GodsendJen

Before last season kicked off some friends convinced me to start watching hockey. Already a certifiable sports nut, I wasn't sure I needed another team (and a whole other league) to follow. Beyond this my biggest problem with hockey is that it isn't accessible for me.  Football, baseball and even basketball and soccer are games I can go out and play in my backyard or my driveway.  As mentioned here previously, I can barely stand on ice skates so I can't just up and play with friends at a cookout for fun.  Despite this I gave in and watched anyway.  I went to some games and even got a jersey sweater.  I was hooked.  Hockey wasn't entirely new to me.  I'd gone to enough Renegades games in Richmond (prior to their demise) that I understood the rules, the basic positions, and that improperly laying a basketball court on top of the ice makes for one really sloppy basketball game. Last year I focused on learning who our players are, how the new rules affected the game and how to recognize penalties.  This year I've decided to learn about strategy.  What the major plays are and where players should be on the ice.  I thought preseason training camp might be a good place to start learning so I decided to pass on watching College Game Day Saturday morning and check out camp.  I learned a lot from watching practice and talking with my new friend Noah, but it wasn't what I expected to learn.  Here are the highlights.

1. Hockey practice is not for the color blind. The team looks like they are auditioning for a skittles commercial on ice.  Thankfully it didn't take long to realize the point of this is to color-code the lines.  At first it was frustrating.  I learned about the players, but I'm used to finding them on the ice based on their name and number.  The color coded jerseys don't have names and numbers.  This proved not to be as troublesome as I feared.  It doesn't take long to realize who is on what line and after that finding someone on ice is actually easier because of this handy color scheme. I was interested in watching a couple of our new centers and spotting the short guys in navy (Metropolit) and gold (Kapenan) was pretty easy.  For the record Metro is very very fast and Kapenan is adorable. Can they make up for the departure of Mr. Savard?  Who knows?  Of course finding my favorite (Hossa) and everyone else's favorite (Kolvachuk) was easy.
   
   
2. You spend a whole lot of time just standing around at hockey practice. In most sports, training camp is designed to get players back into game condition.  To build up their endurance so they can go full speed for an entire game. I was really surprised to see most of practice consisting of short bursts of activity by one line while the players from the other lines are waiting in a queue for their turn.  Maybe this works for hockey and not for other sports because no other sport imitates their pattern of constantly rotating personnel but I was surprised. In addition to this there were several times during practice when Hartley called the team over to his white board to explain what he wanted them to do. (That's what is going on in the first picture.)  Never-the-less some of these guys were just exhausted at the end of the 2 hour, 20 minute practice.
   
   
3. It's really hard to take good pictures of hockey practice.  Part of this is because some of these guys skate very fast.  Part of it is the glass.  Part of it is that I wore sandals, shorts and a t-shirt to practice and was shivering while taking photos.  I was absolutely struck by how short one of our new goalies is.  Brathwaite is 5'7" and looks like a dwarf compared to Kari Lehtonen who is 6'4".  The photos I took to illustrate this look terrible, but I'm using two of them anyway.  The photos are taken at different distances but with the guys standing in front of the same goal.  Look at the difference in where the top of goal hits each of them, and then look at the top of their head in relation to the yellow line in the background.  Like I said, Brathwaite looks like a shrimp. 
   
   Brathwaite surprised me in general.  I knew we'd signed new goalies but I had no idea that Brathwaite is whatever you call African-Americans in Canada (African-Canadian?) [on advice from my Canadian friend the correct label is-->]Canadian.  He had his helmet painted up with MLK and and a Welcome to Atlanta sign that people appeared to like.  Our other new goalie was a big hit.  I think the inner sports fan in all of us just loves shouting "Moose."  Frankly I wouldn't mind not seeing either of these guys in goal this year for any reason other than giving Lehtonen a night off on occasion.  I also learned that while some players are fast, goalies are slow on skates.  Maybe it's all the padding but these guys lagged far behind everyone else when the skating portion of practice began.
   
   
4. Of all the various sports practices I've watched or participated in I think hockey practice reminds me most of basketball practice.  Lots and lots of drills done as a whole team (football splits up into units for these) and not so much game simulation.  This struck me most at the end of practice when it was time to do some skating.  They moved the goals out of the way and everyone got situated behind the red line at the end of the ice.  I had instant recollection of coaches yelling for us to line up at the base line during basketball practice...and sure enough it's the same exercise but on skates.  We ran between the baseline and the top of the key, half-court, the top of the other key and finally the other baseline before collapsing and trying not to vomit.  Swap out the keys with the blue lines and the hockey players were doing the same thing.  I guess everyone appreciate the effort as the assembled voyeurs were cheering, usually for the last guy to finish in each group. I guess since hockey adopted the best part of basketball (the fast break) they decided to adopt the most excruciating part of practice as well.
   
   
5. Real hockey fans are serious about hockey and this starts young.  My new friend Noah was happy to tell me something about almost every Thrasher.  He knew every player's first and last name as well as their number.  He knew where players who had left the Thrashers during the off-season had signed.  He knew how to pronounce the funny sounding European last names.  His favorite player is Kolvachuk because of his fierce slapshot. He was happy to share with me some key statistics form Kovalchuk's season last year.  Noah plays hockey and skates fast just like Kolvachuk and even skates fast backward.  He has not yet mastered that slapshot.  Noah plays left wing on his hockey team.  I told him my favorites are Hossa, because I think he plays smart and because he scores all the short-handed goals and Jim Slater because I think he's cute.  Noah thought that last bit was funny. This was a moment of enlightenment for me.  I am used to being one of the more knowledgeable people in any sports conversation but Noah knew much more about the game and its players than I do. According to his dad, Noah's room is a shrine to all things Thrashers.  Did I mention that Noah is 5? Last season he got to be boy of the game once.  He stood on the ice with Kolvachuk, Mellanby and right next to Peter Bondra.  I think with Hockey I might have to accept that I can't catch up to some serious fans.  I mean if they start committing these details to memory at age 5, and I didn't start until last year....I'm going to take it as a sign to just enjoy the game rather than talk about it.