The Beer Leaguer

Where Do I Put All This Stuff?

• The Beer Leaguer • Season 1 • Episode 14

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Hey, everybody, Beer Leaguer here with another episode of the Beer Leaguer Podcast. In this episode, we're gonna talk all about gear, but not picking gear, or my normal ranting topic about cleaning your gear. Where do you put your stuff, you know? Between games, during the summer, if you're not playing, what do you do with all that stuff? I think gear takes up a lot of space, you know? And as we talked about, with cleaning gear always and will continue to rant on it forever, you don't want to just leave it sitting in your bag in the back of your car all summer long. So, what do you do with all that stuff? So, that's what we're going to talk about this episode. What to do with all your gear, best ways and different ways to store your stuff, and why you should store it one way or another. So, I'm going to break things up into how to store stuff at home, versus how to store stuff if you're away at a tournament or an event or something like that. So, one that's more permanent setup and one that's more, kind of take it with you and temporary set of things. One, you always want it to be a way to help get your gear dry. That's the most important thing. So, that means not leaving it in your bag. You know, unless you have one of these super ventilated bags, or one of these bags that's out there that has like fans in it and stuff like that. Unless you have something like that. But honestly, most of those ventilated bags don't really ventilate that well. But get your gear dry and also get rid of the stuff that causes smell and infections and all that gross things. So, those are the two big things that you need to do. So, how do you do that? One, getting it dry. You just need to get air on your stuff. We'll talk about that with all these things. That can be just taking the stuff out and laying it out. Also, that can be getting something that actually pushes air through things. So, box fans, oscillating fans. I'm a big fan of boot dryers. I think those are super, super handy. They always have them at places. They have them at camping stores and things like that, and some big box stores when it gets close to winter time. But I've seen them go for real cheap at Costco here in the US. Aldi's has had them the last couple of years as it gets closer to winter. And those things are great because they just are a little place, a little stand, a little thing. You put your skates on, put your gloves on, pushes air through it. Works wonderful because your skates and your gloves are usually things of the sweatiest and the grossest to have. I think those are good. And then how to get rid of all that gross bacteria and stuff. Just putting it out in the sun helps. I know people that throw their stuff in their pools because chlorine helps kill the crap that's on there and it does not degrade the plastics unless you leave it in the pool for hours on end, it'll be fine. And there's all kinds of sprays you can do on there. All different kinds of stuff, commercial things or just stuff you can buy. But that's more for cleaning your gear. We have an episode about cleaning your gear. I'll leave a link to that episode in the show notes. So what can you do with your gear? Where do you store it? Where do you put it up? What do you do with it? So if you're at home, the first kind of thing that comes to mind is if you have like a locker, there's a lot of people out there, especially for kids. I don't know as much for adults have these things. But I guess if your kids have them, maybe you want them to. You can get nice. It looks like a locker, you know, it's like a locker room locker. It's a little locker stall that has the hooks and stuff behind you and, you know, shelves on top and stuff. And you get something like that to just kind of have a nice set place for your gear because the other nice thing with a lot of these setups, especially the home setups is not just that it gets your gear out and gets it aired out, but it helps when you're taking the stuff out and then putting stuff back in your bag is you notice if, hey, this hook normally has, you know, my gloves on it. I'm missing a glove or you put all your stuff back in your bag and you're getting ready to go to your game, but you say, oh, my helmet's still sitting up there because you know where it is. That's also a big help for these things is helps you keep track of your gear. And so we don't leave something behind, you know, because I think we've all done that. We've all left gear behind and it sucks. But that's number one is those lockers. There's tons of ways you can build them yourself. They're usually not super fancy ones. There are fancy ones you can go by, you know, and get like nameplates and everything if you really want to go next level and have kind of a ridiculous setup. You could totally do that. That's the thing, but you don't have to. Next up is clothing racks or clothing shelving units. That's the thing that a lot of people use. You can just get like a rolling rack for clothes. Usually they have them with like double bars and they're adjustable heights, and you can just hang your gear on that, roll it wherever you need it to be. Like if it's in the basement or something, you can roll it so it's out of the way. It's super open. Put a box fan underneath it or something. Good to go. It's great. Pretty convenient thing. Doesn't take up a ton of space for you if you have something like a basement or a spare room to put that stuff in. People also I see online a lot of times buy, and these are cheap ones that they get off Amazon because you don't need a really great thing for this, like insanely sturdy because hockey gear is not super heavy, but like covered clothing racks. They're just like shelves that have cloth covers on them, and you just put a box fan underneath it, and that becomes a permanent home for your hockey gear. That's something I see a lot that people do. They have a little corner somewhere that they can keep their gear in, and every shelf is a thing. So you, again, keep track of all your stuff. Kind of going in descending order of how large and big of a space taker this stuff is. Next up, in a similar thing is there's a brand out there called Rocket Dryers that are like a little gear tree that you hang your gear off of. They have a cover on it. They have a built-in fan and heater thing that kind of sits in there, and does all that. It's pretty compact. It's much smaller than kind of these large clothing rack things. They're kind of like cheap knockoff ones that are used just for drying