Old friends

 I've been having some reunions this week.

Though maybe not the way you might expect

First, some silliness. I've been a hockey goalie for almost 30 years, and still have the equipment I used when I was back in highschool. Having spent the last few months acquiring and trying to learn to use the schmancy new technology - like pads designed to rotate on your leg and slide across the ice, and new skates with narrower blades and taller runners - I decided to see what it would be like to go back to my old kit for our weekly Wednesday night game.

Here's one of my new pads, with a big knee guard under my hockey sock, and just a few velcro straps.
You can just barely see my skate, with it's 3mm replaceable blade.

..and here are the old pillows and skates, from 1994 and 1995 respectively.
About 800 leather straps on each pad, and big plastic cowlings on the skates with 4mm non-replaceable blades.

I fully committed to the bit, pulling out as much vintage kit as I still had. My old jill was gone, as were my old hockey pants, but everything else was going to be oldschool!

My ancient Bauer one-piece base layer, elderly velcro shorts, and knitted hockey socks with stirrups. I even dredged up an old stick from the garage and gave it a (mostly) fresh tape job - that thing is a serious piece of lumber!

Fortunately we got to the rink early enough that I had time to think through & remember how it all goes together; the leather straps also luckily still have their kinks in them to remind me where I liked to buckle them. I couldn't believe how heavy the old pads felt, even though empirical testing shows me that my new gear is only about a 1lb total weight savings versus my old kit!

I wore my old chest protector (which is actually lighter than my new one, but not nearly as protective) and even the jersey from the goalie school I attended in both 1994 and 1995

I wasn't at all sure how it was going to turn out, but since we don't even really keep score in our games - it's basically just pickup hockey, but with the same folks each week for 10 weeks - I didn't have much to lose, unless I managed to hurt myself.

Which - after stepping out on the ice in my old skates - felt like a very real possibility!

Nothing else for it, though - I had punched my ticket and would take my ride, with my little action camera suction cupped to the glass behind me to record the carnage.

Highlights (and low lights) from which you can watch right here

I will say I actually played better than the final score would suggest: a goalie has to rely on their defensemen to tie up players in front of the net and take away cross-ice passes, but since it's pickup hockey with a group who are mostly there to learn and develop their skills, things can be a bit chaotic. I do totally own a couple of those goals, though! I couldn't believe how awkward and clumsy I felt, despite this being the kit that I have played 99% of my hockey in lifetime.

Still a hilariously good time all round, though!
(and I don't actually seem to have hurt myself!)

I don't think it's an experiment I'll repeat any time soon, though: maybe pull it all out again next year for a skate, which would be the 30th anniversary for the pads, chest protector and gloves (I had a pair of goal skates I bought used for $10 from the late 70s until my dad bought those Bauer Supremes for me in 1995). While I may not be very good at butterfly style goaltending, the practice I've put in to work on the new techniques has changed the way I move such that I'm not really compatible with the old gear anymore: I truly hated the way my old skates felt (even apart from them making my feet hurt by being too narrow), and despite the pads not being built for it I was trying to slide anyway. That goal that went in over my glove as I tried to slide across? If I'd had the big, flat landing spot for my knee that my new pads have, I would have been able to keep my balance instead of falling forward, which would have kept my glove up and given me a much better chance to make the save.

I won't say I'm a good goalie in my new kit, but I'm better when the equipment isn't getting in my way

Someone in a vintage goalie gear group to which I belong commented that "it's just like riding a bike, right", to which I agreed - in that it can be a little painful if you haven't done it for awhile!

While that reunion was amusing but less than enchanting, I've just had the chance to get together with another old friend today that has been much more exciting.

SHE LIVES!

It's been almost 2 years - July 14th, 2021 - since the last time I got to ride my motorcycle. She'd fallen victim to a number of electrical issues, and wouldn't start at all. I had difficulty finding time to work on her, and eventually realized that her issues were beyond my meagre mechanical knowledge to fix. Then it became a matter of money: I figured it would probably be around a thousand dollars to have a shop work out the issues, so she sat in the garage like an accusation until I finally managed to get her in to a local dealer in mid May. They messaged yesterday to say that - after a stator & regulator replacement - she was ready to go, so I did the 90min bus trip from home up to Waterloo with a bag full of leathers to pick her up.

