-Wee and that I might get hurt, being a girl.”  She scowled a little when she said this. I knew she didn’t quite agree with what her Dad said.

“But you’ve been skating with boys since...well, you’ve always skated with boys.  What’s the big deal?”

She shrugged.  “My Dad said that Pee-Wee is for eleven and twelve year olds, right?  But he said some of the boys are old twelve year olds.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I guess it means that they turn thirteen during the season.”

“Oh.”  I thought about it for a moment. The cutoff for each age level was the end of the year, but we played until April, so I guess it was possible.  Some kids had to have birthdays in January all the way up to the end of the season.  “What’s the big deal?  That happens every year.”

A bee buzzed by us and Jill took a mild whack at it with her street hockey stick.  She missed but the bee got the hint and zipped away.

“All my Dad would say is that this is the age that changes really start happening and some boys at thirteen are going to be way, way bigger than me.  Then he made me go talk to my Mom about it.”

I cast a sidelong look at her.  “Your Mom?”

Jill nodded.  “She wanted to talk about other stuff.”

“Other stuff?” I asked.  Then I realized what she meant.  “Uh-oh.  You mean...?”

“Yup.”

She didn’t have to say it.  I knew what she was talking about.

Puberty.  The Change-o-rama.  The big P.  My Dad had “the talk” with me a few months ago.  He didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know from the school and from listening to other kids talk.  Mostly, he hemmed and hawed and asked me if I understood.  I said yes as quickly as I could to end the conversation.

Jill seemed pretty cool about the whole thing, though.  I noticed she’d started looking more like a girl this last year, but I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it.  I mean, sometimes I didn’t like the idea, but sometimes I did.  It was confusing.  Sometimes it was easier just to ignore the whole thing.

I cleared my throat.  “Uh, so that’s why you changed to goaltender?  So you wouldn’t get hurt?”

Jill picked up a small piece of gravel next to the curb and chucked it at the nearby stop sign.  Ting.  As usual, she hit it dead center.  “That’s why my Dad made me change,” she said. 

I leaned back, resting my palms on the grass behind me.  “Hunh,” was all I could think to say.  Jill was tougher than most boys in our class, though nothing like Nate Bridger.  If she was worried about body checking, then maybe...

I shook my head at the thought.  Jill wasn’t worried.  Her parents were.  And parents always worried way, way too much about things like that.

I picked up a piece of gravel and threw it at the stop sign.  My throw went wide and skittered harmlessly down the asphalt street.

“Nice shot, loser,” Jill teased.

“Shut up,” I said, getting to my feet.  “C’mon, let’s play.  Shooting pucks isn’t throwing gravel.  Game on.”

Jill smiled.  “Okay.”

Body checking, I thought as we put on our street gear. 

It couldn’t be that bad, could it?

I didn’t know that the answer was – yes, it could.