your clothes, not specifically your hockey gear that you can also try doing. But a lot of people like those because they are somewhat portable, too. So you can take them with you to like a tournament or something like that. If you're going away, you can also set your gear up on them overnight, have it dry your stuff, and then collapse it, throw anything back in your bag. So that way you're only up taking up space overnight to dry your gear, instead of having something that's kind of permanently sitting out there. Kind of the last, I think, home, particularly home thing that you would use is a gear tree. I think everyone's seen these like PVC gear trees. I have an article up on thebeerleaguer.com that is old. It is probably 10 years old of me building a gear tree. It cost me going up to the home center, buying a couple of pieces of PVC pipe, some connectors, and just make a little, kind of looks like a little mannequin almost, mannequin skeleton, I guess, that you just put all your gear on. And for me, it was a way to hang my gear up to dry it. But for me, more importantly, is it was very obvious what gear was on there and what wasn't. So when I throw everything in my bag, I'm not leaving something behind. I used to just leave my gear laid out on the floor. That works fine for drying it. But I would forget stuff because something would get kicked to the corner or get behind something. And all of a sudden, you know, I forgot a glove or forgot a shin pad or something like that. And I wouldn't realize I couldn't see it. Whereas this way, everything is kind of really in your face. So yeah, those gear tree is really nice. Like I said, you can make them yourself and get them. They also make nice ones that you can buy at a lot of the hot key stores. They have like nice metal and plastic ones and they're folding and things like that. They are more portable and a little fancier set up. But you can also just get PVC one. And if you don't glue it all together, you can make it pretty collapsible and it's pretty lightweight and easy to take around with you. But tons and tons of plans for those online to do. And that's probably one of the cheapest kind of bigger option things you can get for it. Like I said, it doesn't have to be PVC. It can be kind of anything, but that's usually what people use because it's the easiest to put together versus having to cut pieces of wood and screw it together. Or I guess if you're a welder, you could make one out of metal if you just have stock lying around for it. But usually you see those for PVC things. But I will put a link to the article I did of how I measured mine out and how I built mine in the show. Notes. It's more made for taking out with you, but totally would work for at home options, is gear hangers. So things that you just hang your gear with as a lack of a better way to put it. Something that I have mentioned on this podcast before is the Udi. The Udi, I don't know how you're supposed to say it. U-T-T-Y, they have a website, theutty.com. And basically what they are is a long kind of nylon strap that has hooks to hang your gear on. So it's made to like hang really like on the back of a door or something like that. So you could totally make that your permanent gear hanging setup. And you get the niceness of having like a gear tree or something, but it's smaller. And really, you could just kind of take that whole thing and just drop it into your bag really easily. But it's also something you can take with you if you're going away to play hockey somewhere else and really easily hang that up in like a hotel room or something. Another thing you can do is get something that looks like an actual hanger. This is what I actually have. It's called from hang your gear.com. Again, links for everything in the show notes and at the beerleaguer.com. And this actually just looks like a really big heavy duty clothes hanger that has just straps to hang off of it. They have little clips and hooks and it looks kind of weird. Looks I thought it was kind of complicated first to look at it. This is actually what I use and it's really neat thing. And what it looks, what it is, is it's like a heavy duty looking really bulky clothes hanger that you just, you know, hang your pants on by, you know, I have spenders, so it's really easy to hang your pants on there. So you hang your pants on there somehow or use the little hooks or clips on it on the, like, shoulder parts of the hanger, I guess. What would actually like hold up your shirt normally, put shoulder pads on there, and then use the rest of the little hooks and clips and hang up your gloves and your shin pads off of that and your elbow pads, because it's got a bunch of those. And you can just hang that, you know, on the back of a door. You can hang that in a closet. What I've done when I've gone to tournaments and use this is hang that up, put it in a closet, because I usually don't put stuff in the closet, and put a fan underneath it. Just get a little, bring a little fan with you, put it underneath it, run, blow it up through there for the night. Super easy way to hang your gear out when you're, you know, at a hotel or something. It doesn't take up any extra room, really, unless you're hanging a bunch of stuff in your closet. You can also hang it, like, in the bathroom or wherever, because it's just a hanger. But I really like those. The other thing that they have out there that is really cool, and this to me is one of those, why didn't I think of this? Because it's the simplest, ridiculous idea that is just what I see as I saw it. I was like, oh, man, that's such a good idea. It's something called dry stick. And what these are is these are plastic kind of long hooks that all they do is they slide over your hockey stick, slide over the shaft of the stick, and you can kind of put them at whatever heights you want. And then you can either just hang your gear off of them or just put it on like the little hook that's there. So yeah, it's such a ridiculous thing because it turns your hockey stick into a drying rack for like most of your stuff. I don't think it would really, you know, not really going to do much for your pants, I don't think, on there, but for kind of everything else, you can just hang it all on your hockey stick, which you have with you anyways if you have your hockey gear. And so you can just kind of lean it up somewhere. I guess you could put it and put it up on something if you wanted to, to kind of have it overhead in a place. But it's such a like little easy and super portable thing to take with you that you could totally use that at home, and you'll have your gear drying in the corner off your