@20Skaters

Your Pickup Hockey Needs a 'Rulebook'!

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 12:02:00 -0400

You should create a rulebook document, or charter, for your weekly pickup hockey game. I play a lot of pickup hockey and, through running 20Skaters, I’ve played in a wide variety of games. While they are all quite similar, each is also unique.

If you organize a weekly game, you should consider creating a rulebook for it. Some people immediately respond “Ahh…it’s pickup hockey, there are no rules, that’s the point!”

Well I beg to differ.

Do you keep score in any manner? Do you call offsides in your pickup, who can call them, how do you handle them? Are you ok with people hooking or being physical in the corners? Have you ever had to kick a player off your roster? Can players wear whatever colour they want or do you prefer they only wear one of two colours?

Well, you may have more rules than you think. The problem today is that they are likely all unwritten. That’s confusing, especially for new players to your game.

Any equipment rules for your hockey game?

Part of running a recurring game of pickup hockey is deciding what the specific rules are for the game along with what type of culture you’re cultivating. It’s a charter of sorts.

For a previous weekly game of my own, my rulebook was a shared google document. My goal was to include any/all information that a player coming to our game for the first time would like to know about our game. My example is rather detailed since we used a game clock in these games. Most charters will only be a half, or one page.

A rulebook is a great way to communicate the type of game you’re running to any new players coming out, as well as to your existing players. Making sure that your players are on the same page makes it simpler for them to help you ‘police’ your game every week. It sets clear expectations with, and among, your players.

I’d suggest sharing it at the start of every season with all your players. When new players are coming out, send it along to them as well. As players ask questions about your game, update the document with the answers.

If you’re using our platform, some organizers include this directly on every gamepage. My suggestion would be to include a note on the gamepage along with a link to a longer shared document.

Another great reason to have a rulebook that all your players have read is that it makes your life simpler if/when you have to remove a player from your lineup. It’s much easier to explain to a player that they don’t fit in with your game if you’ve already clearly conveyed your expectations ahead of time.

Some ideas to consider conveying in your charter:

If you keep score in any way, with mini-games, detail the process.
How do you restart play after a goal is scored?
Are slapshots through traffic allowed?
How do you handle offsides? Are they called by the players on the ice or bench players and what happens to the puck?
How do you handle contentious goals?
Length of warm-ups.
How do you have all varieties of hydration, but in-game and post-game?
Team selections and how they happen each week. (Do you know about our optional team selection feature?)
Any jersey rules? I had a set of black/white jerseys for my players as we didn’t want reds, yellows and grays.
What level of competition are you expecting? Hard forechecking or don’t even go into the corners? Do you want people putting effort in on defence or keep is lax?
How long should shifts be? This is a big one for new players to know what you’re expecting.
Post game activities? Do you hangout in the parking lot after or hit a specific local?

Not all pickup hockey games are equal. Some are quite competitive with detailed rule sets while some are super casual. Regardless of what you’re after, conveying that clearly to your players goes a long way to creating a great weekly game of pickup hockey!

Payments Not Promises

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 15:38:00 -0400

Attendance for most weekly pickup hockey games runs today on promises. The organizer contacts their list of subs and asks who wants the x available spots this week. Ideally x people promise they will play.

One of the main lessons we learned in early testing of our platform to run pickup hockey is that we prefer payments not promises!

A sub player making a payment to play represents a commitment. Having to pay online, ahead of time, to secure your spot forces you to stop and think....”can I really make it out this week?” Or is there a chance I may fall asleep on the couch, have to drive my kid to soccer, forget to get my skates sharpened etc etc....

That’s great! Forcing someone to make a real commitment, with their dollars, results in more consistent attendance for your hockey. That means better games every week, which means more demand to get spots in your game. It also means healthier finances as your organizer has money in pocket to cover icetime costs. Healthy finances means your organizer will likely keep running your game.

A player making a payment also shifts the risks of your icetime costs from one person, the organizer, to many, your players. The main reason an organizer stops running a weekly pickup hockey game is poor finances. One person loses hundreds, or thousands, trying to run a pickup hockey game for their friends.

