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There needs to be more adult hockey options

Garth McLennan

Editor in Chief

 

he end of minor hockey has

been a period of time which I

am now fully immersed in but
have been dreading for years. For a while
now, I’ve been looking down the road
towards the time when my run with the
New Westminster Royals various “C”
teams comes to a close while at the same
time been trying to figure out just exactly
where to go with my not-so-fledgling
hockey career after my affiliation with
the New Westminster Minor Hockey
Association come to a conclusion.

Well, the hockey season began over
a month ago now and I still haven’t
found a place to play. The problem, you
see, isn’t a lack of options. After all, this
is Canada, and there are innumerable
adult recreational leagues and teams that
are always looking for new players at a
variety of levels.

The issue I’ve discovered is that out
of all these leagues (there are too many
to count through 8-Rinks alone), not one
of them, not a single one, offers an adult
hockey league with hitting in the game.
All of them are non-contact.

Now, maybe I’m being a bit picky,
but to me, hockey without hitting
just isn’t the same game. I’ve played
competitive hockey every year for
the last eight years before this one,
and every single one of those seasons

involved hitting. I understand that

it can be an insurance nightmare for
facilities to provide fast-paced leagues
where full body contact is permitted,
but I have to say I was surprised to find
that the only way I can play hockey
with hitting beyond the age of 20 in
British Columbia is if I’m skating for
the Vancouver Canucks, the Abbotsford
Heat or the Victoria Salmon Kings, and
to be perfectly honest, the odds of that
happening any time soon are a little slim.

What B.C. needs in the future is a
unified league, much like the one that
currently and efficiently ‘governs the
entirety of minor hockey in the province.
After all, while I don’t have any problem
with offering a non-hitting option for
players at any age (minor hockey has
a league without hitting), there’s no
concrete reason for not having a full-
contact league for adults. I mean, I just
spent the last eight years or so learning
not only how to hit, but how to be hit
as well, so following basic logic here,
shouldn’t I know how to play the game
safely? Why can’t an operation like
minor hockey, only for adults, be run,
with waivers and all? What’s the problem
there?

I don’t think they’d want for
players. Offer a full-contact circuit with
defined age and skill levels, exactly like
minor hockey. Heck, while it’s unlikely
to happen, you could just create an
extension of age groups through the
current organizations. It works brilliantly
in lacrosse, so why not hockey?

 

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