DRAFT — every word below was written by Claude as a shape to edit, not as facts about Eric. Replace it with what he actually says in his filmed interview before this page goes public.

Eric came to this the way a lot of adults do. He plays in a beer league, he is 37, and he cares about getting better far more than the setting suggests he should.

What bothered him was the puck. He could skate well enough to keep up, but keeping up was most of what he was doing — get it in traffic, head down, move it away before anyone could take it off him. Knowing exactly what he wanted to do and not having the hands to do it.

The hesitation was not really the money. It was the feeling that coaching is for people going somewhere, and at 37 he was not sure he counted.

The work was unglamorous. Short sessions, most days, filmed on his phone and sent back so we could both look at what his hands were actually doing rather than what he thought they were doing. Then the same patterns again, until they stopped being drills.

[Replace this paragraph with the moment it clicked — a specific shift, a specific game. His story, in his words.]

He is not going pro. That was never the point. The point is that he plays the game he actually wanted to play.