There's my girl! All naked without her saddlebags, windshield, or backrest..

I won't say she's running perfectly, because she's a little old and worn - I've had her since new in September 2005, and have put almost every single one of the 71,500km/44,430mi on her - but she's definitely running strong, and it felt so good to be back in the saddle!

WHEEEEEEEE!

I've only got a quick ride down to the office in Kitchener in so far, but she behaved herself well, and I sincerely hope this is just the first few of thousands of more miles together.

I brought the backrest with me so I could be more comfortable for the ride home

Now, if you'll excuse me....BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP awaits!

Let's Body Check Cancer Hockey Tournament - Apr 21-23, 2023

 After a year of anticipation - with some actual practice beforehand this time - it was here again!

..and I was slightly terrified..

I was so very nervous in the days before we hit the ice for the 2023 edition of the Let's Body Check Cancer hockey tournament. While I've actually been playing pretty regularly since February, I still don't feel like I've got myself anywhere back to a consistent, decent form, and I was anxious not to let my coworkers (plus an employee's sister, a couple of returning folks who had left the company but came back to play, and Tanker) down. 

Trixie helped me pack

It didn't help that our first game wasn't until 9pm on Friday evening: that sure gives you a lot of time to have an existential crisis. Nonetheless, we made our way to the rink for about 7:45pm and got ourselves checked in, then picked up our team kit: t-shirts, Sniper Skin stick grips, and stickers, all with the tournament logo on them, plus some purple hockey tape.

Our swag got dropped off in the car - I had enough gear to deal with already

I was so very nervous getting on the ice for game 1 vs BrokerLink (a platinum sponsor of the tournament), especially since we had some added pressure in the stands: we knew that Tank's parents were flying in from Calgary for the tournament - and to spend some time with their son during the week of his 50th birthday - but we had no idea that his sister and our nephew were coming as well! They turned up at the rink all together just before our first game, making things very emotional for Tank. 

What a great surprise!

I ended up playing ok - we actually carried a 1-0 lead into the second period, but then it seemed like the other team woke up, and we eventually lost 5-3. I definitely let in a couple of goals I'd like to have back, but certainly faced more shots than I had in any game last year. It felt like we'd been moved up a division for this year, and we had a very short bench - also missing a player for Friday, as she had a class. Nothing for it but to try again Saturday morning!

Our schedule was a little...compressed..this year

We were back on the ice about 12hrs after we'd left it, while the rain continued to pour outside. We faced off against Moves Like Jagr, and if I'm not mistaken I think they actually got one past me first...but then I managed to shut the door, while Team Nico - now at full strength - proceeded to pour 7 pucks into their net. It was amazing what one more skater on the bench did for us!

One of the stipulations of the co-ed tournament is that 2 females must be on the ice at all times - I'm out there for the full game, but it's always easiest if we have more than 2 others on the bench!
Thanks to (L-R) Lindsey for coming out with her brother, Blake; Sarah for coming to play while on maternity leave, and Suzana for coming back to play after moving on with her career last year!

Unfortunately we were back down to only 9 skaters - not quite 2 full lines, and only 2 females apart from me - for our second game on Saturday. Lindsey was taken down by a migraine when she got home, and was unable to play. We also faced a very strong team with a deep bench: they included the family who started this tournament in 2015, and the young man whose childhood cancer diagnosis had been the catalyst for its inception had just turned 18 and was on the ice with them! Unfortunately - despite playing my strongest game so far - we found ourselves outmatched, and lost 5-3 in a really fast, exciting contest.

Our friend Rhonda came to watch the afternoon game, too, and got this pretty sweet photo of me actually looking semi-competent!

The standings were slightly less flattering

We met up with Tank's best friend and his family for a birthday dinner Saturday night, complete with a birthday cake and the hockey-themed birthday card I'd made for him.

