EDMONTON HAVING A BALL WITH HOCKEY IN JULY
City prepares to host junior national ball hockey championships this week
We’re in that part of the hockey calendar that Bill (Spaceman) Lee once famously referred to as three months of bad ice.
But it’s still, always, hockey season.
With so many subsets of the game to be accessed — road, sledge, ball, floor, inline, field, table, air and fantasy — interest is at a fever pitch 24/7 in this country and it seems likely Hockey Canada will reach its stated goal of one million new hockey families by 2022.
Hockey on ice will obviously lead the way forward. But the membership numbers in ball hockey are not to be ignored.
“I don’t know of a sport that’s more Canadian,” said Norm Spitzer, the Edmonton-based GM of Canada’s U16, U18 and U20 national ball hockey teams. “We all grew up playing it on the street and the driveway and this is sort of an organized form of that.”
In Edmonton, it’s a low-priced, fun-first, indoor, low-commitment affair, as $260 gets you a 14-game league schedule and some practices on the concrete floors inside the West Soccer Centre between April and June. Spitzer said Edmonton has 2,000 minor ball hockey players and 100 men’s teams and Sherwood Park has another 800 minor ball hockey players.
The organized form of the sport dates back four decades and membership is growing all over the country. Later this week, Edmonton plays host to the junior national championships at the West Soccer Centre. There will be boys games in the U15, U17 and U19 divisions, as well as girls U19 action.
Many of these players have already played for Canada internationally or are on the verge of making that leap. And many play ice hockey at the highest levels.
“We have high, high end ice hockey players who are starting to realize that ball hockey is a sport they can go somewhere with,” said Shelley Callaghan, president of Canadian Ball Hockey Association. “Some people think of ball hockey as a pickup game, you play every now and then just for fun, not very competitive, and certainly that opportunity exists as well. But I think there is more awareness of the higher levels.”
Spitzer is guiding Canada at the upper echelon. He recently returned from Sheffield, England where Canadian squads took world championship gold in the U16 and U18 divisions and U20 silver, matched up in all three finals against Slovakia. The U.S., Switzerland, Czech Republic and Great Britain were also there.
Several Edmonton players were on those national teams, and Spitzer said there have been 22 Edmonton-area ball hockey players drafted by National Hockey League teams in the past five years.
Though there is a push for high performance and the national governing body is also doing all it can to work with Hockey Canada and find its way onto the Olympic radar, the grassroots feel in ball hockey is still more casual than that of its ice hockey cousin.
“Ball hockey is all about fun,” said Spitzer. “It doesn’t have the stress of ice hockey. There are no tryouts. It’s just a group of guys who want to play together.”
Indeed, you can gather up a bunch of buddies, form a squad, bring it to the association and have it tiered into a league with similarly skilled opponents. Forwards and defencemen wear gloves, helmets and visors, soccer-style shin pads and running shoes. Goalies wear everything they would on ice except for the skates.
All that padding is necessary because you play the game with the nasty, hard orange ball that has bruised generations of Canadians.
“That’s one of the more challenging parts of ball hockey, because when players shoot that ball it curves quite a bit,” said Chris Curr, a 17-year-old who was named top goalie in the U18 division at the worlds, and also backstops the top-ranked Edmonton Xtreme. “And you can actually shoot that ball harder than pucks.”
Curr started playing ball hockey about four years ago and enjoys the mental change.
“Ice hockey is pretty serious and you’re focused on that all season so it’s nice to have a little bit of a break. It’s a more relaxed environment, but still competitive, which I like.”
It doesn’t get much more competitive than a 2-1 overtime win, which Curr and his U18 teammates pulled off against Slovakia at the worlds.
“It doesn’t happen very often where you get to represent your country in a sport internationally. Just an amazing experience,” Curr said.
His league team, the Xtreme, will also be playing in the junior nationals here this week. That’s a ton of hockey for one off-season, but he also managed to fit baseball into his schedule, and he would recommend ball hockey to anybody looking for an off-season pursuit.
“It’s great for conditioning. Players have to run. And even for me as a goalie, I’m sweating buckets every game. You’ve got to work hard out there. It really helps with your skills, even if it’s with a ball.”