stick or travel with it, keep it in your bag, because these hooks are not very big because they just have to hold your, you know, like gloves or your shin pads or whatever, which again, don't weigh a ton. So they're just little plastic hooks that basically go over your hockey stick and just hang your stuff off of them. Super, super cool idea. Probably if I didn't have my other gear hanger, this is definitely what I would be using to have those with me because you can just kind of always have it with you for hanging your stuff up. So you could use that at home or, you know, on the road with you and hang all your things really easily. Also, more specifically, if you're away, so this isn't really for at home stuff, but if you're away and looking for ways to kind of store your gear, you know, in a hotel room or an Airbnb or whatever you're at, obviously you can use the hotel closet. You know, they have hangers, usually hangers have little pants clips on them. So you can usually hang up all your stuff in a closet, especially if you're in a room by yourself, if you're in a room with multiple people, you might not have enough hangers to hang up everything, but hang up what you can with those. There is also the upside down ironing board trick that you can do where pretty much every hotel room at this point, and honestly, most Airbnbs, I would think to have an ironing board, just take the ironing board, you know, kind of open it up, raise it up as if you were going to use it, but flip it upside down so the feet are sticking up into the air, and you have a bunch of things you can hang gear off of. You know, you can use the feet in any sort of way that they have it and just kind of figure out a way to manipulate that. It's a bunch of points to hang gear off of and let it air out more. I mean, it's shocking how quickly hockey gear airs out and dries out if you just don't have it sitting in your bag, and you just kind of have it up off the ground a little bit. Usually airs out pretty quickly for things. The other big one, and me and Mason talked about this on our traveling to play beer league hockey episode, is if you stay at an Airbnb, I guess technically this could also work at a hotel, but if you stay at Airbnb, something to look for is if they have a driveway or a deck that looks like a place you could put your gear out on. If it's out in the sun, that helps, because sunlight is a great thing for disinfecting gear and obviously dries it out a lot better. But also you don't want to have it necessarily sitting on the ground and get creepy crawlies in your gear, because that's not pleasant if you go have your gear nicely dried out and then you go put it on for the next game and you have ants in your gloves or something. That's not a great experience. But that's something you can totally do is a deck or a driveway to just lay your gear out, so you don't have to hang it up on anything. That's a great, great way to do it. See that a lot of these tournaments where you play multiple games in a day, you'll see a lot of people on, I don't know what you call them in parking lots, the tree lawns that are around parking lots. You'll see people have their gear on there, see people hang their gear up, try and hang it up in trees that are in parking lots, which usually doesn't work too well because it gets some wind maybe, but you're usually completely out of the sun, so that's not helpful at all. I see a lot of people if they have trucks or some, you know, sometimes in cars, a lot of times in trucks, you'll see them kind of just lay their gear out in the truck bed, hoping to get it sitting in the sun. I've seen people do that on their cars too, which kind of looks funny to do that. But that's another option you have with it. That's, you know, if you're going to stay at the place and not go anywhere and you're, you know, stuck at a rink for like an early game and like a middle of the day game or something, that's usually your only option is to have your stuff out. But that's kind of the biggest thing is what I'm trying to get here is get your stuff out for it so it airs out and dries out. But do it in a way so you don't forget your things. I think every tournament that I go to, you always see people scrambling to put their stuff in their bags, because they got to run in to go play. And everybody always is, if you stay there, it seems like you're always last minute getting your stuff together. And there's always people that they always forget something outside. You know, are they like, I thought I grabbed all my stuff. The other four guys are grabbing their stuff. And the last person is going, hey, somebody left a glove. Hey, somebody left a sock. Hey, somebody left like that. So that's to me, that's a big thing to try and avoid with that is not just get your gear aired out and dry, but somewhat organized so you're not leaving things all over the place. And any of these things will help that anything that you have a set place for and you get used to it will help that you don't need to go get the really nice fancy lockers to have hooks for everything. You can get something like those dry sticks and just kind of know, hey, you'll see on that and you're taking your stick with you. So as long as all your gear is on there, you're taking it all with you, can't not take something that's there. So you can go that route as well. Hopefully, this was something helpful. Hopefully, this is something that people are doing. Hope you guys are actually not just leaving your gear in your bag all the time. I know some of you are and that's still disgusting. But hopefully, this has given you some ideas for reasons to not do that and alternatives leaving your stuff in your bag. Links to all these things, all the products and stuff that I've talked about specifically, links to all that stuff in the show notes, links to previous podcasts that I mentioned, everything, all those also in the show notes and at thebeerleaguer.com. That's going to wrap it up. As always everybody, thanks a lot for listening. Any kind of likes, shares, subscribes, they're appreciated, help the show out. Also, if you have suggestions for the show, leave a comment either on the YouTube channel, on beerleaguer.com, or you can also text the show. That's in the show notes as well. You can shoot a text to the show. And let me know if you have a show idea or something else you'd want me to go more in depth on or anything like that. Love to hear from you. All right, thanks a lot, everybody. Catch you in the next one.

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Mike / Roz / The Beer Leaguer

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