Cultural differences

I spent several weeks this summer playing women's shinny, which is unusual for me. It just worked out that, in the past, I've always played shinny with men. What I noticed is that there are some cultural differences.

Spring break

I had ambitions to be writing more blog posts lately, but life got in the way. Lots of hockey, too - a weekend fun shinny tournament with four games in two days - plus Sunday night shinny organized by my team. As a result, not much time for blogging. Lots of ideas, though.

Now we're heading away on holiday to visit our families out West, and returning in a couple of weeks. It's going to be a crazy amount of work but good for the kids to meet or reunite with grandparents, cousins, aunties, and uncles. I hope to have a look around my old neighbourhood and reminisce. I'll swing by the outdoor rink where I used to play shinny with my little brother a million years ago, and maybe take some pics for a future post.

Spring is only really beginning now in Nova Scotia, calendars not withstanding, so I'm thinking of this as my own spring break.

Keep your pants on!

I am an oddity among female hockey players in that I wear suspenders on my pants. My hips are just not that big -  with the front laced completely closed, the pants still slide down. It doesn't help that all the under-layers are quite slippery.

Better plus/minus stats

Thanks goodness we don't officially keep track of plus/minus stats in our league. I feel like I'm often on the ice nearing the end of my shift when a goal is scored (but that could just be my confirmation bias coupled with a general insecurity about my playing abilities). The plus/minus stat would be an interesting thing to measure, actually, rather than just guessing. (I'm a scientist. I will always prefer measurement over estimation!)

Nursing in the changeroom

The playoffs wrapped up this weekend. We won our game Saturday afternoon, which had us returning to the rink for another game at 9:00 Saturday night. We lost the second game in a shootout, which was fairly exciting in itself. It gave a true playoff flavour to the weekend. I'm pretty pleased with how I played overall; actually, the last part of this season was really good and I think in part it was due to my new positive thinking exercises. My defensive partner and I really gelled; we were solid at the blue line and kept the opponents to the outside in our end. Awesome!

Wriggly little kettlebells

Every once in a while I surprise the person I'm defending against by not letting them put their stick down on the ice. Everyone expects opposing defencemen to lift their stick up off the ice. What they never expect is that they won't be able to get it down again just by pushing hard downward. Not with me. They won't get it back down. You should see the surprised looks I get from the men when it happens. I'm stronger than I look, especially for maintaining a steady resistance against them. Why?

Small victories

Well, we lost last night, 2-1, though I feel like we dominated the opponents. [Aside: do you suppose they're telling themselves that, too? From our point of view we just got unlucky on their two goals, but otherwise we really played well offensively. Their goalie was good. I wonder what their version of the story is.]

It's got to be there

It's been a two-week break for me with no hockey at all. No wonder I'm feeling out-of-sorts. I also have this vague feeling that I've forgotten how to play.

Tonight is our first playoff game and I am trying to work up some enthusiasm.

Paleo hockey

The Paleo diet has been in the news again, this time because of a book called PaleoFantasy which purportedly debunks the reasoning behind the whole diet. I haven't read it myself yet, so this is only hearsay, but apparently the author completely misses the point of the Paleo diet. Most Paleo bloggers out there agree with a lot of the author's points, but not her overall conclusion. Some summaries and critiques I've read include one on Mark's Daily Apple and Nerd Fitness. I strongly believe in reading a wide variety of opinions, including dissenting ones, so I'll read it eventually. But, since I am cheap, I will get the library to buy it (if they haven't already) and read it that way.

In our household we more or less follow the Paleo Diet (with dairy, therefore not strict Paleo).

More Mom than hockey

It's been a wearing past couple of days. The baby has been very hungry and nursing seemingly non-stop. He also had some "bonus awakenings" last night - oh yay! 

Then, today he had his 6-month vaccinations, and was super-grumpy, and had napping issues. I am worn right out, mostly from being the sole source of nutrition for another human being, small though he still is. Plus, with no hockey this week, I am a bit low on inspiration, though I have a half dozen post ideas that I haven't fleshed out.

