Ok, here’s the weird thing. I hate playing wing because I never feel I do it well, especially the role of the wing while on defense. Yet, last night, I found myself there again playing for the Ordinals because we had someone out last night. I ended up scoring again (that’s two goals in two weeks, if you’re keeping count, and it doubled my Ordinals career record). It’s really sort of weird how I’ve been scoring all of a sudden, all while playing a position that is not my favorite.
Unfortunately, the rest of the Ordinals game wasn’t so good. John and the defensive players put up a great fight, holding the game at 1-2. Unfortunately it seemed like a segment of the team just wasn’t putting everything they had on the ice. The Ordinals should not be loosing to the Sled Dogs. However, there we were loosing a tight game. And I see people gliding rather than hustling and not minding their positioning (says the guy who hates playing wing) and just not seeming like there’s an urgency to winning this game. Very frustrating!
In a stark contrast, there’s the Storm game. A second loss for the still new team (it’s hard to be new and play a week and immediately have to take a week off for a bye) with a score of 0-6. This loss was much wider than the Ordinals loss, yet I find it much easier to handle this loss because I really feel like everyone on the team hustled and put the best game we could on the ice. It makes the loss a lot easier to handle when you feel the team did it’s best.
The key there is team too… there were a number of Ordinals who played and played hard last night. But there were others who didn’t seem to be putting it all out there on every shift, and also not taking into account some basic fundamentals of playing the game that have really cost the team over the past two weeks.
It’s hard to be captain in these situations. To strike the balance between pushing the team hard to play to the level that’s possible, without getting into negativity or poor morale. I’m hoping between myself and the alternate captains we can find the right balance to push the Ordinals to be the winning team they can be. The talent is there… now the hunger needs to be there, for the whole team.
Yesterday was a crazy amount of hockey—and it was a blast. In addition to the two games, I did Ronnie’s Ice as always; but I also went to a 1 a.m. scrimmage that has been going on for the past few weeks. The captain of the D8 Blizzard set up this scrimmage to give the D8 folks a little extra ice time to help them get better, and D7 players who are D8 friendly are welcome too. Since Storm had the 11:30 game last night, I just decided to stay and play some more. The scrimmage was a lot of fun with a mix of players from Storm, Phantoms, Wizards, Rampaging Moose, Sled Dogs and Blizzard. It was cool to play with people I never get to play with, and to play constantly rotating positions too.
And of course, it’s all good practice for Montreal!
One other bit of hockey news… My board role with the NYCGHA changed. I’ve shifted from secretary to a new positions of Communications and Recruitement Director. I’m excited about this, not only handling the communication to players, but to press in an effort to get the word out about the association. The recruitment side will be great too. I’ve already been handling communication with players who email off the website looking to join; now I can look for hopefully new ways to expand our membership.