I live in Baltimore, Maryland, about an hour north of Washington, DC. Baltimore hasn’t had a hockey team since our AHL team, the Baltimore Skipjacks, left for Portland in 1993. I was 14 years old.

I’ve always loved sports and was drawn to ice hockey in my early teens because of the speed and physical contact…and for some reason, I really wanted to play a sport where I had to wear a helmet. But hockey is an expensive sport and as a kid, I just wasn’t able to pay for equipment and league fees myself, and my mom wasn’t particularly thrilled about funding this hobby or driving me to a rink at 5am because that’s when ice time was the cheapest. I ended up playing field hockey throughout high school, which is not exactly a substitute but is still really, really fun. I was pretty good. Many years later, I helped found Baltimore’s first roller derby league: Charm City Roller Girls. I didn’t realize at first, but there are so many similarities between roller derby and ice hockey, the least of which is that they are both played on skates. I began to realize that I loved roller derby for the same reason I was initially drawn to hockey, and playing roller derby rekindled my love of the sport. So I decided to start a hockey blog because it’s 2009, and that’s what people do, right?

Throughout this blog, I would like to bring a somewhat different take on the sport. I will leave salary caps and waiver discussion to the experts. I will likely leave the more complicated skill discussions on those who actually play the sport (although I am in the process of getting ready to take lessons myself). While I do intend to talk about those things now and again, I find myself a bit more interested in the psychology of hockey and, by extension, those who become fans and those who become players. I feel like there is so much to say about the connection between how the game is played, how the AHL and NHL work, with why people become fans: beer fans, hardcore fans, “puck bunnies,” and so on.

I hope people find this blog interesting, and a departure from many other (usually well-written) hockey blogs which often focus on the same thing–albeit with different approaches and opinions.

As I write this introduction, the Max & Pace calculations on my fantasy team (Team Burrito!), show the regular season is nearly 20% over. I hope I can add something useful and interesting to the hockey blogosphere (I absolutely hate the word ‘blogosphere’) for the remaining 80% of the regular season and continue to do so through the Stanley Cup playoffs. Thank you for reading; I hope you enjoy my blog.

This is a work in progress, clearly. Useful content forthcoming. In the meantime, have you ever wondered what Dany Heatley is REALLY thinking?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.