At this point, I don’t think there are many people left who don’t know how to purchase something online. If you have a few players expressing hesitation about having to purchase their sub spots ahead of time. Take it from us, it’s for one reason, they don’t want to commit. If they can’t commit, and in doing so share the financial risks, allow someone else to commit to that spot!

Your organizer shouldn’t have to shoulder all the risks or fund your weekly pickup hockey.

Running Pickup Hockey Stories

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 10:23:00 -0500

Rather than us explaining our platform and how our organizers and players feel about it, we’ve started the process of interviewing them directly. We’ll be posting video snippets from these interviews.

It’s no secret that we love hockey and pickup hockey a lot. There is so much culture and history that develops within these games that we love. It is our hope that some of those stories can be told as well.

In this one minute video, Nathan discusses how he began organizing his summer pickup hockey game. As he explains, he took over an existing game and icetime and he was already familiar with 20Skaters through his previous experience as a player. As with all organizer transitions, you tend to lose a few players and need to replenish and signup new ones.

Over to you Nate!

Pickup Hockey "Faceoffs"

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 18:25:00 -0500

95% of the pickup hockey games I play in already so what I call the pickup hockey faceoff. The 5% that don’t......drive me a bit bonkers to be honest.

It’s such a simple practice and takes up no real additional time, I think every game should play this way. The short story....everyone comes back to center ice after a goal. The team which was scored upon restarts play by making a pass from the center position back to a defenceman. That’s it.

While it’s super simple, I still recorded a short video to explain it for those who are not currently doing this.

[UPDATE]: Based on our post to Reddit, there are lots of opinions and many ways to restart play in pickup hockey. To clarify, this is simply ONE way and it’s the way that’s dominant here in Ontario where we play. I think we need a followup post where we list out as many known options as we can find!

Auto Response Solved Part 2

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 14:45:00 -0500

I wrote a longer post over a month ago about the auto response issues triggered by aggressive email virus checkers, and our attempts to solve it.

As expected, our fix did impact many of our players negatively in that it required them to login where they previously didn’t need to. We took the feedback from them and went to work on designing an improved fix. Our goal remained that we needed to ensure we no longer had any ‘fake’ game responses due to this virus checkers while hopefully alleviating the need for players to login all the time.

Wait 5 minutes…

Several weeks back, we placed a new fix in place that we feel achieves those goals.

We made the technical assumption that if your virus checker is going to click links in your emails without you knowing, it will do that immediately upon receiving the email.

So, when we send you a game invitation, this is what happens now. If you a full time player or a goalie in that game, meaning you do not have to make a payment, AND you are trying to respond within 5 minutes from the time we sent that specific email then you will have to login in order to respond.

Basically, if you try to respond within 5 minutes of us sending your email then we treat those responses as suspicious and require you are authenticated.

Your choices in you encounter this are

Just login to your 20Skaters player around.
Wait 5 minutes and respond.

That’s it. We’re hoping few of you actually bump into this as it requires you jump on emails within 5 minutes of them being sent. If you do, hit the bathroom and try again when you get back.

Where's My Game Invite Email...part 2

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 14:36:00 -0500

I recently read over my previous post “Where’s My Email Invite?” and I wanted a redo on that post. Consider this the TL;DR version of that post.

via GIPHY

You only need to know two things.

As soon as you are invited to any game on our platform, that game will be listed in your dashboard’s “Invited” list. You do NOT literally have to find any emails, just login to your 20Skaters account and you will see all your invited games there. You can click into them and accept, decline, grab sub spots etc.

2. In order to ensure you’re receiving your actual invite emails, try whitelisting our domain “20skaters.com” and “www.20skaters.com” along with the sender email address…

“brydon@www.20skaters.com”.

If you’re unsure how to do that, search for “how to whitelist email addresses {insert name of your email client}”. That search should find you the most recent information for how to whitelist effectively for your email client.

If that doesn’t work, feel free to email us at team@20skaters.com and we’ll take a look on our side to see if we can spot any reasons your emails aren’t getting through.

Automatic Decline Issue Solved

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 10:41:00 -0400

The quick story

For games in which you are a full timer or a goalie, when you accept/decline to that game on a device which you are not currently logged into 20Skaters on, you will have to click “Confirm action” on the resulting page. It will now take 2 clicks under those conditions.

