Last Wednesday some pals and I headed up to Fairbanks to compete in the USA Hockey's Pacific District Women's Tournament. The winning team from each division goes on to compete at Nationals which will be held later this month in Rochester, NY. The girls divisions are broken down by age - 12U (12 and under), 14U, 16U and 19U. There are also three adult women's divisions, but only the lowest - C - received enough competing teams (including ours) to actually have tournament play. To qualify for Districts, we had to play a minimum of 14 games as a team and each player has to make at least 10 games. This is generally not tough for teams that play together all the time, but our league doesn't allow us to create our own teams so we had to play our games in addition to our normal league games. We started playing and practicing as a team in September. If you consider that we all play 3 league games every 2 weeks, plus most of us play a pick up game on Friday morning and another one or two Saturday night, and on top of all that we had our travel team games or practices once a week, we have been playing ALOT of hockey this season.
Apparently, it still wasn't enough. Our first game the other team took 46 shots on our goalie and scored 6 goals. We had 4 shots and no goals. Our coach was kind enough to point out that even if every one of our shots had gone in the net, we would still have lost. Great way to start off the weekend. Our second game was better. And it was worse. We took 6 shots, scored one goal and lost 9 to 1. In our final game we actually played pretty well as a team, but I think our goalie was worn out. We took 25 shots on net, scored 2 goals but still lost 10-2. By then we knew we were in the beer bracket, so we just relaxed and decide to have fun.
As a team, our best play turned out the be our penalty kill. We even played 6-on-3 for a while after 2 of our players ended up with penalties and one of the remaining players on the ice cross checked an opponent. In hockey most penalties aren't called until a player on the offending team touches the puck - it's called a delayed penalty. The ref skates around with his arm raised to let the players know a penalty call is coming and if there is time, the goalie on the wronged team will skate off (since the offending team can't really score a goal without touching the puck and if they touch the puck, the play is dead). This allows the offended team to put an additional skater on the ice to make the most of the situation. 6-on-3 is less than ideal when you're already obviously a much weaker team. Somehow we pulled it off though and goodness knows at that point we were happy to have done anything well.
There's the ol' phrase about what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and I think the same is true about road trips, especially when a good deal of that trip is spent in the locker room.
Not all details from the trip are classified though. After our last game we went to the BP Championship Ice Sculpture Competition. It was -10 degrees but well worth freezing for an hour to see the amazing ice art. Here are some photos.
Oddly enough, what probably turned out to be the highlight of the whole trip came just as we returned home. When we put our team together, we spent a fair bit of time trying to choose a name. I think most everyone has heard the joke Sarah Palin told during her speech at the Republican National Convention. You know... What is the only difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? LIPSTICK!! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Almost immediately, we became the Alaska Pitbulls. Our logo is a set of lips lathered in pink lipstick. We even had fleece caps made up with our team name and logo embroidered on them.
Just as I settled into my seat on the plane in Anchorage on the way home, I looked up to see the governor getting on as well. Most of us were wearing our hats and at some point our goalie and coach both approached her to tell her about our team. I think our goalie is the only Sarah supporter and I'm not certain she ever realized that we were mocking her this whole time. However it happened, just before we began our descent, our coach made a point of telling us all not to run off after we landed. Sure enough, he had given Sarah his hat and arranged for us to have a group photo with her when we landed. The whole time I sort of felt like the person who pretends to hug someone meanwhile taping a "Kick Me" sign to their back. The entire ride home from the airport, we kept looking at each other thinking, "what the heck just happened?!" and breaking out in fits of laughter. We couldn't quite figure out if Sarah knew we were making fun of her or she thought it was an honor. I suppose if she considered it an honor, what more appropriate way was there for us to do so than to travel out of town and get completely annihilated by our competition because we were out of our league big time.
No comments:
Post a Comment