Summer Hockey Roundup

August 26, 2008 · By Megan · Filed under friends, hockey

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:

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:

LynneM:

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

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.

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Cape Cod Canal Challenge Hockey Tournament

June 23, 2008 · By Megan · Filed under 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….)

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