All that to say - good thing I don't have much of a readership, because the last few days have been more Mom than hockey.

It will do for now

Wednesday shinny is over now. The league regular season is over, too; all that is left is playoffs. (Are playoffs? Is playoffs plural?) We are playing in a tournament at the end of April, and I think my team is organizing some spring shinny, and I might do another puck skills camp in June. But right now I am looking at a few weeks with no hockey. Oh, no!

Wood, for now

All of a sudden I was down to the wire about getting a new stick, since my old one was really wrecked, and playoffs start next Wednesday. Actually, part of the rush to get it today was that I thought there was going to be shinny tomorrow, for me to get the feel of my new stick, but it's over for the year now. Bummer.

Physics in the slot

I covered the physics of hockey players in a general way a couple of weeks ago. I talked about position, velocity, and acceleration, and how, as you move from the perceiving the simplest concept (position) to the most difficult (acceleration) your understanding of the game increases. Deciding what to do with yourself in the slot (or in general as an attacking forward) so that you are in a good scoring position follows a similar evolution through position, velocity, and acceleration.

This stick is toast.

That's only about half a season's wear.

I could see before I removed the tape that the blade was starting to fray, but this was more shredded than I expected. At least it's proof that I play hard.

Oh yeah baby, this stick is TOAST!

If you need help, you have to ask for it.

Yesterday was lunchtime shinny day. Last week, I had had a brainwave and invited my husband to come with me. He's a beginner player, too, but this shinny group is usually pretty gentle with beginners. He'd had a lot of fun and was going to come again today. The only missing piece of this puzzle is childcare, of course. 

White tape makes your blade invisible

I'm sure the question of white tape vs. black tape (on the blade of your stick) has been debated ever since we began taping our sticks. [I would like to add a note that Wikipedia's article on hockey tape doesn't mention when the practice of stick-taping started, so I can't casually mention the year in this post. No doubt the hockey historians can name the first person who taped his blade, but I'm not motivated enough to dig for it just now.]

No regrets!

Women often put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do everything perfectly (and maybe this is an extension of the pressure we put on ourselves in all areas of our lives). But in a fast-paced game like hockey, perfect performance is impossible. So you have to just let your mistakes go, and let them go right away (which is actually good advice for the rest of your life as well). The worst thing you can do on the ice is the combination of standing still, feeling like a fool, and looking around to see if anyone noticed your mistake. It takes you completely out of the game.

Hockey at bedtime

Our hockey league has negotiated really great early evening ice times for many of our games, at a brand-new four-pad arena. However, we are still stuck with some less-desirable ice times, including the 9:00 pm Saturday night slot at Gray Arena. There is something really awful about having to psych yourself up to play so close to bedtime (for me, bedtime is around 10:00 these days). Then you get home really wired and have trouble falling asleep. I am also starting to wonder if we end up with more injuries during the late-evening games, because people just don't seem to be paying as much attention.

The 10% rule

Anyone who knows me in real life has heard me expound on "The 10% rule", which goes like this: in any demographic, 10% of the people are Not-Very-Nice [the actual word that I use starts with a and ends with holes]. Really, the 10% rule applies anywhere - coworkers, men, women, drivers, politicians, neighbours - and even to groups of people whom, ideally, would all be nice - children, people who do volunteer work, religious types... The trick to keeping yourself sane is to just accept this fact and not take it personally. Also, if you sigh with relief that one of the 10% that you normally interact with has finally left/been fired/quit, don't worry, another one will come to fill their place. Just roll with it! And keep in mind that the other 90% of people are pretty nice.

Start with two minutes of practice. Then repeat.

Since "mom hockey" players are not NHL stars, we have our day jobs and family responsibilities that take up a lot of our time. We all try and maximize our opportunities to play, but our ice time is typically league games, or shinny. Unless you take lessons, how can you work on specific skills ? And even with lessons, let's face it, they only last about 7 sessions, and leave you wanting more. What to do?

The reality of mom hockey

Of course I would like to have an interesting, well-thought-out post up every day. You'd think that with being off on mat leave I would have nothing but time to write blog posts, right? I actually have about as many posts started and waiting to be completed as have actually been published. Ideas come to me at the strangest times - especially while nursing the baby - but time to write them?

