Category: Uncategorized

Okay, that was fun.

After checking out the skate and shoot Monday, I decided to bring T today.  The rest of his gear arrived, so he’s well-padded and ready for some more ice time.

Unlike last time, when I just skated around trying to control the puck, this time I had an eleven-year old of roughly my own skill-level to play with (all the other eleven-year olds there being far beyond my level).

We practiced passing – a lot different on ice with a puck, than it was in the garage with a plastic ball. T took some shots on the empty net at center ice. And we just chased each other around in the neutral zone trying to steal the puck from each other – it was a blast.

I like the skate and shoots, so far, but I’d like to find a time when they’re less crowded.  The scrimmages at either end seem to get a bit more aggressive as time goes on and come further and further over the blue line — it’s unnerving to watch a herd of guys four times his size bear down on the little guy and weave around him.

In a couple months T’ll be done with learn to skate and then we’ll both take a learn to play class.  After that, I’m pretty sure he’ll be ready to play on a team, but I’m not so sure about myself. The kid’s picking things up and improving a lot faster than I can.

Tonight I go to the rink to watch a game in the 35+ division – I am, after all, getting up there, so maybe this is where I need to set my sites on playing.  I want to get an idea for what my target skill-level needs to be to join a team.

Things look promising at first … lots of grey hair, lots of missing hair, some bellies.  I might be able to keep up with these guys … then the puck drops …

Old and slow?  Right.  Older and slower than when they played in college, maybe.

Not where I’ll likely ever be playing, but a fun game to watch.  I need to stop by and watch games here more often.

So how, exactly, do we get from the boy-child’s skating lessons to me being on the ice in full hockey gear?

The progression of logic is as simple as it is horrifying:

• Boy-child needs ice time;
• Skate and shoot is recommended;
• I should be on the ice with him and should check it out beforehand;
• Although the rules say, as an adult, I only need a helmet and gloves, I realize I don’t bounce so good anymore;

See? I was clearly required to buy a full set of hockey gear today. There was no other logical option.

So me in a locker room – haven’t been in one since high school and didn’t like it much then.  Putting on all this gear for the first time. 

Yes, realizing there’s still a tag on the elbow pads and pulling it off quickly while hoping no one saw.  Of course that had to happen …

Onto the ice and looking around because I have absolutely no idea how this works or what’s going to happen.  Thankfully a few seconds of watching make it clear.

Nets at either end of the ice and one in the neutral zone against the boards between the two benches.

There’s a goaltender at one end with people taking shots and shots on the empty net at the other end, so it looks like center ice will be a fairly safe place for me to stay.

I grab a puck and set out to practice just being able to control it and skate at the same time – back and forth between the blue lines or cross ice.  And I don’t think I do too badly.  For the most part, I can keep it on my stick, even when I’m stopping and changing directions.

I pick up the pace, too, of both skating and stopping, and I’m pretty happy that I can mostly keep the puck with me when skating at a reasonable speed (for me, at least) and when reversing directions quickly.

When I get off the ice I realize something, though: forty-five minutes of skating is one thing – forty-five minutes of skating in twenty-five pounds of gear is quite another.  I’m exhausted and sweating like a pig.

Now I haven’t skated much over the years … maybe twice a year since 1995 or thereabouts, so I’m okay, but not great.

I can make it around the ice reasonably quickly, snowplow stop and if you watch long enough (or possibly use a time-lapse camera) you can see me making progress when I skate backwards.  You have to pay attention, though, to the casual observer my backward skating looks remarkably like someone dancing the Twist.

But I have never been able to do a hockey stop. 

I’ve tried, but mostly I just wind up turning or spinning in a circle.

Well, today I got it.  Something clicked and I was able to start getting a feel for it early in the skating session.  I was still mostly turning, but my outside skate was scraping more and slowing me more, then all of a sudden the turn went away completely and became an actual stop.

I can still only do it with my right foot – turning so my left foot is outermost feels incredibly awkward, but I can work on that.

So I spent most of the rest of the session at center ice skating a little between the cones:

Skate-skate-skate-stop, skate-skate-skate-stop, skate-skate-skate-stop.

I’m rather proud of myself, actually.

Proper shin and elbow pads, plus a jersey one of the coaches gave him last week and T is starting to look like he means business.

At the public skate after class he keeps his shin pads on and starts going to his knees and sliding like they taught him in class today, but that’s not good in the crowds so I have to tell him to stop.

So now I have a dilemma.  I want to get him more ice time so he can practice what he’s learning, but he can’t do those things in public skating.  The staff recommends taking him to skate and shoots, but I’m a little wary of that. Those’re going to be full of people who already know how to play and he’s barely starting out.