If you’re a paid sub or you are logged into 20Skaters on that device, nothing changes and you can accept/decline with 1 click from your email invite.

Update: We are rolling this out in two stages. Today, you will have to login to accept/decline. After we complete some testing and validation, you will be able to accept/decline without having to login but with the ‘confirm action’ click.

The longer story

We’re making a change that we hope will only impact you positively. Over the past several years, we’ve seen an increase in players being automatically declined from games within seconds of being invited.

You would likely only experience this if you are a full-timer in a game and your email address is hosted with a large institution such as a bank, university or municipality.

The short story is that some email virus checkers are now clicking the links in your emails. Our accept and decline links are unique to that invite and allow us to know who you are and which game it’s referencing. This makes life simple for our players as you can accept and decline from any device without having to worry about logging into our site on that device.

The impact for some of our players is that they are invited to their weekly game and within seconds they receive an email confirming they have declined. For them, this seems like someone has declined on their behalf which is the case since that’s exactly what the virus checker has done.

Up until last Friday, this issue seemed to be isolated to auto-declines and only a few players which means it was annoying but low impact. Last Friday we had an incident where a goalie was auto-accepted into a game without them knowing. The result being one of our games was short a goalie.

That, as we all know, is not cool and we take this very seriously. We decided we have to make changes and address this asap.

The change?

First, if you’ve been experiencing this issue as a player then here’s what should change for you. You should immediately stop receiving these auto-decline actions and emails. Assuming you are logged in on the device you accept or decline from then you’ll notice no changes beyond that. If you sometimes accept or decline on a device you are not logged into then you’ll now need to click a “confirm action” button before we accept it.

TL;DR

In order to address this, we are making the following changes. If a full time player or a goalie accept or decline a game through their email invite link but are NOT logged in on that device then it will now require one more click on their part.

It’s only a click to “confirm the action” you are taking. You do not have to login to the site so you can still take this action from any device.

The reason this should eliminate these issues is simple. The virus checker is never actually logged into our application. So we’re assuming that 100% of the clicks from a virus checker will be unauthenticated.

As well, if you’d rather not have to double confirm on that device then you simply have to login to 20Skaters.com on that device.

Our hope is that this removes 100% of these virus checking issues from our system with minimal impact to you, our players.

Our New Pickup Hockey Video

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 11:43:00 -0400

Hey, welcome back to hockey season. Fingers crossed, this may be our first full season after a few years of pandemic impacted ones.

A few quick updates. We are operating and more importantly we are hungry to add more weekly pickup hockey games to our platform. If you play in a weekly pickup hockey game where the organizer is still sending around emails and texts by hand, collecting cash at the rink etc....tell them about 20Skaters!

To help with that, you can share our new video with them using this link.

We will also be posting more videos about pickup hockey and our platform to our Youtube channel so please subscribe there as well.

Where's My Email Invite?

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 11:25:00 -0400

We get asked this one fairly often. Getting an email from us through and into your email inbox is no easy task. Between us and you, a lot of computers have to receive the email, review it and then decide if they’re willing to pass it through to it’s next stage. Any of those players along the route may decide to break the chain and hang onto your email.

If you’re having issues receiving emails....

First, if you ever feel you’ve been invited to a pickup hockey game yet haven’t received an email, simply login to our website. You will see all upcoming games you’re invited to listed for you once you login. Yes, it’s a pain if you’re not getting those emails to remind you but that will immediately answer your question “Have I been invited to Dan’s game yet?”. Please take this step before sending emails/texts to your organizer.

Check your email client spam folder and policies. The simplest solution is that you did actually receive it but your email client decided the email wasn’t important enough for you to actually read. Check spam folders, add us to whitelists etc. How you do that is dependent on your email client.
Talk with your email server admin. If you’re using a corporate email then your server admin may be holding our emails back. Submit a support request with details to your server admin.
Not much after 1 and 2 actually....but keep reading…and please send us an email at team at 20skaters.com, including your username and email address. We’ll do out best to diagnose for you.

Our Approach To Sending Emails

We send all our emails using our partner Sendgrid. We do this because they spend their days helping partners like us get our emails delivered. We send tens of thousands of emails every month and we do our best to ensure our emails have their best chance to getting to your inbox.

