| 01.12.04
Adventures at Hockey School: Session Two – Skate,
Stop, Repeat
The Space-Time Continuum is a fascinating thing. Seven calendar
days can fly by when you’re in the middle of something
fun, say, a honeymoon on a Hawaiian island. But when you’re
forced to wait seven calendar days in between something fun
like, I don’t know, hockey practice, it’s interminable.
The days crawl along at a snail’s pace, and completely
ignore you as you yell, scream, cajole and cry for things to
hurry the hell up!
Monday mornings are becoming a bit like the first night of Hannukah
when I was a kid: you can’t believe that it doesn’t
get underway until after sundown and you hope and pray that
things go well. And that was the mood in my car as we careened
towards the ‘burbs.
After suiting up like the seasoned pros we were far from becoming,
AJ and I waddled out of the locker room and towards the ice.
Upon reaching the bleachers, I realized I had left my new practice
puck in my bag, and waddled back. It was somewhere along the
return trip that I postulated my question for the evening: how
do NHL enforcers keep up their intimidation factor after opposing
players have seen them shuffle awkwardly down the tunnel in
between periods? Just a thought.
Our second session on the ice was much like the first, as Coach
Bruce decided to go back over the basics. While Bruce spent
the first twenty minutes cycling his way through the forty-six
different ways to come to a stop, I valiantly attempted to master
method #1. A nice hulking fellow named Kevin took pity on my
inability to come to a dead stop, and tried to give me pointers.
He broke down the process into several steps and stages, and
I tried my best to remember each one. Unfortunately, every time
I got one part right, I forgot two others. In the background
I could hear Bruce yelling, “now backwards on the inside
foot while you wave to the fans,” which I, of course,
ignored completely.
Apparently, one of the keys to stopping is to lightly shave
the ice with your skate blade at a 15-degree angle. In between
botched attempts, I would scrape my skate across the ice surface,
creating small piles of ice shavings. Just when I started to
feel a bit silly, I heard an odd scraping sound to my left.
Sure enough, there were a bunch of other guys dragging their
skates across the ice with an intense look in their eyes, and
small piles of snow at their feet.
From there we moved on to more skating drills and then a few
puck-handling exercises. I glided my way through these, and
began to get excited over the prospect of utilizing my new skills
in a game situation. Finally, when someone said I had “soft
hands” they wouldn’t be talking about my moisturizing
habits.
With three practice squads, we rotated around the ice from drill
to drill. While two teams skated figure eights through cones
and then attempted to bury the puck past the goalie in net,
the other team launched wrist shots at the boards on the far
end of the ice. Soon, a Blue Man worthy symphony began to coalesce.
“Whack! THUMP! Scratch. Scrape.” Repeat.
Like last week, my favorite part of the evening was slaloming
through the cones, the puck loosely attached to the blade of
my stick, and then trying to fake out the waiting goalie. I
had a few nice goals, including one where I lured the goalie
out of the crease, slipped to his left, and then pushed the
puck into the back of the net. I felt a little guilty when I
saw him extend his leg for the block, only to cry out, “owwwwwwwww.”
Goal, Rolnick. Groin pull, Goalie.
Of course, the best one-on-one of the evening was my chance
to go head to head with my own goalie, AJ “Five-Hole This”
Brandt. Cutting the tightest of corners, I cleared the final
cone and began to shuffle the puck back and forth across the
ice as I closed the distance between us. AJ waited patiently
for me to make the first move, while I tried to do the same.
Finally, I pushed the puck to my forehand, got him to commit,
and faster than the hair comes off of Sadie when she sneezes,
slid the puck to my backhand and flipped it over his shoulder
and into the net.
At this point, I was supposed to come to a clean stop, turn
and get back in line. However, if you’ve been paying attention
thus far, you can imagine that instead I kept spinning in circles
before finally coming to a crashing halt against the boards.
AJ had a smile on his face, but I couldn’t tell if it
was because I had beaten him, or because of the artistic merit
of my celebratory triple Lutz.
Practice came to a close shortly afterwards and we were informed
that next week we would not only get a chance to scrimmage,
but would learn our team names and colors. The drive home was
full of speculation, aching backs, and a bit of longing for
the seat warmers in AJ’s car… |