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Another summer has come and gone, and with it, I’ve finished playing in two more leagues.

First league was Concord Women’s Summer Hockey League, a mixed-level league. Amy and I played on the purple team this summer, and while we didn’t win a lot of games, it certainly wasn’t for lack of scoring! We went 2-7-1 in the games Amy and I played with them (we ended up missing a couple of games due to vacation) and the combined total scores in those games was 32-42. So on average, the score for each game was about 3-4! I only ended up with one assist in the purple games we played, but did get a goal (against ELAINE!) when we subbed for the pink team. Not bad, for someone who doesn’t really score at all…

Funny story about our last game: we won even though we only had one of our B-level players (and her both hungover and showing up for the second two periods of the game) against a team with a wicked awesome goalie. (Yes, the afore-mentioned ELAINE.) As we were getting ready to play, one of our regular subs, Carol from the maroon team, was talking about how to score on Elaine. The upshot was: we can’t, so get in front of her and block her view. Me, being the alternative theory girl, thought maybe Carol was being a little pessimistic and reframed her statement as: one of the more effective ways to score against her is to block her view.  And wouldn’t you know it, but one of our two goals was because she was screened and couldn’t see where the puck had gone!

And then after the game some woman walked into the locker room wanting to buy a couple of purple jerseys. Not needing purple jerseys any longer, Amy and I practically threw ours at her and used the cash for a quick meal on the way home.

Our second league was the Walpole Adult Women’s Hockey League. We played with Raising Kane this summer and had a total blast! We ended up at 6-7, and had the same number of goals for and goals against (38). I scored a goal against my former goalie Lynn and her team, the Mustang Sallies, and picked up several assists over the course of the summer. We got the chance to sub for a few other teams too, including the team we’re going to play with this coming season.

The best part of playing on Raising Kane wasn’t getting better at hockey (although that was good). No, the best part was playing with a great group of women, most of whom I’d not met before. Shastin, Lynne, Karen, Annie, Maura, Kristen, Libby, Pam, Donna, Fran, Nancy, Joni, AmyN, and AmyB - what fun it was! I’d play with any of them at any point, even if sometimes I try to score goals on some of them (sorry Joni!) and other times I throw some of them to the ice (sorry Pam!) and then on very rare occasions I make a bad decision on the ice (sorry Sarge….)

The league hired a photographer to shoot some of our games, and for some reason he ended up shooting us a few times: 6/25 agains the Raiders, 7/23 against the Mustang Sallies, and 7/30 against the Pumas. The photos are un-downloadable and copyright the photographer, so I’ll just link you to a few of my favorite pics:

• Skating with the puck
• Pam, bowing to Sarge
• Hanging in front of Joni
• Laughing with Shastin
• Making a move past Deroda (while subbing for the Sallies)
• Amy making a strong pass (while subbing for the Sallies)

But the best photos of Raising Kane were taken by our very own Karen Winger, who was sadly injured for the second half of the summer. (Side note one: Karen also played in the Concord league on the pink team. I think she faked her injury so she wouldn’t have to wear the eye-searingly-bright pink jersey.) (Side note two: Karen plays with many of the Pumas during the regular season; that’s the team in black in these photos.) This was a quarterfinal game for the playoffs; we won and ended up losing in the next round to Lugano. (Side note three: Amy, Libby, and I are all going to be playing with most of the players on Lugano during the upcoming regular hockey season.) (Side note four: If you are vaguely social and you hang around CWSHL, WAWHL, and SSWHL long enough, you’ll end up knowing a LOT of hockey players.)

Go check out Karen’s awesome photos of our playoff game against the Pumas! There are a bunch of really funny pictures in that set, mostly of AmyB and LynneM.

AmyB:

• Do we get a goal if I’m in the net?
• Yo! Where’s the puck?
• The Patented Human Zamboni Poke-Check

LynneM:

• It’s hard to make that gesture while wearing hockey gloves. (And yet she can!)
• Get away from my goalie!
• Aaaaaahhhhhh!
• May the force be with you…

And then there is photographic evidence of Joni’s Awesome Game!

• She’s got the post
• Blocking Bridget (she who makes goalies cry)
• And blocking Bridet again
• Ready...
• And ready again…

My favorite of me (and my new Facebook profile photo) is this one, where I swear I’m leaving Pamie in my dust!

