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.
The Olympic Oval at the University of Calgary is the best ice rink I’ve ever seen! Two full international sized hockey rinks within the confines of a full long track speed skating rink!
I played hockey there at lunch times a lot and I had power skating and hockey lessons there as well. Plus I played in the University of Calgary B-grade Intramural hockey league for Team Group Velocity (I was a ring-in for the Physics department team).
For Christmas, my friend Mike Boyle took me ice skating in the Rocky Mountains 🙂 The weather was great, well as great as minus 20 degrees can be, and there was HEAPS of ice. Unfortunately there was a tad too much snow to make skating viable.
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A beautiful skating pond near my home in Calgary.
Well what do you do when you’re stuck in a strange foreign land on Christmas day? You have a Christmas orphans dinner that’s what! Gregor and I bought a turkey, got a bunch of other foreigners (Gregor’s from Oz) and then we deep fried the little bugger – the turkey, not the foreigners!
The locals seemed to think it was some sort of weird Aussie/Kiwi tradition to deep fry a turkey, but of course it’s not. It was just a crazy idea of Gregor’s which turned out to be lots of fun. We also deep fried brocoli, carrots, cauliflower, Moro bars and other assorted goodies 🙂
The photo below is of me standing on our rink with my Possum Bourne beanie and Speights T-shirt that my mum sent me. Of course the deep fryer was right in front of me so I couldn’t play hockey that day, but it made for a nice photo 🙂
Ice skating at the Olympic Plaza in Calgary, Canada.
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.
