Month: May 2010

T’s regular lesson in learn-to-play today and not much new, except that I’ve decided not to jump into the current adult learn-to-play session.  I’d like to, but I’ve watched it a couple times now and I’d be the worst skater in there.  Instead, I’ll be taking a four-week learn-to-skate class starting Saturday –- hopefully I’ll be able to improve enough with that to get in on the next set of playing classes.

Since we started this, I’ve noticed some folks going out of their way to be nice and helpful to us:

• T’s coach at one of his first couple lessons, who gave him a free jersey;
• Really, all of T’s coaches deserve credit for putting up with the little snot;  😉
• I was sitting at a table during one of the public skates and a referee walked up to me and asked, “Is it your son who’s learning to play?”  My first thought was: “Oh, hell, he jumped onto the ice during someone’s game”, but no, a player had broken his stick and they took the time to track down a kid it could be cut down for (resulting in the one and only $180 stick T will have for a long, long time);
• A lady who heard me talking in the pro-shop about goalie gear, during a momentary brain-fart where I thought my knees might be able to handle that, and stopped me a couple days later to give me the number of someone who was selling his old gear;

In general, everyone we’ve interacted with has been very nice and helpful – so let me set the scene for Jackass.

The public skate starts today and I take a few laps, then move on to practicing backward skating. 

I’m skating a normal oval, like everyone else, but I’m transitioning to skate backwards at the red-line, and continuing straight until I either decide to stop or transition back to forward-skating somewhere between the other blue-line and the goal-line.

Before I transition, I’m making sure that there’s no one ahead of me that I might catch up to once I’m skating backwards and no one coming up behind me who’ll be caught unawares by my transition.  Furthermore, I’m making sure that there’s no one in the boxes who might step out onto the ice ahead of me (behind me?) once I transition.  If these conditions aren’t met, I just keep going forward to the other side of the rink.

I’m very comfortable with my transition at this point and I’m keeping my speed down to maintain that comfort-level.  I think it’s clear that I’m not very experienced at going backwards yet, but I’m maintaining a straight path and I’m certainly not spinning around or flailing my arms in the air. 

Nor am I over-balancing and about to go backwards, ass over tea kettle.  I recognize that my center-of-gravity is still too high and my knees aren’t bent enough, but I’m working on that. 

In short, I’m being very careful to make sure I don’t run into anyone, get in anyone’s way, or push my skills too far – just enough to force me to improve.

So I’m doing this and as I’m skating backwards, this guy, we’ll call him really-good-skater-guy slows down and gets my attention.  Now really-good-skater-guy is someone I see at the rink a lot – he breezes around at a pretty good clip and clearly knows what he’s doing.

“Turn around,” he says.  I figure he wants to tell me something and knows I’ll be able to listen better skating forward.

“Cool,” I think to myself. “Really-good-skater-guy’s going to give me a pointer or two.  Probably that I should get my COG lower, but still.”  So I turn around and get ready to listen.

“You need to stop skating backwards like that,” he says.

Huh? I must have looked perplexed, because he continued:

“You’re going to bust your head open.”

Now, keep in mind, I haven’t fallen, I haven’t lost control, I haven’t been flailing my arms in circles like a deranged gibbon.  In fact, I feel like I’ve been very careful not to push too far beyond my abilities – obviously, in order to improve, one has to push somewhat beyond one’s abilities, but I’m pushing that envelope slowly and with forethought.

I say something to the effect of, “Well, I’m learning.”

To which he responds, “Learning to crack your head open if you keep it up.”

At this point, I’m somewhat irritated, because his tone and phrasing are very condescending.  In addition, I realize that his initial “turn around” wasn’t a friendly, “hey, turn around so we can chat”, it was, to him, an order of some sort – an attitude I don’t respond well to.

But I’m not going to cause a scene, so I shrug and say: “Well, I’m practicing,” hoping he’ll take the hint and go away.

Which he does, with the parting words: “If you’re going to do it, wear a helmet; I’ve seen too many people crack their heads open.”

Now, his core advice, which he finally gets to, is probably sound: wear a helmet.

In fact, I’ve considered wearing not only the helmet, but my shin and elbow pads, as well as my hockey pants, when practicing skating, precisely because it’s just safer.  And I don’t bounce so good anymore.