Like I said, it was a great summer playing with this team and I’ll miss playing with them. But the regular season is getting underway already - we’ve had two practices with our new team (more on that in the next post) and have a tournament coming up in a couple of weeks. Good times, this playing of hockey.

This past weekend, Amy and I headed to Bourne, MA for the second annual Cape Cod Canal Challenge women’s hockey tournament. We entered with a team called the Subzeros, which had many of the same people who were on the team from last year’s tournament.

We again entered in the D division, played two of the same teams, and had different results from last year.

Game one was against the ever-strong Rhode Island Raptors. I’m not sure why they entered the tournament in this division, since they are in the C division in both the Walpole league and the South Shore league. At any rate, they were our first challenge. And a challenge it was! The game was at 8 a.m. on Saturday - not a good time for most of us on the team. Ugh. They beat us 1-5. They scored three in the first and two in the second, which meant that we actually tied them in the third period. Guess we were all waking up!

Game two was later that day against the Cape Cod Women’s Hockey League team. We played a lot better against them; they also weren’t as strong a team as R.I. We ended up winning that game 2-1.

Later that evening we watched our friend Steph’s team play against the Quincy Fighting Squirrels. We were not disappointed at seeing some action - holy bad blood between those teams! The refs tried to wrest control of the game in the third period, but by then it was too late. Needless to say, there were some fireworks on the ice as poor Steph’s team couldn’t put the puck in the net to save their lives.

At the civilized hour of 11 a.m. on Sunday we played our third game against the Ice Breakers. If we won we’d be in the championship game against R.I., and if we lost we’d be out. Well, we couldn’t have lost if we had tried. We spent about 90% of the game in their end of the ice and we ended up winning 4-0.

So that put us in the position of having to a.) stick around until Cape traffic was really bad and b.) play Rhode Island again. Fortunately on both counts, neither were horrible! (Seriously - the traffic coming home from the Cape [mind you, we started at the Bourne Bridge so we missed the traffic ON the Cape] was rather light! That never happens.)

But the game against the Raptors was a ton of fun. Why, you ask, since they’d spanked us hard the morning before? Well, our de facto coach-of-the-day Bridget (bless her!) watched the Raptors play a couple of games and figured out how to frustrate them. She took about 15 minutes before the game explaining the two systems she wanted us to run during the game. In our offensive end no one went in deep after the puck. Instead, our wings simply stuck on their wings and didn’t let them get any breakout passes. Our centers picked up all their errant passes and ooooh they didn’t like that. In our defensive zone we simply ran a box defense and didn’t let them get into the middle of the ice. While we didn’t run it perfectly by any stretch of the imagination, we ran both of the systems well enough to TOTALLY piss them off. They got frustrated and annoyed. I poke-checked their two strongest players on at least 2 rushes each. What a change from the earlier game when I wanted to douse myself in orange paint and call myself a traffic cone! Amy drew a couple of penalties - the best was against a player who had been really physical with her all game. She finally cross-checked Amy into the boards (I think it was a cross-check - at least that’s what it looked like from my vantage point 20 feet away) and was immediately whistled to the box. We didn’t capitalize on it, but we held them to a 0-3 score. And against them, that was a victory!

So we ended the weekend with a 2-2 record, and a second-place finish overall. It was a lot of fun, and a nice way to end our tournament season. Now all we have to look forward to this summer are league games twice a week and the 3-day camp up at Dartmouth. The horrors of that little hockey in the summer!!! (I jest, I jest….)

Despite the lack of posts about it, I have been playing a fair amount of hockey in the past few weeks. I’ve played four games - three with the Sunday team and one with my Tues/Wed team - and am in the throes of the June 1000 shooting challenge (over 600 shots already!)

Raising Kane is my Tues/Wed team. Last week we played the Pumas in a tough game. We ended up losing 1-2 (although I also saw 1-3. Hmmm….) The things I remember about the game:

• The Pumas are a FAST team and got several odd-man rushes on us.
• Playing defense with Lynn is fun, even if we want to put “Thank You Joni!” on the back of our jerseys for our goalie to see.
• I got off a sweet shot from the point that would have been on goal had it not gone off of Amy’s butt.
• In the neutral zone I was trying to pick up the puck when one of their players ran into my front, and a second later another player ran into my behind. I extricated myself from the garage sale on ice and made it back to the bench, hardly any worse for the hit. And really, it took TWO of them to knock me down, so that means I’m tough, right?

