Forty-two years old …
Largely sedentary for the last decade …
Never played organized sports in my life …
Raised in sunny Florida …
Obviously I’m the perfect candidate to start playing ice hockey.
No? Not obvious? So how did I get myself into this situation?
Born in Minnesota (okay, hockey-country). Never played, never went to a game, and moved to Florida when I was about six.
Florida was not hockey-country in the seventies and eighties. Far from it. Summered back in Minnesota, but not a lot of hockey in August even there.
I remember my grandfather took me to one hockey game when I was a kid. A USA-USSR exhibition match – but I didn’t really understand the game.
Then in 1995 Orlando got a professional hockey team, the Orlando Solar Bears. The guy I worked for at the time had season tickets and gave me a couple one day, so I went to a game.
I don’t remember who one or lost or even if a goal was scored on this play, but I remember seeing Mark Beaufait take the puck from one end of the ice to the other – around and between players from the other team like it had been choreographed.
In that one skate from end-to-end of the ice, he made me a hockey fan.
Within a month I had season tickets of my own and for a number of years rarely missed a game.
But I never considered playing … my ideas of sports for me were:
- Golf: Hit the ball, drive the cart, pay the drink girl;
- Bowling: Roll the ball, eat a cheeseburger and fries until it’s my turn again;
- Kayaking: Can be strenuous, but you get to do it sitting down;
Hockey looked like a lot of work for people a lot younger than me.
In 2001 I met my wife, who had two children at the time. I took the kids to games with me occasionally, until the season ended with the Solar Bears winning the Turner Cup and the IHL folding. No more hockey.
Another team, the Florida Seals, came to town, but problems with leagues and management and switching playing locations made it more difficult for me to get to their games.
The point of all this is to set my now eleven-year old son’s (I adopted my wife’s kids) exposure-level to hockey:
- Half a season of watching the Solar Bears when he was two;
- A few Seals games at three, four and five;
- Very few games on television;
So why, over the years, hasn’t he shut up about it?
He used to take a plastic stick and puck and skate around the kitchen in his socks “playing hockey”. Half a decade since he’s been to a game in person, and he still wants to play.
But we’re twenty miles from the nearest ice and hockey is not exactly a cheap sport – and the boy-child sometimes has issues following directions and following through on things, so I didn’t want to commit to the time and expense only to have him quit after a couple practices.
Well, earlier this year, my wife brought home a Try Hockey Free flyer from RDV. So, for free, I’ll take him to spend an hour on the ice.
Equipped with rental skates, RDV-supplied stick and gloves, and his Spiderman bike helmet, he went onto the ice for an hour of drills … and damned if the little snot didn’t listen to the coaches, do what they told him to and get better at every drill. And he comes off the ice smiling and happy.
I try to see if he’s serious. I tell him it’s hard work, it takes a lot of practice, he’ll have to do the same thing over and over again to get good at it (he hates that). He still loves it, he still wants to play.
So I sign him up for Learn to Skate: Beginner Hockey. All I need to get him for that is a pair of skates, a decent helmet and some gloves. If he doesn’t stick with it I won’t be out all that much money, right?
Learn to skate is about ten weeks – after that there’s a learn to play class he’ll have to take and I notice that there’s an adult learn to play class immediately thereafter.
In the misty, distant picture of the future I have, I think “that might be fun”, when he moves up to learn to play, I’ll take it too …
