BCAA

ODD MAN RUSH The spirited sport of pond hockey is heating up BY K E R RY BA N KS (top photo) Ken Gillespie ACP, (bottom right) Steve Ogle/ACP, (middle and far left) Kerry Banks, (inset, top) istock C louds of vapour billow from the mouths of the shivering hockey players huddled around me in the "warming hut," a picnic shelter covered by a plastic tarp. The simple act of donning skates may be the toughest thing they do today. A woodburning stove and hot cups of "B.C. pond hockey beer" – a concoction featuring cinnamon, sugar and Canadian spirits – are all that is saving us from succumbing to frostbite. It is minus 23°C and a nasty wind is blowing across the five hockey rinks dug out of snowcovered West Lake, 22 kilometres southwest of Prince George. Yet despite the numbing cold, 32 teams have ponied up the $400 entry fee and trekked to this remote forestry town to compete in B.C.'s first annual Northern Regional Pond Hockey Championships. Tugging on my gloves, I push open the A MESMERIZING SYMPHONY of steel blades over natural ice, pond hockey has developed a fanatic following across Canada and the northern U.S. — fed by a nostalgia for a brand of hockey that has largely disappeared in an age of climate-controlled indoor arenas and hypercompetitive youth leagues. (far left) B.C.'s Western Regionals, Rossland; (middle) the Northern Regionals, Prince George. tarp and trudge through the driving blizzard in search of tournament organizer John Reed. I find the 47-year-old conversing with members of his volunteer crew beside a barrel fire – his black toque coated with frost, his eyebrows flecked with ice crystals. Reed, who operates an events management company in Rossland, B.C., has already been onsite with his cohorts for three weeks: shovelling snow, installing lights and hoses, even jerryrigging a homemade Zamboni. But he confides that the weather is actually too frigid for good outdoor ice. "The ideal is minus 10. When it's this cold it gets super hard and super brittle." He points to patches on one of the rinks where holes have developed. The troublesome spots have been marked with rubber boots. It's a far cry from the NHL,but then none of the teams came here expecting climatecontrolled comfort. Pond hockey is a very different animal from the indoor version. It is played with four players per side on 75-by150-foot sheets of outdoor ice. Games last 30 minutes and there are no offsides, no boards, no bodychecking, no slapshots and no goalies – not so surprising when one considers its six-foot-wide nets are only eight inches high. The emphasis is on passing and skating, with plenty of scoring and a rinkside official on WESTWORLD p30-35_Hockey.indd 31 >> W I N T E R 2 0 1 1 31 10/25/11 11:59:55 AM

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