We play again on Wednesday against ICE, the home team. Should be a good game. I’m looking forward to seeing Steph after the game so she can continue regaling all of us with stories about her recent adventure in Alaska.

My Sunday team - Purple - is a funny team. I think we’ve got close to the most points of any team in the league, and yet we’re winless after 3 weeks. We lost last week 6-7. Although one of those goals honestly did NOT go in even though the ref called it in - from her vantage point at the blue line. So I think maybe we could call it a tie, right? At least I’m going to. This week we lost 2-6. It’s tough to play with only 3 defenders, particularly when the team you’re playing against has a few more strong players than you do. I tried double-shifting a couple of times, and accidentally ended up on the ice for a 5-minute shift at the end of the second period. Remind me not to do that again. Ouch. I’m a decent player, but I’m not that good (or in shape)! When you play 3 defenders, you sometimes end up making bad on-the-fly changes, and those bad changes led directly to a couple of goals.  *grumble* As defenders we also didn’t play quite as conservatively as we should have given that we only had 3 of us - things to remember for future games. I can’t count the number of 2- and 3-on-0 rushes they got on us last night. Ugh. Patty our goalie played really well despite our lack of active defending. Thanks Patty!

Amy and I also subbed for the Gold team last Sunday. We won that game 6-2, which was a nice change from the other games we’ve played lately.

Finally, you all should head over to Chanda Gunn’s new blog. She and I had a lot of fun on Sunday morning setting it up. Dreamhost makes the installation super-easy, and it ended up being pretty quick to make a few modifications. Anyhow, she’s a really great person and you should go welcome her.

It just got really hot here today. Yuck. But despite that, Amy and I are hard at work shooting pucks for our hockey team challenge - 1000 shots in the month of June.

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We’ve got a pretty nifty setup this year. On the ground is a sheet of plywood, and clipped onto the top of it is a piece of plexiglass. We have 21 pucks. On the chain-link fence you’ll see part of my Christmas present from Amy - puck targets. We keep all that stuff in our front porch and simply drag it across the street when we want to shoot. I had to mow the grass between the “ice” and the “net” today, but it works!

Our garden is coming along nicely. I think we’ll be able to transplant the tomatoes and peppers by the middle of next week. Here are our Amish Snap Peas (all veggies other than our okra are from Seed Savers Exchange):

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Our purple clematis is taking over the front porch. I don’t mind because frankly, it’s gorgeous. I hope it keeps blooming for a long time.

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And Maggie guards the house while I sit and take photos of Amy shooting pucks (and myself…)

Hope you all are staying cool. We’re off to do a little more yardwork, and then I think we may try to go see a movie in a cool, cool theater.

My regular hockey season ended back at the end of March. We had a couple of tournaments in April. In May one of my two summer leagues started, and last Sunday, the other began. That means I’m back to playing twice a week again - thank goodness! Being on the ice is so therapeutic for me in so many ways (and not just because sometimes I get to hit people, although that’s kind of fun too…) On Sunday my regular team’s June 1000 shooting challenge began too. And for my birthday, Amy made/is making me a slide board.

Last night in my WAWHL game (our team is Raising Kane) I finally scored from the point! I’ve scored in other games, while playing wing, but never while playing defense. There was kind of a mess of people in front of the net on the right side of the ice, and my winger popped the puck up to me. The goalie (hi Lynn!) was completely screened and I saw a sliver of open net on the left side. Somehow the shot went through all the people and cleanly in the net. Needless to say, I was pretty excited. We ended up winning the game 5-1.

Our CWSHL team is Purple - thank GOD we aren’t the pink team. Their jerseys hurt my eyes. We lost our first game 5-6; total barnburner and lots of fun. Our team seems evenly balanced with a few rec/instructional players, a couple of D players, a few C players, and one or two B players. Should be a fun summer.

Some pictures -

April Showers: puck handling (note to self: keep head up when handling the puck), looking thoughtful, passing, Amy,  blogless Libby, headshot, Black Ice between periods

Champlain Shootout (whole games, can’t link to individual pics): Black Ice vs. Van Kleek Hill Griffins, Black Ice vs. West Chester Wildcats

I’ll be posting updates for future games, and will see if blogless Libby will let me post selections from her post-game writeups.