Out of the house and active on a Sunday afternoon for the first day of a brand-new enterprise. Back in March I learned via the internet of a proposed over-40 street hockey league, the guy spearheading the effort is a veteran of our league in Lancaster which has been mothballed since 2019 thanks to The Prevailing Circumstances. I reached out to him with a offer of administrative assistance in getting the league organized, he responded by telling me I could be the league's commissioner. The rink is located at Warwick Township Lions Park in the village of Rothsville, about three miles east of Lititz and roughly an eleven-mile drive northeast from my place in Lancaster. It's funny how life sometimes comes full circle: when I was a youngster my mother's parents lived on the main street in Rothsville, when my uncle (my mother's brother-in-law) retired he and my aunt moved into the trailer park right across the road from Lions Park so in many ways I'm more familiar with the area than most might realize. The use of the rink is under the auspices of the local recreation commission and the financial backing is being provided by a restaurant/bar in Ephrata. The league is a lot like our summer leagues in Lancaster: it's advertised as "laid back and chill", there is competition involved but the main idea is to play the game and have fun doing it especially since most everybody is above the age of forty. Most of the players have played at Reservoir Park previously so there weren't too many I didn't know, many of them will probably be back once we get restarted. There are four teams in the league, we have four games each Sunday with each team playing twice against the same opponent. It's an unusual format but since we play only on Sundays it was agreed to, the teams playing at noon rematch at 1:30 with the 12:45 opponents meeting again at 2:15. The rink itself is only a few years old and it's shorter and narrower than our rink in Lancaster which probably isn't a bad thing considering the ages of most of the players. On this day Hillside defeated Ephrata twice, Warwick won both over Township with one of them decided in the OT shootout. We play three ten-minute periods of running time, the last three minutes of the third period are stop-time. We started right around noon and were done just before 3:00 on an 80-degree afternoon, forty-two players participated so by any measure we can consider Opening Day a success. Week #2 is on Sunday the 9th. Take care, thanks for reading.
