A quiet Wednesday skate and the A gets promoted

On Wednesday night me and Craig went down the Ice Arena for what will probably be one of our last opportunities to do so on the big ice before the winter hockey season starts (when the the big ice hosts regular A Grade games and social skaters are banished to the small ice). 

The ice was fairly choppy, I'm assuming a result of larger and/or more active than usual groups of figure skaters doing lessons there beforehand, and fairly hard (assume that there's a hockey game straight afterwards).  This down side was countered by the fact that there were less than the usual number of skaters doing laps, perhaps a couple dozen on the big ice and half that on the small.

I spent over half my time going round at a fair clip while talking to Ben about our respective hockey seasons.  He's a D in the Rangers and we compared notes quite a bit about the recent game we played against each other.  I also got a chance to say "g'day" to Keith, another Ranger whom I'd enjoyed being outplayed by.  It was kinda comforting to hear from Keith that I'd played a hard game, and have Ben confirm that, even when he'd outskated me down the boards, I'd managed to keep him from taking effective shots.

I didn't push it too hard, a few laps at high speed, a few cut backs with backwards cross behinds, a few stops being the most dramatic things I did.  Still burned a lot of energy, however, as Ben and I carried on our conversation at pretty high speed.

*

There were two good bits of news for the day.

1.  The A was promoted out of the little kid's group in his Learn to Skate classes earlier in the evening.  He's now with kids his age or older and who've generally been skating for a year or two.  From being the master in his group he's now the neophyte.  He's quite proud of the promotion, quite nervous about what will come (backwards skating, stopping).  All a growing experience.

2.  The Wheelers WILL play on Saturday, despite over half the team being absent.  Because we're a development league the forfeit rules don't apply and we'll have a make up team of reserves playing with me.  It might be interesting if the reserves are the usual suspects as they're all pretty good players (basically, the best line which we played against in the Rockers last Saturday) and would give me a chance to play on a dangerous line against the best team in our division.  Should be fun.

Ice 17