Jordan Cripps
Sports Editor ;

I consider myself an athlete with a disability
(although I must admit that my athletic side has
recently been on hiatus). I was born needing to use
a wheelchair. This has had an impact on the sports
that I am able to play. From an early age, I developed
an interest in hockey, and because I wasn’t able to
play ice hockey I settled on playing street hockey
almost every day, developing a strong wrist shot and
an uncanny ability to annoy opposition goalies.
Eventually, I realized that I needed to find more of
an outlet for my interest in hockey. I had a couple of
friends who told me about this sport that they had
discovered. It was called sledge hockey. From the
first time I slid out on the ice, 1 was hooked.

Sledge hockey was created during the 1970’s when
a Swedish hockey team was involved in a plane
crash, leaving many of the players paralysed. When
they realized that they missed the game, they tried to
come up with some way to play. Someone came up
with the idea of attaching skate blades to the bottom
of a toboggan and the game of sledge hockey was
born. Players sat on the sledges (as they became
known) and used sawed-off hockey sticks with sharp
picks at the bottom to move around the ice.

For me, it was a revelation. It had all of the key
attributes of hockey. It was fast-paced, competitive

Don't like seeing white space? _ Neither do we. We would like to sales as 5 closely t
College students, but to do this, we need some help. I would like to encourage anyone who has an interest in sports
(or if you don't, tell people why) to submit their stories to me. If anyone attends a Royal's game and would be int
ested in submitting a write-up Please contact me. I would like to send out a special invitation to any Royal's athl
who would be interested in writing about their experiences as a college athlete to get in touch with me. Finally
you've got anything you would like to say that falls into the category of sports or recreation, please do so. Artic
be submitted to me at desportseditor@yahoo.ca. For more information on submissions es please see pi

 

and, most importantly, there was an abundance of
violence. For the first time, I could pretend that I
was in the NHL, a dream shared by almost every
Canadian kid. The feeling I had as I first skated
around the rink was one of total elation and I felt
like I had found a place where I truly belonged. As I
watched my teammates flying around me, I mar-
velled as one of my friends fired a puck into the top
corner of the net. Snaring a puck with my stick, I
decided to take my first shot on goal. It went about
2 feet and came to a complete stop. How could he
have done that? Why couldn't I? I grabbed a puck
and fired it again and again, willing the damn puck
to rise off the ice. It didn’t.

Earlier, I said that one of the things that interested
me immediately about sledge hockey were the vio-
lent collisions that happened with alarming regular-
ity. In one of my first scrimmages I was chasing a
puck that had been shot into the corner, trying to
beat the defenseman to the puck. I had forgotten
that this particular player had yet to master the skill
of stopping his sledge and quickly found myself
driven face first into the boards. I wasn’t hurt; rather,
I felt that I had lived another dream, taking the first
bodycheck of what I imagined would be a long
career in sledge hockey.

 

fi Plea For Submissions

 

 

Jordan Cripps

  

 

possible the attitude of Dot

 

Unfortunately, I was never very good. I did man-
age to occasionally imitate that player who had lift-
ed the puck into the top corner of the net. My
crowning achievement was a game in which five dif-
ferent pucks bounced off me and into the goal. The
goalie I was shooting on was my dad so maybe he let
a few of them go in, or maybe one of my shots was
the one responsible for breaking one of his fingers.
Although I enjoyed the game for what it was, I think
that it also allowed me to live the childhood dream
of possibly making it to the NHL.

li A

Jordan melting the ice

 

 

     
   
   

 

 

 

 

 

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