Playing Ice hockey has been a huge part of my life since the 4thgrade. I officially started playing Ice hockey in 5thgrade for a local in-house team out of Hershey, PA. As I got older, my hockey skills improved greatly, opening new opportunities for me in my hockey career. In middle school I began playing travel hockey out of Harrisburg, PA. Travel hockey is a step up from in-house hockey because in travel you try out for a team, rather than just signing up. This allows you to play with other kids with similar skill levels to yourself, and eliminates the kids who love hockey, but just have not quite mastered the skills part. I played travel hockey all the way through my senior year of high school, and when I graduated I began playing for Bloomsburg University.
In 2014 I was 16 years old, and the hockey team I was playing for at the time was a Bantam A team called the Capital City Vipers. Being an above average team for our division, we decided to register for well-known hockey tournament in Lake Placid, NY. This is an annually run hockey tournament, and it attracts teams from every part of the nation, as well as teams from across Canada. We knew the competition would be high. We ended up losing in the semi-finals, which in my opinion, was due to the fact we were unaware of a few technicalities until the tournament had already started. Was this due to poor technical writing? Shouldn’t have we been informed of these changes in game play before we started?
Two major differences in the game play of this tournament smothered my teams chance of winning. First, when playing a Canadian team, checking was considered a penalty. This was due to the fact that in Canada, checking is not allowed in Bantam aged hockey leagues. Second, overtime was played out in a way I had never seen before in my life. It started 4 v 4 for five minutes, 3 v 3 for five minutes, 2 v 2 for five minutes, and finally ended with a full-ice 1 v 1 until a team had scored. To say that this overtime strategy was odd would be an understatement. My team had previously relied on the skill of checking as a very helpful strategy to win games. Without checking, our defense was off, we couldn’t fore check properly, and our whole strategy had been thrown out. The reason the change in overtime play hurt my team so bad was because this overtime ended up being more about who had the best player, not who had the best team. My team was so successful in the past not because we were a bunch of all-stars, but because we were good at working as a team.
This leaves me to question, did the technical set-up of this tournament truly effect my team’s chances of winning? If we had been presented a document that emphasized these changes in game play we could have planned, and practiced accordingly. Lake Placid being an American town, we expected the tournament rules to be geared towards American teams. However, once we arrived we realized that the majority of teams registered were Canadian. This tournament did a poor job of recognizing all potential audiences.
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