We arrive at the ice and I have him wearing his bicycle elbow and knee pads … I haven’t had time to find some for him and Play It Again Sports doesn’t have any used.

Well, he heads for the far end of the ice where the highest-level group is and I think, “uh, oh … he was only supposed to move up one level”.

Nope … I assumed that, but not so.  They bumped him up to the highest level in the class.

In a new pair of gloves and used helmet and skates from Play It Again Sports, the boy-child takes the ice for his first learn-to-skate lesson.

To my eyes, he seems to be doing okay.  Not falling down a lot or anything.

After the class, he tells me he’s getting moved up to another group.  They’d split the class into four groups on day one, and T was in the second group.  I figured, cool – he’s moving up a level.

I talk to the coach and she tells me he should have elbow pads, shin pads and a stick for that level.

Well, a couple sets of pads … not that big a deal …

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 …

There’s an old Styx song I’ve been humming a lot this week:

Nothing ever goes as planned …
It’s a hell of a notion …

I’m on vacation this week and had “plans” — the plans were to paddle every morning, do several hours of paddling on different routes and be off the water by mid-day to spend time with my family. But, as I keep telling my kids when they whine “But you said we were going to …”, plans change.

Errands, a dog needing to go to the vet and a couple late nights have all conspired to make me skip getting on the water several days.

Now, all week long, the boy-child’s been saying that he wants to go kayaking with me and I’ve been putting him off. Because I’ve paddled so little over the last few years, I’ve become a bit jealous of my time on the water. Taking one of the kids means changing the trip to accommodate them — and I had “plans” for this week.

Taking T. has always meant paddling the tandem Pamlico, which I’m not entirely happy with, and keeping the trip short enough so he doesn’t get bored. At nine, hours and hours on a river just doesn’t keep him entertained.

But kitten‘s been reminding me of some things lately (it’s not nagging when it’s the right thing to do), and that’d been percolating through my brain all night, so when the Big Bad Wolf …

… stepped on my gut at dawn to say “Morning! Morning! Morning! Time to do things!” … plans changed.

I still don’t like paddling the Pamlico, though, so I decided it was time for T. to try paddling himself. We loaded up the the Tarpon and my daughter’s Swifty to head for Moss Park where I’d paddled just a couple days before.

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Earlier in the week I’d paddled Lake Hart, on the West side of Moss Park, but that route starts with a 1/2-mile trip down a relatively narrow (20- or 30-foot wide) channel. I figured that would be a bit much to ask of the boy his first time alone in a kayak, so we paddled the Lake Mary Jane side of the park.

(view this location in Google Earth)
(get Google Earth)

This side of the park has a nice sand beach and swimming area, as well as a grass launching area suitable for kayaks. Just off the beach is an island that’s designated as a bird sanctuary. We put in from this area and started paddling.

I’d almost expected T. to be a bit hesitant about paddling himself, but he took right off, clearing the reeds around the put-in before I was fully in my boat:

I was really impressed by how well he did right from the start. His stroke needs work (so does mine) and his tracking is … creative (I think he paddled two or three feet for every one I did today), but he took to it quickly.

I let him set the pace and direction for a bit, then suggested he head across the lake toward the nearest boathouse we could see. I expected him to tire out and want to turn back before making it, but he kept going and we made it to the target.

The distance to the boathouse from the put-in is about half a mile, but as I said, his paddling paths are interesting, so he probably paddled a full mile on the way over.

Once there, we took a brief rest and he was ready to paddle farther, not the least intimidated by the view back to the beach we’d set off from:

He has a tendency to paddle harder than he needs to, though, so I didn’t want to chance him tiring out and needing a tow back. We drifted for a bit, talking about paddling and then headed back in.

Once everything but the Swifty was back in or on the car, we took the it over to the swimming area. If he’s going to paddle his own boat, he needs to have some knowledge and be prepared, so I stood in waist-deep water with him in the boat and explained some things like primary and secondary stability. Then I tilted the boat so he could get a feel for it and finally I dumped him over a few time so he could practice a wet exit.

Okay, so he’s so short that a wet exit for him mostly consists of falling out of the cockpit as the boat goes over and this was more of an excuse to dump him in the water a few times, but it did give him a feel for it so he won’t freak out if it ever happens.

He also practiced getting back into the boat after going over and saw how, even full of water, the flotation bags keep it at the surface. And how much water he’d have to bail out if he ever went over in the middle of a lake somewhere.

Next time, we’ll work on keeping control of paddle and kayak when going over. This is also an area I neglected with the girl-child, when she started paddling, so I should work on this with her, too.

Isn’t it great when a legitimate safety exercise gives you an excuse to half-drown your children?