By: Richie Dunphy

 Like most sports there are age brackets in which you go through to have the same age of kids playing together.  Mite – 8 and under  Squirt – 9-10 years old  Peewee – years old  Bantam – years old  Midget minor - 16 and under  Midget major - 18 and under  Juniors – 16 and up  Reference – USAhockey.com

 I started playing hockey at 3 years old. While most people consider this a very young start for a sport this is actually quite typical in hockey.

 I played for multiple teams in my life including:  Livonia Knights  Honeybaked  Farmington Flames  Michigan Seals  Mighty Ducks  Livonia Stevenson Spartans

This is the team that I started my career I played for the knights at multiple parts of my career I played with my age group which is the ‘91 birth year I also managed to play with kids that were older than me and in the ‘90 and ‘89 age group

This was a unique experience for me as this was AAA hockey so I was playing with the best kids in my part of the state of Michigan I was lucky enough to play and win a state championship I got the experience of going to a international tournament called international silver sticks in which you play with the best team from multiple states and from all around Canada I got to play in the largest mall in Canada named the west Edmonton mall so that was a very fun time also

I played for the Farmington Flames for only one year but arguably one of my favorite and most fun teams to be on While this team was not expected to be the very best, We managed to work as a team and upset a lot of other teams and ended up bonding because of it On this team we went to a lot of fun tournaments around the Midwest and had a tremendous amount of fun doing so

This team was originally a team in which I thought I would only play a couple weeks for before making the jump to high school hockey In the end it turned out I did not make the high school hockey team and played the complete season with this team I am very glad for getting cut from the high school team though because I ended up gaining two of my best friends from this team

This was just a spring league team that I played for in two consecutive years It was comprised of some of the best hockey players from my high school and some friends from other high schools that we previously had played with We were what in the hockey world you would refer to as a bunch of goons. This is because every single game we played there would be at least one fight

This was the highlight of my hockey career Where I grew up (Livonia) you are bred to either be a football or hockey player and its as serious as you can imagine I had the privilege of playing hockey for this team for my junior and senior year My junior year we compiled the best record not only in the Michigan high school hockey that year but also in school history at