{"id":19969,"date":"2021-02-17T14:10:23","date_gmt":"2021-02-17T19:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=19969"},"modified":"2021-02-19T17:03:12","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T22:03:12","slug":"alex-the-amazing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/alex-the-amazing\/","title":{"rendered":"Alex the Amazing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>New Fiction by Bruce Pratt<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none; width: 100%; height: 450px;\" src=\"\/\/e.issuu.com\/embed.html?backgroundColor=%23efeeee&amp;d=portland_magazine_feb_march_2021&amp;hideIssuuLogo=true&amp;pageNumber=82&amp;u=portlandmagazine\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-19996 size-full\" src=\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/hockey.jpg\" alt=\"hockey\" width=\"750\" height=\"419\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/hockey.jpg 750w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/hockey-300x168.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/hockey-200x112.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/hockey-620x346.jpg 620w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\" \/>Sixteen years at Willard Hall and I\u2019ve never coached a team like this. We go 10-1-1 out of the gate, then drop five straight before Christmas. Our happy, fast, sharp-skating winners became a brooding wreck. Defensive zone turnovers, lousy shot selection, and shaky goaltending were all part of the problem, but in my gut I knew something else was wrong and asked our sports psychologist, Laura, what she\u2019d recommend we do. She said, \u201cSomething fun.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New Fiction by Bruce Pratt Sixteen years at Willard Hall and I\u2019ve never coached a team like this. We go 10-1-1 out of the gate, then drop five straight before Christmas. Our happy, fast, sharp-skating winners became a brooding wreck. Defensive zone turnovers, lousy shot selection, and shaky goaltending were all part of the problem, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19969"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20074,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19969\/revisions\/20074"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}