Rink Rat – 1973

I was playing in my final year of Youth Hockey eligibility (there used to be a level above Midgets called Juveniles – nowadays 17/18 year olds would play Junior Hockey). My W.H.Y.H. team usually had a game on Saturday nights from 9:00-10:00pm. At 11:00pm a private group of guys which included a few W.H. and Pembroke Coaches - Leo & Frank Runney, Tom Schmidt, Ray Larosee – skated in a pickup game which technically ended at 12:00, but because nobody had the ice-time afterwards, often went until 1:00am or later. Occasionally they would be short a few skaters and let a couple of us kids play with them so they could have two full lines per team. Before long, it became a regular thing and I (and sometimes Eric and/or David as well) would be sticking around after my team game to skate a “Double-Header”. By 1:30am just about everybody had had enough and gone home, but a few die-hards just loved the idea of having free open ice and would stick around – skating and stickhandling, practicing slapshots and backhanders, inventing 1-on-1 or 2-on-1 drills until sunrise. Maybe if we were lucky, somebody with a car and a few spare dollars had also stuck around and had made a donut run. Around 6:00am my team-mates would start returning for our regular morning practice hour and I’d sit down to rest a bit. From 6:30-7:30am we practiced, at 7:40 I would go out again to participate in the opening 15 minutes of skating drills with the Bantams, do it again at 8:50 with the Peewee’s and at 10:00 with the Squirts and once more at 11:10 with the Mites. At this point, having been in my skates and on the ice for the better part of the past 13-1/2 hours I would have to decide whether I was done or if I should stay around and help coach the Instructionals from 12:20-1:20. At either of the “I’m done” points, I would go home, eat lunch, go to bed, wake up for supper, and then call it an early night. On one occasion I opted to go dirtbike riding after lunch, but soon realized that my reflexes weren’t too sharp and recognized that I might be tempting fate and risking a foolish injury – so I decided that bed was indeed the better afternoon option.
Needless to say, I was in the best skating shape of my life in the spring of ’73.