An Aussie on ICE
Learning to play Canada’s national obsession is no easy undertaking, writes Juris Graney.
Australian-born reporter Juris Graney is embarking on a 12-week mission to learn how to play hockey. Over the next few months he will go from never having skated to, hopefully, playing in a non-contact hockey league thanks to the tutelage of the folks at Discover Hockey. You can follow his progress each week online at edmontonjournal.com/ tags/aussieonice.
I’ll be the first to admit that when it comes to my sporting prowess, there is a gaping chasm between my imagined ability and reality — especially when it comes to winter sports.
Growing up in a region blessed with more hot days than hot dinners and where the coldest temperatures folks had to face last year was 6.9 C (trust me, that’s cold enough for the toques and scarves to be busted out), my sports diet was far different than my Canadian counterparts.
My focus was on rugby union in the winter and cricket in the summer. The only ice we saw was packed in our beer coolers and the only hockey on display was of the field variety.
Ask me to explain a ruck or a maul and I’ll chew your ear off about rugby terms. Ask me about the laws of cricket and you could be in for the long haul.
But, after almost nine years of living in Canada, I’ve developed a deep love of the “other” hockey and a burning desire to strap on the skates and slap a puck.
The combination of never having skated on ice before and a cursory understanding of hockey’s nuances should have deterred me from a dalliance on ice, but I just couldn’t shake my on-ice ambitions.
Thankfully I found Discover Hockey to guide me through the school of hard knocks. As I keep telling the newsroom, this could be my Cool Runnings moment where an NHL team sees raw, unadulterated talent hidden inside a tubby 41-year-old Australian.
I’ve been told I’m more Eddie the Eagle than Jamaican bobsledder.
THE TEAM BEHIND THE TEAMS
Discover Hockey began around the same that Kris Perraton and two friends founded the Non-Contact Hockey League in Calgary in 2004. The principle of the league was simple. They wanted a place they could play hockey without having to deal with all of that “other stuff.”
“We were professionals. We had day jobs to go to the next day, the last thing we wanted was to show up with a black eye and missing teeth,” Perraton said. “We just wanted to play hockey.”
It took off to the point that they expanded their summer league to include a winter session
It’s pretty intimidating when you are trying to learn out there on the ponds and you have sevenyear-old kids skating circles around you
before striking on the idea of creating a program for hockey novices to get them into the game.
In 2010, they expanded the Discover Hockey program to Edmonton and it’s since been introduced to Vancouver. There are now over 300 teams that play in the NCHL across Western Canada and the education program graduates about 1,000 newly minted players each year.
“It’s all about getting out on the ice with people of the same skill level because it’s pretty intimidating when you are trying to learn out there on the ponds and you have seven-year-old kids skating circles around you,” he said.
“That’s not the best environment to learn the game, but if you hop on the ice with a couple of other people who are in that same category — people who are new to the country or people who never had the opportunity to play growing up or never wanted to but their kids are now playing — being able to do that on an even playing field, it takes some of that intimidation away.
“It’s all about introducing people to hockey who want to play it with maturity and respect for not only the other players but their teammates and referees.”
HISTORY OF HOCKEY IN AUSTRALIA
It might seem counterintuitive, but Australia’s history with hockey stretches back to the early 1900s, so finding an Aussie on ice isn’t such a weird thing once you dig into it.
The first exhibition game on June 9, 1906, wasn’t technically ice hockey, it was “hockey on the ice” and was an adaptation of roller hockey, or rink hockey, played on ice but using roller skates instead of ice skates.
The first recorded game in Australia was held a month later on July 17, 1906, between a state representative team and sailors from visiting American warship the USS Baltimore.
That game would foster the early iterations of ice hockey in the nation with visiting U.S. sailors invited to play (and more often than not, beating) Australian players.
The first game was a heavy deviation from what Canadians were playing at the time and was more akin to field hockey on ice using a red ball the size of the tennis variety made from the natural latex of tree sap found in Malaysia.
The puck, originally made of wood, was first introduced in September 1908, the same time as the first ice hockey association was struck in Australia featuring four clubs: the Beavers, Brighton, Glaciarium and Melburnians.
Printed in The Advertiser newspaper on Oct. 15, 1904, and attributed to an unnamed yet “great English authority on skating says of hockey on the ice,” this is how the game of hockey was portrayed in the Colonies: “The game is conducted on the same general principles as football, but it is football etherealised. The play is more rapid and brilliant than in any other game. It needs a combined action of eye, hand, and foot, such as is needed in no other sport. A good hockey player threading his way through a whole field of opponents’, and driving the ball under increasing difficulties towards the goal, enables one to realize Scott’s description of the knight in the melee of a tournament better than any other sight.”
It’s unlikely you’ll see Australia on centre ice at top division world championships any time soon.
Both the men’s and women’s teams are in Division IIA meaning they are at the lowest end of international hockey.
The Australian men’s team, ranked 33rd out of 48 in the world and known as The Mighty Roos, is ranked higher than Iceland at the bottom of the sixteam division they share with the likes of Romania, Serbia, Spain and Belgium. Below them even still are nations like Israel, Mexico, South Africa, United Arab Emirates and North Korea.
The women’s team is ranked 27th in the world out of 38 nations and is only a handful of points above traditional transTasman rivals New Zealand.
According to Lisa Martens, assistant commissioner for the Australian Ice Hockey League (yes, they still call it ice hockey), there are currently 4,300 registered winter season players in Australia although that number swells to around 6,000 in summer.
The AIHL also is growing as a spectator sport. Currently there are eight teams nationally, which includes up to 25 Canadian import players spread across the teams.
Martens said AIHL grew from 76,000 ticket holders in 2016 to 94,500 in 2017 and they believe they can crack 100,000 attendees in 2018.
ON THE ICE
The Discover Hockey program consists of eight on-ice, skill development sessions the first of which focuses on skating and, most importantly, learning to stop.
Thrown into the mix are two off-ice orientation classroom sessions that focus on the rules of the game and “positioning chalk talk.” Once it’s all said and done, the teams will play four NCHL games against the other beginner teams who have taken part in the winter sessions in Edmonton.
“The beginners who go through the program and fill up the bottom of the league are the most passionate of hockey players because they just love everything about it,” Perraton said.
“The guys who have played hockey all of their lives take it for granted. The beginners get to live it and they make the most of it because they missed out on the hockey thing.
“It’s pretty addictive once you get started.”
The guys who have played hockey all of their lives take it for granted. The beginners get to live it and they make the most of it ...