Arth's 2010 Summer League

12-3 Cobras over the Monarchs.

So, to start my season off I had to drive to Airdrie because apparently my team captain either thought it'd be funny or he just wanted to drive an hour to every game. Mind you, that meant an hour and a half for me. Yeah, great plan Craig. Long story short, after getting lost for 20 minutes I finally found this surprisingly nice rink tucked away in a corner and got suited up.

As I'm sitting there in the dressing room with my entire team for the first time, I started looking around getting acquainted with everyone since most of them already know me from the shinny we've played together the last 3 months but as it goes, I really didn't know any of them. Come to think of it I still don't. Anyways, my team captain explains to us what's going on and the new rules of the league for those who were returning and afterwards he starts handing out free skate sharpening coupons and a 15% off ticket to Hockey Experts (Mind you, I've told him several times now that I work for the Forzani Group which is the parent company of Hockey Experts.) and when he gets to me I gave him this smirk and he thought I was implying that I had no intention making an effort to grab it from him while I was getting dressed. He starts to lean over and mumbles "I'll just put it in your bag for you" when I had to remind him again that I work for the company and even if they were 50% off tickets, I'd still be paying more than my discount. He laughed when he remembered what I did and I finished suiting up in time to watch the Z go around 3 more times and pull off the ice. Time to skate out and get ready for some high paced ankle-skating division E hockey.

First period. Yawn. That's really all that can be said for it as my team put away 3 goals and I think I only had to make 2 saves off guys that were stumbling down the ice. Aside from that the period seemed to last hours even though it's 3 14 minute stop-time periods due to the fact that I had very little action and even fewer shots. During the first intermission I told my team where to shoot and what to watch for on the other goalie, as is usually my habit and I had more than enough time to watch and critique him.

Second period. This one was a bit more exciting. We were now up 4-0 and someone dumped the puck in behind me. I skated back to play it to the guy in the left corner and he coughed it up (great...Div E blows) to someone on the other team who was just about 6 feet out from the net and on the bottom of the circle. Thank god that A) he's an ankle skater (surprise!) and B) he had his back to the net when he caught the puck because as soon as he turned around I made an amazing diving splits toe save on his surprisingly hard shot and a secondary save to prevent the rebound from going in. My team finally cleared it and managed to score our 5th goal. Alright, I'm feeling good now because we have a 5-0 lead and there's 8 minutes left in the period. A bit later I had a back door pass get through my stick and to someone waiting to make that amazingly awkward mid net blocker shot that handcuffed me and went in. Well ****, there goes my shutout. Shortly after that there was a faceoff after another save that put the puck squarely on the winger in the slot who instantaneously fired one low left side and my leg was just about 2 inches from full extension so the puck beat me. 5-2...worse things have happened. My team went on to score three more before I let in the only weak goal of the game where a guy shot the puck straight down the slot and beat me 5 hole since I was somewhat stunned that he even managed to make it into the zone let alone fire off a shot that quick and cleanly down the slot. 8-3 and I'm really having the best time playing hockey I think I've ever had. We scored one more in the dying minute of the period and closed the second out with a 9-3 lead. After laughing it up during the second intermission I skated out to my net, tossed my bottle on top of the net and nudged my mask down. Get ready for round 3.

Third period. This one was my most challenging and I'd say I saw probably about 10 shots this period since my team knew we were on a solid lead and I was playing very well tonight. I made a save almost identical to my second period "OMG how the **** did he get that" and nobody really noticed. I also made an amazing glove save on an extremely amazing shot and of course embellished it with the usual Patty Roy flare just because...hey...if I drop it who cares. My team played really loose which was perfectly fine with me as we were already up by a large sum of goals and still managed to put 3 more away making it a 12-3 lead, something even I can't screw up. I made some dazzling saves that were a bit of "I couldn't move laterally because my skates were too dull" and "I got bored, I had to do something to earn my keep." In the end we closed our first game of the season 12-3 against what I'm assuming and hoping was one of the worse teams in the league since I don't like getting peppered but I certainly don't like not getting a lot of shots in.

In the end the scoring was Cobras 3 for the first, Cobras 6 Monarchs 3 for the second and Cobras 3 for the third bringing it to a 12-3 final which was something everyone was thoroughly pleased with in the locker room after the game was done. On an interesting side not though, the entire team was East Indian and it was kinda cool that they came together like that since our team has a bit of everything on it. No serious injuries and one player from the other team got ejected* at the end of the match. All in all, a great day of hockey. The best part is I play again Saturday!

I prefered 89X anyways. WRIF for some reason just annoyed me with their commentators.

Two more games and a shinny this week. You know what's odd, I actually played more hockey in the States. Kind of odd to move to the home of Canada and find less hockey.