Don’t fear the tender

We had our second last hockey game of the Campus Rec fall regular season tonight. There is one more game on November 11th before we go into play-offs. This hasn’t been our best season to date but with our 7 to 4 win tonight we brought our record up to 2-3-0 (W-L-T). Hopefully we’ll win our next game and finish out the season in around 13th place out of 28 teams.

The big news from tonight’s game isn’t the win however. We had some goal tender issues and played the first 4 minutes of the game with 6 players and no goalie. Thankfully we were able to do a pretty good job on both the scoring and defensive fronts and the score was a respectable 2 to 2 when the goalie finally took the ice. The rest of the game was played with the inexperienced backup tender and thankfully due to great defensive play only 2 further goals were scored; surprisingly, to all involved, none of them were bad goals either. Oh ya and did I mention that I was that backup goal tender?

My first ever experience goal tending. I have to say that it was a lot of fun, I really enjoy the game of hockey no matter where I play but I wasn’t sure if this would also be true of goal. I have much more respect now for the position as it was a lot harder than I expected it to be. Staying in your crease and knowing where the posts are is really difficult. The equipment is also very heavy and it is exhausting just picking it up and putting it down during the course of the game. Holding the stick was also a challenge since your grip is totally different, it is essentially impossible to stick handle and shoot without a very steep learning curve and a ton of practice. Anyway, through some combination of luck, flailing, and luck I managed to do a fairly respectable job but for sure it didn’t look pretty. I’m glad no one was taping the game that’s for sure.

One more item completed on the check list of life. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for future instalments of “What random thing did Adam do today…”