I'm so grateful we got to celebrate together!

We knew we would not be in contention for anything with 2 losses in 3 games, but had to wait until the final round-robin bouts were over before finding out the time for our final game on Sunday. Fortunately it wasn't until 11:15am, so we were able to get some sleep to help us recover. I'm so happy we didn't have to play a third game on Saturday: my left hip/groin was complaining loudly about me having gone down awkwardly (to try to stop a puck that was blocked before it even hit the net, no less), and it was all I could do just to lift my bag full of sweaty goalie gear onto my shoulder to get it out to the car after 2 games!

As 3rd place in Pool A we'd play 3rd place in Pool B in the Crosby Division
(We'd been in the Gretzky Division last year, which was the beginner division)

Thankfully, some massage gun work and stretching on Saturday night had taken care of most of the soreness, but I definitely tried to get a good warm-up in before game 4. Unfortunately, while Lindsey was feeling better and back on the bench, Suzana had woken up with a sore, swollen knee, so we were down a skater again and faced with a team that seemed to have the maximum 16 players.

I also had a shaky start, letting in 2 pretty soft goals in the first period, and the Pylons just seemed to have a nearly impenetrable defence. I let in 2 more goals in the second, and while I managed to shut them out in the third period, Team Nico was unable to get on the board. We finished with a 4-0 loss, and an overall record of 1-3. 

..but we had a lot of fun along the way!

Even better, Team Nico raised almost $2,900 for the Canadian Cancer Society, and the tournament as a whole brought in $170,000!

And now half a million since the start of the tournament

While it might have been nice to win a little more, it was great just to be out on the ice and participating in such a fantastic event. I'm not hanging up the pads just yet, either - we've signed up for a little bit of weekly shinny starting next month through late July, and have been playing pickup hockey most weekends lately. Who knows - maybe with some more regular practice, I can help Team Nico to another division victory next year?

In the meantime, I took some of the terrible footage I shot with a cheap action camera (that I've since returned since the viewfinder and the actual video were about 20 degrees off from each other both vertically and horizontally) and cut together some highlights. If you've got 4 minutes to watch some amateurish editing and bush league hockey, give it a look!

On a personal level, though, the best part was that Tank got to spend some great time with his family for his birthday. I couldn't ask for a bigger win than that!

We even got to watch the Oilers take down the Kings together!

Ballers

 I didn't run at all the weekend of April 1st-2nd.

No, I'm not fooling you.

Remember back in February when I talked a bit about goalball? Tank and I have kept playing, and were invited to participate in the Ontario Blind Sports Association's Provincials tournament. The president of OBSA is actually Glen who organizes the Kitchener practices we've been attending, and he cleared Tank and I to play with our makeshift eyeshades (cheap ski goggles with fabric glued inside to completely black out all light and vision). He also set up our team with Kate (a blind lady who started playing goalball with him in November), Tank, myself, and Glen himself as both 4th team member and coach.

The Kitchener Rolling Rangers were given our loaner jerseys at our last practice on March 21st

We were registered in Division 3 - the adult recreational field, versus the kids' recreational and competitive divisions - and were all set to go. We had 3 games on the schedule for Saturday, against teams from Nova Scotia (the Shipwrecs) and Quebec (Team 1 & Team 2), and a sneaking suspicion that these out-of-province visitors might have played more than the 4 times total that comprised Tank's experience...and mine.

How bad could it be?

We arrived early on Saturday - though our first game wasn't until 11am, we pulled into the beautiful grounds of W. Ross MacDonald School for the Blind in Brantford, Ontario around 8:10am as we'd seen an 8:30am warm-up on the schedule and wanted to give ourselves time to get oriented.

Arriving in sunshine

It turned out the warm-up was just time for those teams playing in the first games at 9am to get themselves ready for competition, but this meant we had lots of time to check out some of the competitive division (D1 & D2) action in the other gymnasium from where we'd play all our games.

