Here’s some videos from the finals of the University of Calgary Intramural B-grade and A-grade non-contact hockey leagues.
First up are the Stubble Jumpers (the winners). I often played at lunch time with a bunch of these guys and they were pretty pumped to win the B-grade.
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The next video is of the A-grade. The white team is the “individuals team” which my friend Janay Magowan played for who also won 🙂 Janay is the short fast one with the yellow socks.
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Somehow I managed to end up on the University of Calgary physics hockey team! They were short on players so I signed up and dragged along Janay with me. We had the stunningly geeky name of “Team Group Velocity”. The team was a hotch potch of various levels. We competed in the University of Calgary Intramural B-grade hockey league.
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I played in a social outdoor ice hockey tournament in Tuscany, Calgary with some guys I met at the Olympic Oval a while back. The event was great, ice wasn’t the best as a chinook (easterly wind) was blowing through, but it was a heap of fun and I hope to compete in an event like this again some time. We were called the Shabangs.
Well what else do you do when it’s -15 degrees outside and you have an itch to play hockey? The idea of the rink came about one day when my roommate (flatmate) Gregor and I were sitting round talking about how his old roommate had built a rink in their backyard. So I was like “dammit, I’m buildin’ us a rink today!”, so I googled as many things as I could on rink building to figure out the best plan of attack. You can build them by building a snow wall and spraying water directly on to the ground, but this apparently messes up the lawn and takes longer to freeze, so I headed to Walmart and picked up a rink liner for $10 (big sheet of plastic) and filled it up with water. A day and a bit later and we had a fully functioning ice rink in our front yard 🙂
Getting the ice surface smooth is no easy task. I tried leaving hose on it for a while, but it just created a nice big lump on one side of the rink 🙁 Buckets of hot water did the trick, but it took quite a few to cover it.
Mike Boyle took me to see a Western Hockey League (WHL) game featuring the Calgary Hitmen at the Saddledome in Calgary. The game was very exciting, lots of big hits, lots of skill and a WAY higher level of hockey than I’d seen before. Unfortunately the NHL lockout was on at the time so I couldn’t see any NHL games so this was the next best thing.
The Dunedin Vixens (aka Dunedin Aces women) were an awesome team. Unfortunately an extra Y chromosome ruled me out of joining 🙁 Although I did play in goal for them once as an honorary woman.
The photo below is from their 2002 journey to the South Island Regional Inline Hockey Championships. Clockwise from top left: Emma Gordon, April George, Kezia Bibby, Tasha Szeto, Kate Williman, Martel Letica, Becky Szeto, Kerry Perkins and Natalie Syddal.
I found the following pictures on a DVD many years later. I have no idea who took the pictures or when they were taken (the date stamps were wrong).