Ha! As if!

Sharpen your skates. And then trust your edges.

In rec hockey, I don't think we put enough value on having properly sharpened skates. Maybe we justify it by thinking, "I'm not in the NHL so why bother? They're sharp enough." I just got my skates sharpened before starting power skating lessons, because I had promised myself that if I got one thing out of this session, it would be to improve my power turns and crossovers on my weak side.

The power of positive thinking

Such a cliché, right? Maybe not.

Last week, I talked about behaviour and reward, which I had first stumbled upon in the context of disciplining children. Another great discipline technique that we have learned is to always frame our requests positively: for example, instead of "Don't hop around the house" we ask "Walk quietly". For an impulsive four-year-old, the rewording helped tremendously - it's as if she would fail to hear the "don't" part of the statement, and her brain would just latch onto the "hop around the house" part, so she would hop more, which was precisely the opposite of what we wanted. Once we started reframing the requests, the unwanted behaviours decreased, and were replaced by desirable behaviours.

Hockey is not a spectator sport...

...not when you're on the ice, anyway! However, it happens a lot in our division: something interesting is happening on the ice and the players are spellbound. They just stand there, on the ice, watching the play. Ack! You should probably be doing SOMETHING, or at the very least not standing still.

Is it finally time to switch to a composite stick?

Maybe it's because I'm originally from Winnipeg, so I'm cheap, but I still use a wooden hockey stick. (Frugality is a quality Winnipegers are proud of, by the way. When we get together with other Winnipeggers the conversation often turns to bargains: where we recently got a good deal on some quality item, and how we managed to achieve it.) But I feel like I'm the only person in the universe still using a wooden stick. Statistically, this is unlikely, since there is one (albeit dwindling) row of wooden sticks for sale at the local hockey mega-super-store, and they are probably not all manufactured just for me.

Behaviour and reward

We've been doing a lot of reading in our house about behaviour and how to produce desirable (or correct) behaviour through judicious use of reward and punishment. One useful piece of advice was to let "natural consequences" take over - for example, if your child dawdles getting undressed for bath, point out that she will have to take a cold bath. Pretty motivating in wintertime! 

Last week at shinny I realized that when you are teaching yourself a new sport, natural consequences definitely motivate you to figure out the correct behaviour.

You can wash all your gear. Except maybe skates.

Not every post is going to have deep insights. Sometimes a post will simply be practical. This is one of them.

I hate smelly hockey gear. It's gross. When I sit next to someone on the bench who obviously leaves the wet gear rotting in the bag, in the car, between uses, I want to gag. It smells like everything unpleasant about blue cheese (and I like blue cheese, as a food).

I learned from a teammate in my first year that all the gear is pretty washable.

Take some lessons

Power skating camps abound for kids, but camps intended for adult beginners are hard to find. I'm lucky that Pete Belliveau (former coach of the Dalhousie Tigers men's team) regularly offers power skating and puck skills camps in the Halifax area. I've done three of his camps before - I had to take some time off when I was pregnant - so I was looking forward to starting his new camp this weekend.

Pass it to yourself

Much has already been said, I suspect, about passing the puck to yourself to get out of a sticky situation. But I've been studying the more skilled puck handlers both in our league and at shinny, trying to figure out why in mid-ice skirmishes they always manage to come out with the puck, with perfect control, and skate away from the fray.

You have to really want it

One thing I notice about playing women's rec league hockey is that as a group, we're way too polite. Of course, this doesn't apply to everyone, and in fact those who aren't polite end up doing very well - breaking up a lot of plays, leading, naturally, to scoring a lot of goals. What's going on?

The physics of hockey players

Much has been written about the physics of hockey. I even have a book about it that was thoughtfully given to me for Christmas one year (since I am, in fact, a physicist). However, it struck me today at shinny that there is a parallel between basic mechanics and the development of hockey playing ability. Since I've only been playing a few years now I can easily see the stages that I've gone through so far.