The Beer Leaguer

Summer Hockey Activities

• Season 1 • Episode 17

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It’s summer here in North America and that means, it’s hot and kids are out school, but more importantly that means a lot less hockey going on. Lots of rinks close and melt their ice temporarily, some trade in ice hockey for roller, and in many places there isn’t any hockey to be found. So what can a beer leaguer do in the summer to scratch that hockey itch?

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Welcome to another The Beer Leaguer podcast. It's summertime here in North America, and that means, well, it's hot out. Kids are out of school. But more importantly, that means a lot less hockey is going on. A lot of rinks close, a lot of rinks melt their ice temporarily around now. Some of them trade in ice hockey for roller hockey. So what is a beer leaguer to do in their summertime to scratch that hockey itch? Well, that's what today's podcast is all about. Summer hockey. Well, first off, if you're looking for stuff to do in the summer that will help your hockey game out when fall comes around and you start playing again, honestly, one of the biggest things to do that I think really probably doesn't get thought of is just resting, getting away from hockey. Hockey's tiring. A lot of people play hockey multiple nights a week, when it's going on. And hey, beer leaguers, not always the best and most in shape people that there are, so a couple weeks of rest isn't the worst idea in the world. So that's always an option. You know, another option to take is you could try working out and doing some hockey specific workouts for things that will help you for hockey. You know, maybe improve the cardio finally, or working on building up arm strength for your shots or something like that. You could do the Happy Gilmore thing and go to a batting cage and just stand there and get pummeled by the baseballs to practice for shot blocking, because I know shot blocking is a big deal for all the beer leaguers out there. Now, maybe a little bit more realistic option is to do some kind of recovery work on yourself while you're playing no hockey or maybe just less hockey in the summer. And this is all stuff that, you know, totally you can do by yourself or great things to do, you know, with your partner if you're looking for something to do. I'm talking about things like getting a massage, you know, or even get one of those massage guns. Those things are great. And learning how to actually use it, you know, look up YouTube videos and stuff and learn how to actually properly use that so you're not just having it jab you all over the place and go, eh, good enough. Do some yoga or Pilates or something like that and learn how to properly stretch so you don't get hurt as much and you're not as achy the next day. That makes a huge, huge difference. You know, maybe actually go to a yoga class. I know, sounds crazy. I'm a huge, huge fan of that. And I will say any yoga that you do, the thing that you're gonna find is the super tightest because I think it's just a universal across the board for everybody that plays hockey, and especially anybody that plays hockey and sits at a desk all day, your hips, your hips are gonna be tight. So that is the thing to look at. Next big idea of stuff, your gear. I talk about gear a lot on here and taking care of it, but this is a great time to give your gear a thorough once over. Do the clean it, inspect it, fix it, replace it. That whole thing, go through all your gear, check it out, see if there's stuff that you need to fix, see if there's stuff they need to replace, just go through it and kinda check up on it, tighten up all the screws on everything. There's a whole podcast I did about going through this that goes through an entire checklist of what you should check, what pieces of gear, what to check, what to check on everything, and how to do that. This is a great time to do that, to sit down and spend an hour or two on a Saturday and go through all this stuff. Another thing, if you're looking for something to do, maybe when you go on vacation and you're doing something else to relax around, you can read hockey things. There is all kinds of great hockey books out there. Possibly a podcast coming, talking specifically about hockey books. There's tons of hockey biographies. There's like the Gretzky, 99 Stories of the Game. There's the super famous Ken Dryden, The Game biography. Michael Ruzioni has The Making of a Miracle. That's a big one. There's books out there about playing hockey, you know, learning tips and tricks and different things about playing hockey or mindset for playing hockey. A couple that I know off the top of my head that I really like are Play Better Hockey, Hockey the NHL Wave Win with Defense and one called Hockey Tough. Then there's some just great hockey history, hockey story books out there. There's one called Midnight Hockey, which is kind of all about beer league, really. That's a real great one. There's another one out there that's called Take Your Eyes Off the Puck, and it's all about kind of what to watch when you're watching hockey and all the kind of things that happen away from the puck, which is a great thing for learning how to watch hockey and learning how to appreciate the game, but can help you learning how to play hockey or get better at hockey to tell you things to look out for when you're watching or things that when you're playing that you might not have thought of. So that's a great thing. And all these, I'm a big audio book fan. Great things if you're driving somewhere for a vacation or have some long summer trips going on, or you're sitting out by a pool or something like that, whatever people do on vacations nowadays. Books are always a big thing. So audio books, actual physical books, all these things. Great things to check out there. Other things you can do is kind of some off-season hockey training stuff. You could do shooting. I