With 75 participants, this was the largest tournament in Canada in 2023, with several national paralympic team members competing

Apart from the actual sport, it was interesting to see how all of the people - most of whom had some level of visual impairment, as this is technically a sport for the blind - move through the space and crowds of people. We saw some young fellows we had met when a contingent from the school had come up to Kitchener for a practice (actually the very first one we attended), and wished them good luck. I also ended up assisting a couple of people visiting the school in navigating the halls to the student lounge and gymnasiums, offering a voice to follow or an elbow to hold on to as we walked to where they needed to go.

Soon enough it was time for our first match, which turned out to be against a friendly-seeming group of Nova Scotians we had seen earlier in the student lounge.

We hoped they wouldn't go too hard on us

I started on left wing as usual, with Tank at centre and Glen on left wing. Another lady - Chantal - who had come down from Sudbury for the tournament was acting as our coach on the bench, and Kate sat ready to sub in at any point. It was a very strange experience to realize that the change of venue from the familiar little elementary school gym in Kitchener to the larger, more open space of the gymnasium in which we were about to play made it more difficult to navigate, as did having the net behind us.

We had only had walls behind us with gym mats hung on them previously

The floor was wood, too, instead of the tile to which we were accustomed: this made it less uncomfortable to land on (as it has more give), but the sum total was a bit disorienting. Tank and I - being fully sighted - have less experience at finding our position in space via tiny echoes that you barely even register consciously, if at all. The wider space, with more open air behind us, made it difficult for me to know where I was when I'd move around the court. The raised lines (made by taping down string to the gym floor) helped, but only really when I would sweep around with my hands; my feet aren't yet sensitive enough to let me feel them through the soles of my shoes, and it's not permitted to remove or even touch your eyeshades once they've been checked by the referee (which happens before the start of each half) unless you specifically request permission from the ref to do so, after which they are checked again.

In the more competitive divisions, players wear patches of tape directly over their eyes under their masks to ensure full sightlessness

We were down a few goals at the half, but getting amazing coaching help from both Chantal and a young fellow named Nader, who was playing for the Bytown D1 team and is on track to join the national team in the future. I subbed out for Kate for the second half, but in the end the Nova Scotia Shipwrecs took the game 11-5.

Despite Glen's valiant efforts, on his birthday no less!

After the game, we met as a team to go over some coaching points with Chantal and Nader, and to get a team photo.

We might not be winning, but we were learning and having fun!

We had a bit of lunch - the tournament provided sandwiches and pasta salads, plus fruit and juice for all participants (I brought a small cooler with stuff to eat so I was sure to have something safe) - and Tank and I took advantage of the air hockey table in the student lounge. I also had some time to chat with Chantal, who was astonished that we had never played an official game before, and had no idea we had so little experience! I laughed a bit about not needing to be good at things in order to enjoy them (which also applied to Tank having beaten me soundly at air hockey), then off we went for our second game, 1pm against Quebec Team 1.

Hydration and Chantal offering some coaching

This Quebec team actually had a former Canadian paralympic team member on it, and were definitely shooting harder. Glen was doing his best to keep us in it, though!

(A double whistle indicates a goal has been scored, if that's not obvious from the reactions)

A quick note about different playing styles: Glen has been playing for decades, and the sport began as much more of a running-style game, where players stayed on their feet and would dive for the ball. This has evolved over the years so that most athletes start in 3-point stance or on their knees, which is how Tanl, Kate, and myself play, but Glen has amazing ball tracking (which is something with which Tank and I struggle a bit; the ball has bells inside so it makes noise as it moves, but we're not the most precise at being able to figure out its trajectory) and prefers to play on his feet. 

To see him move, you'd never believe that he's completely blind!

It was just before the end of the first half (10 minute halves for D3 games - 12min halves for the competitive divisions) that I took a hard shot from a Quebec player right in the face. My ski goggles had shifted upward a bit, so the frame was right on the crest of my cheekbone, and I found a dark mark when I subbed out so Kate could play most of the second half.

It didn't look like much yet, but I had a feeling I had a shiner in the mail

Unfortunately the substitution wasn't quite enough to improve our odds: we lost again, this time 11-3. Nonetheless, we were starting to feel real improvement with the great coaching that Chantal and Nader offered us, and were a bit less lost on the court. Baby steps!