But his presentation and attitude are just so supercilious and negative, that this encounter simply pisses me off.  Plus now I’ve got “crack your head open” and the fact that really-good-skater-guy is apparently keeping an eye on me running through my head, so if I try to practice any more, I likely will fall and crack my head open – not the best mindset in which to be when practicing something.

Which, of course, brings up the mindsets of: if I don’t keep practicing it, he’ll think it’s because he told me not to; and, if I do wear my pads next time, he’ll think it’s because of him.  The stubborn boogeyman of human nature rearing its ugly head. 

But I realize that the I’m-pissed-off-so-I’ll-be-even-better-at-something mentality only really works in the movies, so I leave off any backward skating for a while.

Midway through the second-half of the public skating, I start practicing this again – same way, only doing it if there’s no one else around me and no flailing – when really-good-skater-guy breezes by me again with an eye roll.  What the hell is this guy’s problem with me?

Even if the advice “wear a helmet” is good, fundamentally a lot more people have learned to skate – forward, backward and sideways-triple-camel-death-spin – than have ever learned with one.  The learn to skate class, where, I assume, I’ll be taught to skate backwards, doesn’t require a helmet.  Ultimately, this guy seems older than I am so, presumably, he learned as a child well before the current helmet craze, so he must have learned without a helmet.

Attitude and phrasing have a big impact when offering advice.  My fifteen-year old daughter apparently knows that, because she offered some skating advice to a couple this afternoon and got a big “thank you” after the session.

Let’s see:

“Hey, you’re doing pretty good, but you should keep your center-of-gravity lower and a lot of people get hurt learning this, so you might want to wear a helmet.”

or

“Turn around. You need to stop skating backwards like that.”

Which approach would work for you?

No, this list will not be everything that T and I need to work on, just the most immediate couple of things I can see right now.  There’s not enough room on the interweb for the complete list. 

One thing I’ve noticed observing both the kids’ and adults’ learn-to-play classes is that they concentrate on different things.  The kids are combining learning to skate (crossovers, backwards, etc.) with hockey drills, while the adults are assumed to know all the skating maneuvers.  As a mediocre skater, I’m a bit miffed by this, but oh well.

So T’s list is more hockey related, while mine is more skating in general.  Sucks to be me. 🙁

T

• Situational awareness.  He’s focusing on the puck, especially when he has it, and not looking around at all.
• Passing.  Sort of like the first one – he looks at the puck as he’s getting ready to pass, not at where he wants the pass to go, so they tend to go wide or he misses the target if it’s moved.
• Practicing. He needs to start taking new things he learns in class into his regular skating.  For instance, last class they taught crossovers, but he spent the next public session without doing it at all.

Me

• Trust the Ice. A lot of my problems boil down to this – someone once told me to get better I had to trust the ice. I can see this in other skaters, the way they’ll turn and slide with ease and confidence.  I have it with certain maneuvers, but not with others, and I think it needs to be more of a general attitude.
• Backwards. Awkward as it feels, I need to get a lot better at skating backwards.
• Clockwise. Why don’t they reverse direction periodically in the public skating sessions?  I can’t do a damn thing turning to the right.
• Shooting.  It’s not that I have a weak shot … it’s that I have no shot.  Not to speak of, anyway.  I think I need to not practice shooting until I have a class where they tell me how, otherwise I’ll be reinforcing a technique that clearly sucks.
• Balance.  I need to get the Wii set back up and start doing yoga in Wii Fit.  If I had stronger core muscles a lot of this would be easier.

There are a lot of things I need to work on as far as general skating skills before I’ll really feel ready to play, so each new accomplishment is a big milestone for me – one step closer to that first game.

On Sunday, I watched the adult learn-to-play class, the one a coach told me I could jump right into, and saw one of their drills:

Two players skate around the face-off circles twice and head up-ice. Pass in the defensive zone, pass in the neutral zone, pass in the offensive zone and shoot.  They ran it both with and without a defenseman trying to break things up.  I think I could handle this pretty well, except for the skating around the circles part.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can skate in a circle.  That’s not the problem.  But this drill had them skating the top half of the circle forwards and the bottom half backwards.  Since I can barely make noticeable sternway backwards and can’t transition at all, even in a straight line, the drill would be problematic for me. 

