Coaches Get Restraining Order Against World’s Most Fanatical Hockey Mom

hockey mom with stickTeachers, coaches, Scout leaders, and band directors, take note: have you ever considered a restraining order against that parent who just. won’t. stop emailing you? A Canadian father has successfully filed a restraining order against his ex-wife that prevents her from directly contacting anyone involved with her three kids – doctors, teachers, and particularly her sons’ hockey coaches. Why didn’t I think of this back when I was teaching and used to get phone calls in the middle of the school day every time I updated the electronic gradebook?

The coaching is really the crux of the issue, as apparently the two older sons are both pretty talented Junior League hockey players who are literally having trouble finding teams to play on because coaches are scared of their mom. From daily harassing emails to showing up at practices to wreak motherly havoc to actually assaulting a coach during one altercation, I can see why her interactions aren’t exactly welcome. I mean, head coaches are the guys wearing suits and ties to hockey games, not 15 pounds of defensive, but if they are too afraid to coach your kid lest you show up unannounced at a game, something has gone seriously off the rails. You can be a hockey mom or grizzly mom or whatever the noun-mom thing to be is these days, but please don’t be this kind of noun-mom.

The mother is also forbidden from contacting people associated with the National Hockey League, since she’d previously sent an email to 13 people in the Detroit Red Wings organization over head coach Mike Babcock‘s involvement with her kids. I couldn’t figure out how a hockey coach from Detroit was involved with junior hockey teams in British Columbia, so I did some more digging and … well. Wow:

(Editor’s note: After this story originally ran, the father contacted Metro to explain that Babcock, a family friend, visited and offered support to one of boys who was going through cancer treatment.)

Yes, emailing a baker’s dozen of highly-placed hockey VIPs certainly seems like the reasonable response to someone supporting your child during his struggle with cancer.

I never really considered the restraining order route for the people who called me near-daily as a teacher to discuss their kid’s valedictorian aspirations (Is there any extra credit available? Why did he miss one point on that quiz? He’s going to be a doctor, you know) but the idea sounds like genius to me. Parents, we want you involved in your kids’ academic and extracurricular lives, but we also want to teach our fifth period classes without getting interrupted by the telephone, and we want to coach our teams without anxiously looking over our shoulders to make sure we’re not in danger of getting mauled by an unforeseen grizzly mom attack. Being involved is good. Being so involved that we burst into tears every time the phone rings is not.

In case you were worried about the father who actually filed the restraining order, the good news is that he’s also protected by it. The dad, who also (thankfully, I imagine) has full custody of the children, can still be contacted by his hockey-mom ex, just not several times a day with thousand-word screeds about his parenting:

The mother is limited to contact the father via email twice a week, as long as the email isn’t more than 200 words and has no attachments.

(via)

(photo: Sean Locke Photography/Shutterstock)

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