Ice time continued to elude me until today. Family obligations just made it brutal to find a time to get away three hours. Then I missed week 5 of the skating lessons because I bought Anaheim Ducks tickets and didn't think about it being a Wednesday night.
I was feeling a bit frustrated, but that all went away today. I had some time, I finally had all my gear, so I decided it was time to go to stick and puck.
If anyone doesn't know, stick and puck is sort of like hockey's equivalent of "open gym." It's open skating, but with nets and pucks out and you're allowed to bring your hockey stick (which public skate doesn't not allow).
This is actually at a different rink from my usual. KHS Ice. It's slightly closer to my house. Yelp reviews said it was in a bad neighborhood, but those people are nuts. It was in a light industrial zone, but there wasn't anything bad about it. Maybe not quite as nice as Disneyland half a mile away, but sheesh.
I got there about 30 minutes early because I really wasn't sure how long it would take me to get the gear on. The biggest issue is lacing skates, because I'm still chubby and it's hard to bend over that far. At least I got the jersey over the shoulder pads with no problem.
I'm not gonna lie, walking out of the house and into the arena with my gear bag and stick, sitting in the locker room suiting up, I felt like a total boss. So many years of watching people do this, covering hockey games and going into locker rooms with nothing but my note pad and recorder, now I'm a *player*.
One offensive zone was devoted to two coaches and two players doing lessons. The other two-thirds of the ice was free, and there were maybe seven or eight of us. I was the worst player, but there were only two that were really good and a few weren't *that* much better than me. I tried to be deferential and not get in anyone's way, everyone was nice and chatted a bit, sometimes we traded passes, but mostly I just tried to get used to the feeling of being on the ice, with a stick, trying to manipulate a puck. I took a *lot* of rest breaks.
Sometimes I tried to skate a round a little bit stickhandling. It's really hard to focus on skating technique, looking around you and keeping the puck under control at the same time. That's probably why hockey isn't super easy and everyone in the world isn't amazing at it.
A lot of times people just took turns skating in and shooting at the net. I can still shoot a *little* bit from my years of street hockey, especially considering the stick has almost no curve.
One thing I wanted to do was try to get a little feel for my new stick to see if and how much I wanted to cut it down. For feel, it needs to go down a couple of inches and I probably will. I'm a little reluctant just because the combination of short man, short arms and bad skating posture leaves me with almost no reach at all. But that will improve with practice, I think.
I did have one highlight. There was one time I was aiming high from 15 feet out and it went crossbar, down and in. What a sweet feeling. I was tempted to yell "showtime, baby!" and celly all over the ice, but I figured that might be in bad taste.
The other memorable moment was having a puck whiz by my face. I didn't see him about to shoot and he didn't see me about to skate behind the net. He started to apologize, but I laughed and said "That's what hte full cage is for" and he laughed too.
I'm dying to go to a pick-up game now. I don't even care if I'm the worst one there by far.
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