have a series that I'm starting, coming out here about shooting. I've been shooting a whole lot of pucks here in the summer, trying to get better at it, and talking about all the different ways, videotaping yourself. And when I say videotape, you can just use your phone. Just take a video with your phone. Any kind of modern phone does really good slow-mo and stuff, and you can just record yourself shooting a couple of times, shooting a couple of different shots, and look at it and see what you're doing, and try and get better, and do some more, and just keep rinse and repeat through that. Another thing is, of course, you can do stick handling and stuff. You can get green biscuits and zero pucks and things like that. You can get the tiles and shoot off tiles, or just shoot around in your driveway. All kinds of accessories and cool things for that that you can do for five minutes a day, for an hour, whatever. I mean, kids do it. No reason that beer leaguers can't do that. Rollerblade around. Rollerblading, not 100% the same as ice skating, obviously, but it's close. It's a good way to get ice skating type of workout. You can get really fancy, get Marsblades, or get really low tech and get the cheapest kind of rollerblade you can. And just go skating around, go to a park or something, do that, or get a stick out and go up and down. If you got a large driveway or if you have a street that doesn't have a ton of traffic, go be out in the street like kids do. And honestly, the last thing, this is what they always say for people that are beginning to play hockey, play hockey video games. You know, it was the last time you picked up an NHL game. I mean, they're fun to play, fun to play with your buddies. You can play online and stuff like that, which is fun to do. And hey, while you're doing it, you learn. You learn how to play stuff, especially if you go through like their be a player stuff that they do on those things. They kind of coach you up on what they want you to do, which is actually what you're supposed to do in real life. So those are a fun thing to do. It's a fun goofy thing to play, but it's also something that helps you out a little bit, learning different aspects of the game. Pick a position that you're not. If you normally play forward, why not play defense in the game and kind of see how that works? And again, you can play with, if you have kids or something, you can do that. You can play with your hockey team. Get online and play with them and stuff. And it's fun. Obviously, another one that is I think super obvious, but maybe not to point out there is, catch up on different how-to and tutorial videos and stuff like that online. There is so much hockey content out there in video format nowadays. Just like 10 years ago, there was only a handful of channels that did things. Whereas now there is so many that anything you're interested in learning how to do, you can probably find a couple dozen videos that break it down different ways for you and explain stuff in all sorts of different ways. So hopefully one of those ways clicks with you. You wanna learn how to do mohawks? Well, now you can probably find 30, 40 videos on how to do mohawks. And they're all gonna explain it slightly differently. And hopefully one of those explanations is the one that you watch and go, oh, okay, now I get how to do it. If you're looking for some good social media accounts to follow all of the Beer Leaguer shorts episodes, I throw in a social media account to follow, oddly enough. And they're pretty much all things that have tutorials and lessons and stuff like that on there for something different, for a different perspective for it to go through and check it out. I love when I find a new one of those channels to go through and look at all the different videos. I don't watch every video usually, but a lot of times I'll look at, start watching almost every single one if it's a good channel and just kind of see what they have to say because they do say things in a different way and different aspects, you know, click with you. Same reason as if you have different coaches and teachers and stuff like that. Some of them say different things. They click with you differently, pick up different little nuances and stuff like that. Totally worth watching. And the nice thing is a lot of times these videos, they're usually pretty short. A lot of them are pretty short. So you're not sitting down watching, you know, a 30 minute skating video. It's usually, hey, here's how to do, you know, forward crossovers. And it's a three, four, five minute video. So that's another thing to do. If you're looking for something to do that, again, helps you get better with stuff. Now, all this I should say, I have links to everything I talk about and links for all these similar kind of things in the show notes and at thebeerleaguer.com as always. Another thing, you really just got to scratch that hockey itch. Go watch some summer hockey. There is some, there's not tons of it out there, but there is summer leagues that play out there. I'm not saying summer beer leagues. I mean, you can go watch that if you want, but there is summer semi-prone pro leagues. I've talked on a bunch of these episodes before about the beauty league up in Minnesota. There's also one called Cap City Elite. It's a very similar kind of thing down in Columbus where it's a lot of current pros, minor league guys, guys that are living in the area from the area and stuff like that that are playing in a kind of modified NHL format for stuff. And the great thing about these summer leagues is they are usually dirt cheap, if not free to go to the games, which is great and also a great thing to take your kids to if you want to take them to hockey, but you don't want to pay NHL prices or even like AHL prices for it. There you go. Take them to hockey for real cheap. They're usually at much smaller venues, so that's kind of cool. You're a lot more up close, and cheap tickets doesn't mean that you're