Hockey Parent 5AM Practice Exhaustion

Hockey Parent 5AM Practice: Surviving the Ice Time Schedule

The alarm goes off at 4:45 AM. It's dark. It's cold. Your kid has practice at 5:30 AM on the other side of town because that's the only ice time available. Welcome to minor hockey in Ontario.

The Hockey Parent Sleep Problem

Ice time is expensive and limited. When there are 50 teams competing for rink hours, someone ends up with the 5:30 AM slots. Usually multiple times per week. Usually during the coldest months of the year.

Parents adapt. But adaptation doesn't mean thriving. A season of 5 AM practices takes its toll:

• Going to bed early but lying awake anxious about oversleeping the alarm
• Waking groggy because you're interrupting deep sleep cycles
• Running on caffeine until you crash mid-afternoon
• Weekends spent catching up instead of living

You Can't Change the Schedule (But You Can Work With It)

Early ice times aren't going away. What you can control is how efficiently you sleep during the hours you have.

The Alarm Anxiety Problem

Half of bad sleep before early mornings comes from worrying about missing the alarm. Your brain won't fully relax if it's standing guard.

Use a second alarm. Phone plus a physical alarm clock across the room. Once your brain trusts the system, it stops monitoring and lets you sleep deeper.

Evening Wind-Down

When you need to be asleep by 9 PM, you can't start winding down at 8:45. Screen time stops at 7:30. The bedroom needs to be cool and dark. Everything is prepped for morning so you're not lying there running through checklists.

The Mattress Factor

Here's the hard truth: you can't sleep from 9 PM to 4:45 AM and feel fully rested. Seven hours isn't enough for everyone. But you can make those seven hours more restorative.

A mattress with good pressure relief means less tossing and turning. Better motion isolation means your partner's 6 AM alarm doesn't wake you for the hour you have left. Proper support means you're not waking stiff on top of being tired.

The Saturday Tournament Marathon

It's not just early practices. Tournaments mean multiple games across a weekend, often at different rinks, sometimes requiring overnight stays. The hockey parent who slept poorly all week now has to drive hours, sit in cold arenas, and manage a tired athlete.

Quality sleep during the week is your only defense against tournament weekends.

What Hockey Parents Actually Need

Fall Asleep Quickly

When you have to be asleep by 9 PM, there's no time for an hour of lying there. A comfortable mattress removes the physical barriers. You lie down and your body is ready immediately.

Sleep Through Partner Movement

If one parent handles morning duty, the other might not need to wake up until 6 or 7. But only if the mattress absorbs movement. Hybrid mattresses and memory foam options isolate motion well.

Wake Up Mobile

You're going from bed to car to cold arena. Stiffness means discomfort for hours. A mattress that keeps your spine aligned means you wake up ready to move, not groaning through the first 20 minutes of the day.

The Long Game

Minor hockey lasts what, ten years? Twelve? That's a decade of early mornings, tournaments, and disrupted sleep schedules. The parents who handle it best aren't the ones running on adrenaline. They're the ones who've figured out how to actually rest during limited sleep windows.

Investing in better sleep now pays dividends for years of seasons to come.

We Understand

Half our staff are hockey parents or grandparents. We know what the Brantford 99ers schedule looks like. We know the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre parking lot at 5 AM. We know the exhaustion.

Come see us at 441½ West Street. We'll help you find a mattress that makes those short nights count.

Mattress Miracle: supporting Brantford hockey families since 1987.