Recapping Spokane women’s hockey’s season

Hockey is back once again as September rolled around for the start of hockey season for most of us. The league I play in is the Spokane women’s hockey league, which has grown over the years and has been part of Spokane, Washington for a long time. This year we found out that we have 78 women joining this year and that is a record high. It has been incredible to see various skill levels come to play hockey. Our league has Friday night games that consist of four teams playing one of the two games. The league has changed over the years in creating teams and this year consisted of random drawing with a twist. With the five skill levels we have, every captain drew names from each skill level at random to create even teams. It has been a successful approach so far and has allowed us to mix teams and trade players if necessary.

During September and October we got back into the rhythm of playing hockey every week and even had our first tournament at home. First tournaments are always used for getting rid of the rust—it’s why this tournament is called bust the rust. It was a round-robin tournament that brought small groups of teams to play during the weekend. It was a hard fought battle for all teams and was definitely a good way to start the year off. We had our own two teams join in the tournament and came out with a few wins and losses, but we all had a great time of tournament hockey.

I have slowly started to get involved with assisting with coaching U12 kids. A friend convinced me that I could be helpful with coaching and assisting the kids, which would help me decide if I want to coach later on. It’s something I could see myself doing some day and I hope to coach a girls team because I do want to help grow girls hockey and create more opportunities in Washington state. There’s nothing wrong with coaching boys teams but I’m so used to playing with women’s teams over the years. Over time I have been getting involved with co-ed hockey once in a while to play around with competitive hockey.

For those who have helped or gotten involved with a try hockey for free weekend, I hope that it was a fun experience and you enjoyed helping new skaters learn what hockey is all about . A few ladies joined me and we had an amazing turnout that saw a lot of kids having fun and getting excited to reach small goals on the ice.

It has been a great start to the season that has changed a lot of things. I personally feel like coaching could be something I could be getting involved with more as time goes on. I’m excited for some more hockey tournaments to come up. I’m actually looking into joining some new tournaments and thinking of doing a draft tournament sometime soon. I’m always open to hearing about different tournaments and meeting new players.

I hope everyone is having a fantastic start to the hockey season! Cheers and I’ll bring more updates from hockey in the pacific northwest soon. Happy early Thanksgiving for those celebrating!

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EDITOR’S NOTES:

Thanks for reading!

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