Buildup

    The time has finally come for the season to officially start. A Saturday game in Pekin, IL, best known for the fact that until 1980, their high school team's name was a slur for Chinese people and their mascot was people dressing up in stereotypically Chinese clothes. Besides that, I also hate their arena, since the bench areas aren't raised higher than the surrounding floors like they're supposed to be, meaning even the tallest players can't easily step over the boards to get on the ice. But before we get to open our hockey season there, we had a scrimmage against the UIUC D2 club team as our last practice before our first game. 

    It went better than expected, with the first game going 3-2 in our favor thanks to 2 goals in 1 shift from a line filled with D2 players on loan to us after it was clear that we were generating next to no offense and even struggling to not just be constantly on defense. But we scored the third goal ourselves, so I count that as a win. The second game went 2-1 in the D2 team's favor, with them again scoring 2 goals in 1 shift during the first shift of the game thanks to the fact that their smallest players were the same size as our biggest players and some defensive breakdowns. After that, though, we stabilized and even managed to score a goal before the game ended, proving that we didn't need to steal their players to keep games close. 

    This scrimmage gives me hope for our season, since the D2 team are bigger, better, and more structured than the teams that we'll be playing against, meaning that if we can hang with them, we should be fine during the season. This is especially true against Pekin, who have historically had a small team, meaning that they run out of energy faster, and their team has never been amazing, which hopefully continues this year. Regardless of what our results might turn out to be, I'm glad that the season is finally starting and that we finally get to play games instead of just practicing all the time. Until next time, this has been the first week of one icy blog.

Comments

  1. Letitia MoffittNovember 3, 2022 at 9:01 AM

    One of my students told me about the former Pekin mascot and all that. I couldn't believe it at first. Yuuuuck. Good post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wednesdays Are a Power-Up

Image
     For our second Wednesday night game of the year, we have our second Wednesday night win, which are also our only 2 wins, so Wednesday nights are where we shine, apparently. Won won 8-2, despite being 2-2 going into the third period, and while this win was definitely good for morale, I worry many people developed some bad habits by playing against this team (Glenwood) because of how terrible they were.       Glenwood was missing half their team and I don't think their starting goalie was their usual goalie, so the 8-2 score line makes sense. I don't even particularly mind the fact that we ran the score up on them to get to 8-2, but I do mind how we got there. Our first two periods were filled with a lot of us playing down to their level and we were even losing 1-2 at one point, but we were still controlling a large part of the game nd the tying goal was more than expected. But, once we went up 4-2 on them and the floodgates started to open, so...
Read more

Improvement

Image
      We've now reached a point in the season where we're playing teams for the second time this year (everyone in the league plays each other twice: 1 home game and 1 away game), which means we can compare our 2 performances against the same team to see if we've improved or not. So, have we?     I would say so. Despite the fact that we lost last Monday to a team we tied at the beginning of the year, we did much better against 2 teams that we owe 2 of our biggest losses to. Earlier, we lost 1-10 to Kankakee, who we only lost 1-4 to on Sunday. In that game, we scored the first goal of the game and were even tied 1-1 going into the 3rd period, but we couldn't close out the game. Still, definitely a better result than getting blown out 1-10 in our home arena.     We also improved on our 3-8 loss to Sacred Heart (SHG) by only losing 3-4 against them on Monday, which hasn't been entered into the league website yet for some reason. We went down 2 goals early...
Read more

WE WON A GAME

Image
      It only took 6 games, but I can finally say that the Champaign Chiefs have won a hockey game this season. Since the last blog post, we've played 2 games: 1 on Monday and 1 last night. The Monday game wasn't close, with us losing 8-3 to Sacred Heart. I didn't play terribly that game and I scored another goal, but the highlight of that game were one of my teammates getting a bloody nose from being hit but still scoring a goal on the same play. All-in-all, this was a game to forget and is definitely not going to be the main focus of this post.     What is going to be the main focus is our 5-4 win last night against Decatur, where I also scored a goal. The details of this game (even though it only happened last night) are slightly fuzzier than the other games because neither the stats nor the game footage has been uploaded yet, so this post is working off of memory alone instead of having those things to pull from. We started off well, going up 2-0 thanks to g...
Read more