So after sending T off to join the kids’ scrimmage, I worked on that today.  My friend Eric tried to tell me how to do it last week, but I still can’t translate what he said into physical action.

I did, however, get a pretty stable transition going – skating straight, anyway.  It’s not elegant, but it works for me.

It involves going into a hockey stop with less pressure on my leading foot, so it’s still scraping the ice a bit, but not too much, then bringing my trailing foot around to point backwards.  I seem to be lifting the heel of my trailing foot during the turn, too.  So I can then transition my weight to the trailing foot, which is now pointed backwards, and reposition the lead.

I practiced that for quite a while today, skating from the blue line, transitioning at the red and then gliding to a snowplow stop at the other blue line.  Not pretty, but it worked.

One step closer…

Today’s skate-and-shoot had very few people at it, so there was a lot of ice for T and I.  We started out with T skating with the puck and taking shots on goal while I poked the puck away once in a while and gave him something to worry about to keep him on his toes.

Until, that is, he announces that the score is 2-0. Well, hell, I didn’t know we were keeping score.

So the two goals he scored before that don’t count, in my opinion. Neither does the empty-netter he laid claim to after I’d been sitting on the bench catching my breath for a full minute.  Which means that his 5-0 final score is inflated by three.

Yeah, I’ll give him credit for the middle two goals, because I was pushing him pretty hard there and he stayed on the puck well. For some reason, every time I sent the puck to the net it went wide to the left.

Once he was bringing the puck up the right side and I stayed with him, blocking his shot and not letting him move toward center ice.  I figured once we got to the net he’d skate straight into the boards like he usually does to stop, but this time he turned into me and we went behind the net, with him still in control of the puck.  It wasn’t until we got tangled up behind the net and both went down that he lost it.

Since there were only a few kids there today and most of them his size, I sent him off to join their scrimmage while I practiced skating (more on that in another post).  He developed a little tactic of waiting until the crowd around the puck got tangled up, then swooping in to grab it. 

One thing I didn’t realize before starting all this was how much you sweat in hockey – I mean, ice, right? Cold? Sweat comes from heat, right?

Well, once all that gear’s on and you skate for forty-five minutes, you find out different. And even I know that leaving the gear wet is going to result in damp, stinky gear the next time you put it on.

So some kind of stand to let the pads and such dry is in order, but after just buying two sets of gear, another $40-$60 each for stands seems a bit much.  I’d rather spend that on ice time.

So T and I headed over to my crack dealer* Home Depot to see what we could come up with.  For $20 we got enough PVC, connectors, PVC glue and a hacksaw blade to make two stands.

T did all the measuring and cutting of this by himself, I just did the gluing.  Here’s a stop-motion clip of him doing the dry-fit:

 

One problem with this: We went with 3/4” PVC and the upright bends too much with all the gear on it.  The arms are fine, but it sways like a sapling.  Should have gone with 1” for the upright.  But, never fear, attaching a 2” piece to brace it** works fine and provides a convenient tube to put the stick in:

Next is for me to build mine and figure out where to put it … right now the gear’s piled in a corner of the bedroom, but I’m not sure how long that’ll be acceptable.

 

* I’ve started a lot of projects around the house recently and kitten thinks I’m addicted to Home Depot.  I disagree – I’ve only been there about a hundred times in the last month, which is perfectly reasonable.

** Yes, getting the 2” PVC required another trip to Home Depot. I feel much better now and the shakes have subsided.

I go looking for T after his skating lesson today to give him the wristband he needs for public skating, but he’s still on the ice where the lessons are.

I figure they’re just taking advantage of some extra ice time until the zamboni is finished cleaning the other sheet, so I get his attention and he skates over:

“They want me to try the learn to play and see how I like it!” he says.

So he tries it … and, of course, he likes it. 

In the learn to skate group he was one of the bigger kids and got things pretty quickly, but he’s being challenged in learn to play.

Of course, this screws up my timing and plan to take learn to play at the same time he does … after I’ve had another couple months to practice skating.

One of the coaches told me its no problem, I can jump into the current adult learn-to-play class and there are enough coaches in it to work with me on skating, but I’m a little leery of that.  I don’t want to be the suckiest guy in the class.

I need to decide by next Sunday what I’m going to do about that. :/