Week Two (Oct. 23)

At the end of last week's session, we were told that our second session would be in Canton, not at UMass-Boston. For selfish reasons, I internally decried this move as being horrendously unfair and borderline torturous, as UMass-Boston is on my way home from work and is a mere ten-minute drive from my house. My life is hard.

All week, I waited to hear from the clinic people with directions to the new place. None came. Finally, at 4 PM on Tuesday, I decided that no directions were coming. After some frustrating dead ends on the league's website, I managed to find my team and the new location, the Canton SportsPlex. Canton isn't really that far from me, but getting down the Expressway to Rt. 24 is a crap shoot no matter what time of night it is.

Lo and behold, I got to around Columbia Road/Gallivan Boulevard (the exit I SHOULD have been getting off at...no, I'm not bitter) before I hit traffic. That traffic lasted until around Pope John Paul II park, meaning a stretch that should have taken three minutes took over 15. Great.

I think this is India, but it may as well be the Expressway.

Behind schedule, I pulled off 24 in Stoughton/Canton at the exit before BJ's. I'd been to that BJ's plenty of times with my parents, but this time I was solo: instead of shopping for wholesale groceries, I was heading for wholesale hockey fun. (Fun, in this case, is being used as an acronym for "Falling Until Numb.")

Being from the city, I get uneasy when I don't see streetlights. Thankfully, the road to the SportsPlex is a narrow, winding, two-lane road devoid of any kind of late or signs of humanity. I felt like I was part of some B-grade horror movie, driving to my untimely doom in the middle of suburbia.

Considering my skating skills, I guess that comparison isn't entirely inaccurate.

I pulled up to the rink, running a bit late, and found my way inside. I was rushing to get dressed, and could hear them starting the clinic without me. Because I was rushing, I spent the rest of the session feeling like I was missing something. More than once, I looked down to make sure I was, in fact, wearing my hockey pants. Phew.

There were a few other guys getting dressed in the locker room, so I wasn't the only late one. As an older guy was leaving to head to the ice, he said, "I don't know if you heard the coaches, but they said to not leave your valuables up here."

Don't leave your wallets here? In Canton? They hadn't given us this warning at UMass, which is in the hellacious warzone known as Dorchester. Weird.

Rather than lug my bag down to the side of the rink, I, being such a daredevil, left my stuff there. Have fun stealing my tiny-limit credit card, thieves of Canton.

As I hobbled down the flight of stairs to the rink (stupid design, architects), new skates clacking away, I came to the door of the rink. The coaches had already started a drill, having the players skate backwards around the perimeter of the rink, with the puck. Some of us are great at this, some are OK, and some are downright bad. I'm actually a lot better at skating backwards than I thought I'd be, so I was ready for this drill.

The only problem? It had already started, so the perimeter of the rink was crowded with backwards-skating hockey players focused more on the puck at their feet than anyone behind them. It's kind of like watching someone back out of their driveway with a large object in the backseat, blocking the rearview mirror. It has an element of, "welp, I'm coming out, so you better move" to it.

Trying to join this drill was similar to merging onto the highway, which is pretty much a professional sport in Massachusetts. I stood and waited...waited...waited for an opening, then BAM- jumped right in. No fender benders, no rear-ending: I'd merged successfully.

The drill went OK, with my skating backwards slightly less coach bus-esque than the week before. Feeling good about myself, the coaches ordered us into the next drill: 2-on-0's.

This week, the coaches added a little twist: if you missed the net on the drill, you had to do ten pushups. The first trip down, I was on the shooting side. Myself and my partner did pretty well, making crisp passes, and it was my time to shoot. Channeling my inner Steven Stamkos, I prepared to unleash a wicked wrister into the top corner- oh God, it's going wide, no, no. Thankfully, the goalie reached out and blocked it. I've never been so happy to have a shot NOT go in the net. Pushups averted.

The next few times down were similarly uneventful, with my blazing (read: feeble) wrist shots getting turned aside regularly. At some point in the drill, the coaches ordered us to speed up without the puck so we wouldn't get left behind. After hearing this, I heeded their words, dug in, and was moving pretty well. I got to about the attacking blue line before I remembered a horrifying fact:

I still can't stop.

Thankfully, I've never been in a car when its breaks failed, but I imagine the horror is somewhat similar, albeit on a smaller and far less dangerous scale: you know you need to stop, and stop soon, but you simply can't do it.

During the first few rushes, I'd simply slow down and then turn back up the boards, heading back up ice without needing to stop. However, this time I had a real head of steam and was in the inside lane (there were two sets of two lines, meaning each 2-on-0 occurred on half of the ice) and had my partner in front of me.

Uh oh. Impact imminent. I tried dragging my back skate, tried doing the "snow plow" stop I'd seen on YouTube (yes, I did some research), both to no avail. Finally, I turned a little, which managed to slow me down a bit, but still hit the boards with a decent amount of force. I didn't fall down, but there was some damage:

R.I.P. damage-free gloves, Oct. 23, 2012

Yup. I crashed so hard into the boards that the finger of my glove got wedged between the glass and one of the metal stanchions. My first "injury."

The coaches ended the drill shortly after, and, as if sensing my vulnerability, moved on:

"Alright, everyone to the endline, five lines," one hollered. "We're gonna do some stopping."

Uh...no we're not, coach.

It was the same drill as last week: skate up the ice until you hear the whistle, then stop, facing the right side of the rink. You got in two or three stops, depending on how long the coach waited to blow the whistle.

Or, if you're me, you got in two or three pirouettes and a couple of graceful trips to your knees.

After the third attempt, one of the coaches pulled me aside (second week in a row, woo!).

"You're using your back foot too much," he said. "You gotta use that front foot, all the weight on your front foot. Lift the back foot if you have to."

I nodded in agreement with everything he was saying. I watched a few more groups head up the ice, then joined in for one last go.

Three stops, in order: skid. Spin. Fall.

The "Dan learns to play hockey" hat trick!

I'm going to hear "right up, right up!" in my sleep for a while now. But, to my credit (pats self on back), I did get "right up" every time, covered in enough ice shavings to make a couple dozen snow cones.

Mercifully, the drill ended shortly thereafter. The coaches gathered everyone at one end and said, "good, good, you're all making progress. Now everyone knows how to stop, OK? So we don't want to see people bumping into people, or hitting the goalie, or hitting the boards."

I assume I was being excluded from that "everyone" group. Either that, or the coach is a liar.

We ended the clinic with crossover drills, which sounded bad at first. However, to my surprise I skated through them pretty well. The drill involves skating in figure-8's around both faceoff circles, the center circle, and then both circles at the other end.

An MSPaint explanation of the crossover drill, complete with bonus smiley face.

The point is to work on crossing your feet over as you take strides. The coaches told us to keep the strides short, to not lift our legs too much, and to make sure we bend our knees.

I actually wasn't bad at this. I mean, I'm no Tyler Seguin on my skates, but I can move pretty well. It's the stopping that's the problem.

After four different sets of crossovers (two trips up and down the ice), the coaches called us together to end the night. The coaches offered some words of encouragement, and then asked people to raise a hand if they wanted to play a game next week.

I kept my hand down, thinking he meant a game against another team, something I know I'm probably not ready for (turns out he meant a split-squad scrimmage, where we'd play each other). However, majority rules, and most people voted for a game.

That's right: next week I should be playing in an actual game, inability to stop and all.

Get the popcorn ready.

Skid. Spin. Fall. Repeat.