Home-ice advantage so close to home
“Home-ice advantage” will have a meaning much, much closer to home for Jessie Gregory when the 2024 National Para Hockey Championships get underway next week in Port Colborne.
Ontario is hosting the seven-team tournament taking place May 16-19 at Vale Centre in Port Colborne, and Gregory, a 39-year-old mother of two and a goaltender on the provincial team, lives just down the road in Wainfleet, a little more than a very long slapshot away from the twin-pad.
Gregory, a school bus driver for Student Transportation of Canada, last year settled for the silver medal in a loss to the United States at the world championship in Green Bay, Wis. She calls the upcoming tournament “the Stanley Cup for provincial teams.”
As the host province’s last line of defence against teams from as far east as New Brunswick and as far west as British Columbia, Gregory expects the competition to be packed with pressure and her stomach filled with butterflies.
“I get nervous no matter who I play for, even for practice I get nervous. In a big setting like this, I’m going to have a lot of people here I know,” she said. “A lot of the community knows me. I want to perform my best and make sure that I am playing to my potential in games that I get to play.
“That’s a lot of stress and pressure, but good stress and pressure.”
In 2008, the Brantford native was hit by a car as a pedestrian. She broke her back, injured her neck, and suffered a brain injury.
“I just started walking about five years ago.”
She began playing para hockey about a year later. Gregory remembered watching her niece play hockey at a rink near Brantford.
“Para hockey was on before and I said, ‘What is this?’ They saw me in my chair and they asked, ‘You want to play hockey?’ ”
She didn’t think she would ever play hockey again, however. For one thing, Gregory didn’t consider herself “disabled.”
“I think that was my mentality. Mine was an accident, and a lot of these kids are born with their disabilities.”
She began playing at age three and couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t competing.
“I thought I would never play hockey again. I played every sport growing up, but my two main ones were hockey and fastball,” she said. “I knew nothing but sports, school, or work.”
Para hockey changed everything for Gregory.
“It changed my world because I was in a dark place after my accident. Everything changed. Everything stopped,” she recalled. “I couldn’t do anything. Even the basic necessities, I had to have assistance.”
She began para hockey as a position player “but when they found out I was a goalie when I played standup before my accident, they asked, ‘Hey, you want to try net? We need a goalie.’ ”
Initially, Gregory didn’t want to play goal, but she was “right back into it” and soon played a game between the pipes.
“I’m a goalie at heart, but I like playing out. It’s kind of fun. I get to hit people,” she confided with a chuckle. “You really can’t do that in net, right?”
While the competitive juices began flowing almost immediately, getting used to playing hockey while strapped to a sled and using picks to propel herself across the ice took some time.
“It was really hard at first because it’s totally different from standup when you’re in a sled,” she said. “Just learning to balance yourself is hard. Just moving requires a lot of upper-body strength.”
However, by that time she had been confined to a wheelchair for a year.
“I had gained a lot of upper-body strength.”
She had only been playing para hockey for three months when she was invited to Team Canada tryouts. While she had played three or four games by then, she made the team.
“That was pretty crazy. I was still learning.”
For Gregory “playing out” in para hockey was much harder than learning how to play goal.
“I could not stay upright. If someone touched me, I fell over,” she recalled. “I couldn’t do the puck, but if I was in net it was good.
“It was a little hard to move because I was still learning — you move with your hands, not your feet, now.”
Gregory is getting better when it comes to having a selective memory and forgetting about surrendering soft goals. The “majority of the time” she can move on and focus on the next shot.
“Once in a while, no. But my mental side of the game has gotten a lot better,” she said. “I’ve actually been working on that over the last five years.
“I do a lot of mental training with hockey.”
The key to playing goal in para hockey is “angles.”
“Just making sure you’re in the right position. Because we are so low, we don’t cover as much of the net as when you’re standing up,” she said. “A lot of the higher stuff is hard and at this level, there are a lot of really good shots.
“There are a lot of high shots which are really hard for goalies.
“Our arms don’t move that way, unfortunately.”
She likened being hit in para hockey to being “hit by a freight train.”
“And the open-ice hits? They
hurt,” Gregory said. “We’re so low when we hit the boards.”
While the glass has “play” and absorbs the energy of upper-body hits in standup hockey, the boards have little give in the para version.
“When we get hit and we’re at the boards, it hurts. But I think these guys hit harder than in standup,” she told Dave Johnson of The Welland Tribune. “The speed from some of these players is just out of this world. I don’t know how they’re that fast.”
Gregory coaches T-ball but can’t coach hockey because she is not allowed on the ice.
“I can coach from the sideline but I am not allowed on the ice with my sled which is kind of sad. I get it but it would be nice to be able to coach hockey again.”
Gregory and wife Candice have two children — daughter Logan, 5, and year-and-a-half-old son, Jayden.