in the nosebleeds. Cheap tickets usually means kind of first come, first serve for getting there, which is nice. And then the games. The games are usually a lot of fun, because one, the games are usually faster paced because they have a lot of younger kids. They have a lot of kids that are either in, you know, like a junior level or just out of college or something like that. So you have a lot of really fast guys that are doing it. But also because it's guys kind of getting ready for training camps, like there is NHL guys and AHL guys and stuff like that. They're getting ready for camps. So they're trying a lot of stuff. This is where you're going to see them, like, try like goofy moves and different things like that, because it is like the most probably high stakes, the way they can try this stuff out without actually having to try it out in a game or try it out in a practice that might, you know, cause them to be cut from a team or something. So there's a lot of guys trying out just all sorts of stuff. And also a lot of these leagues, they usually have a lot of fun rules. Like the Beauty League has a, I forget what they call it, but it's a thing where a team can put on a, they say a light behind their bench for two minutes. And what that means is all their goals count for two. So if they're down by a ton, you can see them do that and basically kind of force almost a pseudo power play for themselves going on and stuff like that. So there's a lot of kind of fun rules and things that they do for this stuff to keep it going, because this isn't supposed to be something that takes very long. A lot of times the games are half hour at most kind of thing. So definitely check out for summer hockey that's out there. Another thing, hockey movies. There's tons of hockey movies to watch. Tons and tons and tons of them. There will be upcoming a two-part podcast coming out this summer talking about hockey movies because there are so many. Of course, you've got your Slapshots, your Goons, and your Mighty Ducks and stuff like that. There's tons of other ones out there that people, I think, don't know as well. They're definitely not as known. One of the ones I've talked about a bunch that is a newer one is one called The Late Game. That one's really, really good. That's out there streaming. And yeah, and again, going to be a podcast coming out all about hockey movies, kind of talking about not those big game ones that everybody knows, but kind of the more smaller movies or ones that people, I think, have forgotten about and stuff, but definitely worth checking out. And I did a whole series of these during the COVID lockdown on the Instagram account. And if you want to go back and look, you can see I talked about, I watched all these movies, gave a little blurb about them, what I thought, some of them are really good. Some of them are hilariously bad. Some of them are just terrible. But I went through a whole bunch of them. So you can go check that out if you want to go back on the Beer Leaguer Instagram account and see those. Another thing to do, have a hangout with your hockey team. Assuming that you get along, assuming that you like doing stuff with them. I've talked about in previous episodes, me and Mason did an episode about talking, about building a good locker room. That's a good way to do it. This is the perfect time to have some kind of a team activity. Go to a different sporting event. Maybe if you're near one of these summer hockey leagues, go as a team to one of these games. Or go to a baseball game. Go to a minor league baseball game that's going on. Go play some street hockey somewhere. Something like that. But organize something to hang out with your team and do that. Maybe it's even just go to a sports bar and watch whatever is on and do that for a night. That's a fun thing to just kind of keep everybody up with what's going on with everyone and see how people are doing. If you're not talking over the summer and you're not playing and stuff like that, it's a great thing to do. To just stay in the loop with everyone. And then finally, I think the last idea that I have is going on some kind of hockey trip, going on an actual hockey vacation. Again, that's something that I covered in a previous podcast episode is different places to travel to watch hockey and places to travel to play hockey. So check that out for some specific ideas for that. But doing a hockey-themed vacation or a hockey-themed side trip on a vacation is a super fun thing to do as well over the summer, since summertime seems to be the time people do vacations. Hopefully, I gave you some new ideas and some things to think about to scratch that hockey itch in the summer, or things to do to get out there and help improve your game so you're better when you go back in the fall. Or if you're still playing in the summer, stuff to improve at while you're playing in the summer. If you have any other ideas on things, recommendations for books I talked about, or hockey movies, or recommendations on trips, stuff like that, I'd love to hear from you about them. You can send a text message to the show. There's a link in the show notes. Just click that. You can text the show. Let me know if you have any good ideas for stuff. We'll talk about it probably in a shorts episode coming up. Let you know. You can also leave comments on thebeerleaguer.com for this show and say, hey, here's another good book idea. Here's some other movie, something like that. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to put more of that stuff out there. But like I said, any of the things that I talked about today, all this stuff in the show notes at thebeerleaguer.com as always. Let's go check it out. Okay, and that's gonna wrap everything up for this episode of The Beer Leaguer Podcast. Like I say, every show, any likes, comments, reviews, anything like that, always appreciated. All right, everybody, catch you in the next one.

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