Hockey Team #2
Last night was the first game of my Aggie hockey season. And it felt so good to be back on the UBC ice1. And wearing my Aggies jersey! And doing the Aggie slide2!
I started my hockey career at age 263, when I was in grad school and, after watching how much fun the man who would later become my ex-husband had playing hockey, I decided I wanted to play hockey too. I told him my Christmas present was going to be hockey gear and he got me hockey lessons at Burnaby 8 Rinks for my 26th birthday. Then I joined the Aggies. One of the perks of being a student is that rec hockey is dirt cheap4, so even I could afford it on my starving student income. I met some really great friends over the years I played Aggie hockey, including my former roomie and the team captain when I started with the Aggies, Dani, and Kim, who now plays with me out in Coquitlam and who is the team captain of the Aggies this year5, 6. I learned a lot about playing hockey and I had a *tonne* of fun.
The year after I graduated, they tore down the UBC rinks7 to build shiny new ones for the Olympics, so there was no rec hockey. And then last year I didn’t get to play with the Aggies, since I wasn’t a faculty member in first term1 and when I became a faculty member in second term, I was sick for two months and so didn’t play with the Aggies (and probably shouldn’t have even been playing on the one team that I did play on at the time). So, after a two year hiatus, I’m back in the Aggie hockey scene. And, just to prove I mean business – I scored the first (and only) goal8 for our team in last night’s game! w00t w00t!
Also, I have to say that even though we didn’t win the game, we did pretty damn amazing for a team that’s never played together before, with a few players (including the goalie) that have never played a single game of hockey before last night! You could actually see an improvement in us from the first period to the third period – people were picking up some skills, figuring out their positions and getting used to playing with one another. Once we get in a few games together, I think we’ll be a force to be reckoned with!
On a bit of a tangent9, I’d like to point out that one of the teams in the rec league this year – a men’s team in the Elite division is called – and I’m not making this up – 2 Girls 1 Puck.
1I played one game in the new UBC arena – last September I thought I’d be allowed to play UBC Rec hockey because I was teachinga, but it turned out that since I was only teaching in term 2 (Jan-Apr), I wasn’t allowed to play in term 1 (Sept-Dec). Which we didn’t find out until the second game, so I played the first game of last year.
aYou have to be either a student, staff or faculty member at UBC to be eligible to play in the rec league.
2The “Aggie slide” occurs after the game, after we shake hands with the other team, when the Aggies all skate across the rink and dive. One of the new girls on the team was really confused when we did this last night; afterwards she said, “I was like, “No! Don’t throw yourself in front of the zamboni!!”
3I believe it was when I was 26. I’m starting to get forgetful in my old age, so that might be off by +1 year.
4Compare: UBC Rec hockey fees for ~6 months (late Sept-Nov and Jan-Mar) are ~$80. To play out in Coquitlam for 7 months (Sept-Mar), I pay ~$650. Rec hockey is subsidized by the rec fees that all students pay along with their tuition fees, plus sponsorship from our Faculty since we are a Faculty team.
5Just to give you an idea what an amazingly organized person Kim is, not only did she recruit us a full roster of players for the Aggies, she coordinated an entire extra team full of players AND is recruiting refs for the league. And this on top of being a university student and a teaching assistant and rep for a number of professional organizations and playing with my team out in Coquitlam. Did I mention that she is crazy?
6Clearly, I like hanging around with the people with the power.
7I’m reasonably sure this is just a correlation, not causative.
8It may have been the garbage goal to end all garbage goals – the puck was dumped in to the opposing teams end and me and a (much taller than me) defencewoman were racing for the puck. The puck made it to the goalie before either of us got there and, instead of covering it up given that I was racing right towards here, she tried to poke it off to her right. Two problems with this plan: (a) the defencewoman turned to the goalie’s left as she approached the net and (b) her poke was more of a dribble, resulting in the puck sitting a few inches from the goal line, exactly in front of where I’m heading and the goalie standing dead still, sort of facing the wrong way. All I had to do was sweep the puck a couple inches, and bye bye shut out. The nice thing about garbage goals (which happen to be my specialty): they are worth just as many points as the pretty ones!
9Every time I hear (or see) “on a tangent” I always think “on a secant.” This goes back to high school math class, where we would also sing Ace of Base’sb “I Saw the Sign” as “I Saw the Cosine” and where Sarah made the best joke about mistaken (trigonometric) identities.
bMan, I’m really dating myself with that one.
Um. I want more “rampant consumerism” posts 🙂
Hockey + correlation + trig identities? Awesomeness!
Did I really make a joke about mistaken (trig) identities? What was it? I have NO recollection of that. (And you say that your memory is going – bah!) Was that in grade 12 math, since I didn’t take calculus with you?
Man – I loved trig. And algebra. And stats. I do miss working with math stuff, but I am excited about my (future) kids doing math so I can flex the math muscles again. But not matrix algebra. I have a mental block towards that. BLAH!
I believe it was in OAC Algebra (we took that together, right?). Mrs. Brunner (she was the teacher of that class, I think?) was trying to solve some equation and she couldn’t get it to work and the whole class was trying to figure out why it wasn’t working and then someone realized that we were using the wrong trig identity (I wish I could remember how trig identities work, ‘cuz this would make a lot more sense with an example) and you said, “Mrs. Brunner! It’s just a case of mistaken identities!”