Parenting & Family Quote by Bobby Orr

Orr isn’t romanticizing some sepia-toned childhood for the sake of it; he’s issuing a quiet indictment of how modern youth sports train kids to consume the game instead of inhabit it. The line about waiting “for it to be organized” lands like a diagnosis: players are being conditioned to treat development as something delivered by adults, schedules, and entry fees, not something wrestled into existence on a driveway or a pond.

His contrast is surgical. “Go play all of these tournaments” sounds active, but Orr frames it as a substitution for the thing that actually builds players: unstructured reps, improvisation, and the low-stakes chaos where creativity becomes habit. Tournaments promise intensity and validation - scoreboards, medals, rankings - but they often compress learning into performance. You don’t experiment when every shift feels like an audition.

“I learned my skills by dropping the puck just with the kids” is doing two jobs. It’s a personal origin story, yes, but it’s also a model of agency: kids setting the terms, solving problems in real time, negotiating rules, inventing plays. That environment creates not just better hands, but better instincts and a more durable love of the sport.

The subtext is economic and cultural. “Organized” is code for a system with gatekeepers: ice time, travel teams, private coaching, costs that quietly sort who gets to “develop.” Orr’s nostalgia is really a warning that when play becomes a product, imagination is the first thing priced out.