The Rolling Rangers and supporters: Tank, Mike (Kate's husband), Kate, Barb (Glen's wife), and Glen from L-R

We had one more game against Quebec Team 2 at 3pm, and this was definitely our best one yet.

Nader looks on from the sidelines as a Quebec player winds up for a shot

We stayed in this one right up to the finish, and my shot was actually coming along a bit thanks to Nader's coaching.

I honestly had no idea I had that kind of stride length in me

This was also the first game in which I got to play the whole thing: Tank subbed out for Kate in the second half, with Glen taking over centre while Kate and I stayed in our winger roles, though I was on the right and Kate was on the left in a bit of a reversal of usual.

Tank took these photos

We still lost, but only 7-6 after a late successful penalty shot by Glen. A goalball penalty shot is an interesting thing: they can be called for a few different things, like the ball failing to hit the floor before the halfway line on the court, delay of game, touching your eyeshades, or failing to return the ball within 10 seconds of it hitting a player. The team penalized will leave one member on the court to defend the whole net (in the case of a ball infraction or other personal penalty, it will be the person who threw the offending shot or touched their eyeshades), while the other team is given the ball to shoot at the full 9 metre net.

I'd had to face one myself for a high ball (my shot did not hit the floor before the line), which I was unsuccessful at defending - that's a lot of real estate for one person to cover, especially one who isn't very good at figuring out where the ball is heading!

With our games done for the day, we grabbed some snacks, then headed over to the other gym to watch some more competitive action.

Including Nader with Bytown against the very strong D1 Nova Scotia team

..and the Brantford Honey Badgers, which included the kids who'd come up to Kitchener to practice back in January

It was about 7:30pm by the time we headed out to grab some Thai take-out and try to get a good night's sleep. I had a missing chunk of skin on my right hand from sliding across the wooden floor, and my black eye was coming along nicely.

Though bruises never seem to show up well on camera

We were back the next morning for our final game at 9:40am - the top 4 in our division would play for bronze, silver, and gold later in the day, but with our 0-3 record (and 6 teams in D3) we were just there for more fun and experience.

Good times!

Unfortunately, Glen's shoulder was giving him a lot of grief, so he decided he'd stay on the sidelines - he'd sub in if we needed him, but otherwise it was the rookies' day to shine! I was still able to get some decent power behind my shot, but my aim had gone to heck as my own shoulder rebelled a bit against this unfamiliar usage. Kate scored our only goal in a 15-1 loss to the Nova Scotia Highlanders, and I took a ball hard on the chin that left me with another growing bruise.

My right knee also somehow took a scrape, though the gouge out of my hand didn't get any worse

Oh, and they gave us t-shirts!

Yes, everyone got one - different colours for volunteers and officials

With our own games now done, we headed back over to Gym 1 to watch the high-powered competition going on there.

Bytown in a close-fought game against the strong Nova Scotia team

Ottawa Dynamo in semi-final action

We headed home before the medal games, though, as we still needed to get groceries and sort out everything to head back to work on Monday. We had a limited amount of time to do so, too, as I was booked for some additional fun that evening.

(Which led to another 3 bruises on a forearm, bicep, and my left hand)

So while we lost every game and got a little banged up in the process, we also thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and made huge improvements to our game both as individuals and as a team. Goalball season is now over for the summer, but you better believe we'll be back come fall! It's such an amazing, challenging, and fun sport - I'd highly encourage anyone to try it, and if you're in the KW area please drop me a line and I'll keep you in the loop when practices start up again. There's no cost to give it a whirl, and you can learn so much about the world without sight in the process.

Who knows - maybe we'll even win a game next year!

Huge thanks to Richard & Rana from OBSA for all of their hard work to make this event happen, and to all of the officials and volunteers without whom the games would be impossible. It was well-organized and fun for us as both participants and spectators, and incredible to see the skill level of athletes from 4 provinces in a single weekend!