Talkmeme - 6th Dec: hockey

[tielan]

schneefink asked: You play hockey! How did you get started? What position do you play? What do you like about it?

Okay, so maybe a bit more than twenty years ago, I joined an extracurricular sports team with my school age group. I'd been playing netball since Year 8, but my friends were in the hockey team, and so I wanted to play hockey, too. (Ah, peer pressure.) We're talking field hockey. Amateur school-age level. On turf. Literally, turf. You'd be running with the ball on your stick and a tuft of grass would loom, and suddenly you'd be running without the ball on your stick anymore.

And thus began a long-term love affair with hockey. (In Australia "hockey" = "field hockey", she says for the US/Canadian contigent. The thing you're thinking of is "ice hockey" in Australia, most likely because we have more fields than ice around here.)

I joined a team at university - again, nothing seriously competitive. It was exercise, it was social, it was fun. And I gained some friends out of it I wouldn't ordinarily have made.

I left the team when I left uni, although I kept in contact with a couple of the women who'd moved to Sydney, too. Then, in 2008, I got a call out of the blue at 6:45pm on a Tuesday night. "We're on our way to hockey training. They're looking for players, would you like to come?" I turned up the next week and joined the team. I've been with that club ever since.

On the field, I either play a forward (one of the three strikers: centre forward, right wing, or left wing), or in goals. The last couple of years I've played with two teams - one on the field, one as the goalie. It's worked out pretty well. Knowing how the forward line attacks has helped me marshal my defensive players (fullbacks and half-backs), even if I do tend to be a bit on the bossy side of things at times.

Hockey fills my love of team sports and the chance to run with a purpose. I can't just "go jogging" because I get bored and tired and end up walking instead. When my team is relying on me to chase the ball down, it's easier. It's physical, it requires a certain amount of aggression, and you hit the ball really hard.

Actually, things are probably going to get interesting: the Annual General Meeting for the club is on tomorrow, and I suspect that there may be an attempt at a coup. The president this year has been a bit high-handed, even with her officers of the club, and while she's good at organising things, she's not terribly likeable. (I guess that sounds familiar...)

Talkmeme on LJ | Talkmeme on DW

Comments

[schneefink]

Huh, I thought it'd be difficult to switch from goalie to field player, but I can see how it would be useful to have both perspectives.

And I completely agree, team sports are more motivating than doing sports on my own. And more fun :)

[thothmes]

I grew up playing field hockey in middle and high school, and could have played in college as well, but joined the swim team instead. Ice hockey would have been available too (my small city hosted the rink that the NY Rangers, an NHL team, used for practice ice) if our family had had the spare change for the fees. We didn't. Up here, further north - Vermont instead of southern New York - and living on a higher salary than I grew up with, my kids play ice hockey. The girls get a taste of field hockey in gym class, but boys don't, and the game is more common on the East Coast, particularly in New England and the other states north of Washington D.C. Than in the rest of the U.S. When I was living in Michigan in 1980, my fellow Latin students, local kids all, we're all agog at this weird sport they'd caught a glimpse of on the Olympic coverage. Hockey, they said, that was played on GRASS with these weird one-sided sticks. They were all amazed to learn that not only had I heard of it without having caught the last night's broadcast, but I'd actually played it!

It shows how much I have unconsciously entered my kid's world that although I had assumed you were not playing on ice, I had also not assumed turf. I was visualizing what most Americans play when they can't get ice to play ice hockey: I assumed you were playing street hockey, essentially ice hockey rules and sticks, much padding, and played on asphalt with rollerblades and a ball, or sometimes a puck that rolls on ball bearings. Thank you for the corrective.

Field hockey is the better game. I miss it, but the people who would play it here all get suctioned off into ice hockey in cold weather, and softball and soccer when the grass is in season.