As an example of this, our stats for the past month are:

99.95% emails delivered.
0.05% emails bounced.
99% reputation.

While those are strong stats, I fully understand that you could care less if you’re once of those 0.05% not getting your emails.

We’ll keep trying to get emails through but I thought it may help to shed some light on the work we do in attempting to achieve this.

Pickup Hockey Etiquette

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 14:07:00 -0400

I recently came across this great post by Justin Bourne. His post is about how you should handle playing with off-season pros but almost all of his points directly apply to your weekly pickup hockey game. I’ll highlight a few here with some weekly pickup hockey commentary....

DO try, DO Compete

It’s easy to slow down, layoff in pickup hockey but it ruins the game. The best games are the ones with a roster who continues to hold each other accountable to still go into the corners and keep the compete level up. It’s too easy to slump into the “ah it’s just pickup, who cares?” mindset. The answer is that all of us do. We care about competing and having a great game NOT the results or ‘winning team’, although some of us still care about that as well.

DON’T try too hard there, Hustles

His example here is great. If you push too hard in the wrong spots then you put other players at risk. In pickup we all need to commit to keeping us all healthy and sometimes that means laying off if you’re risking injuring yourself or other players.

DO try to score

Again, we’re here to compete including the goalies.

DON’T try to score through traffic

This is dependent on your skate but generally speaking, no one’s going be happy getting injured in pickup hockey from someone blindly trying to hammer pucks through crowds.

DON’T exceed a courteous shift length.

Oh, hellz yes! Obviously, if you’ve got your 20Skaters then you likely have nice even numbers and change in lines which allows peer pressure to keep this in line. There’s still always that guy who just can’t get to the bench almost every shift. We all know who you are.

Hockey is back (in Ontario)

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 12:35:00 -0400

We’re back!

After months of closed rinks where we’re located in Ontario, we’re back playing pickup hockey as of this Friday July 16, 2021. It’s been a long time coming and we have pickup hockey games up and running on our platform Friday.

It’s been a slow, quiet year for us but our platform is up and ready to go. If you’re running, or playing in, a weekly pickup hockey skate then please make sure you’re organizer knows about us! We will make their lives simpler while helping you skate ensure you have consistent and full attendance.

Pickup Hockey in 2020/2021

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 21:47:00 -0400

Hey folks, just a quick update as we’ve been almost silent on our blog of late. We completely shutdown our platform this past March to support the closing of rinks across the world due to Covid-19.

Yes, we are back up and running in order to support our pickup hockey organizers who are getting back up and running. If you’re local rink is back open and you’re planning on running weekly pickup hockey in some form, let us know and we’ll get you setup for another season!

Welcome back and let’s hope we can all get back to some form of ice hockey this year.

Spring Cleaning

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 07 Mar 2018 09:32:00 -0500

Hey, spring is in the air. Personally I ski and play hockey so I’m happy for winter to drag on for a few more weeks. On the technology side we just went through a huge spring cleaning ourselves. I won’t bore you with the details as it mostly involved upgrading packages and frameworks etc. Our primary web framework is now fully up to date. As well, our integration with Stripe is now the latest and greatest once again. Both of those help us ensure security and payments are handled well.

All of these upgrades put us in a position where we can move faster on new features and updates we have planned over the summer season. As with any massive update like this, there are some unintended consequences. There were only a few but if you ran into an issue over the past week, sorry about that but know that we have it in hand and it’s all part of moving our platform forward. If you run into any problems, just email us at team@20skaters.com.

If you are running summer games with us, send us your schedules now. If you play in a summer pickup hockey game then please talk us up to your organizer as we’re growing and need your help with that.

Time to Grow!

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 10:38:00 -0500

20Skaters is the only software platform built to make weekly pickup hockey games better for players and organizers. We’ve helped organizers collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in sub fees and we’ve been a part of running thousands of pickup hockey games across North America.

Now we want to grow 20Skaters, and take this homegrown Canadian hockey solution to the world. That growth will allow us to develop new optional features like auto team selection, game credits, paid waiting lists etc. All of which will improve your games and make them more fun to play in. We think that everyone who runs a game of pickup hockey should give us a try. We’ve learned that the best way for an organizer to learn about 20Skaters is for them to hear it directly from their players and friends!

One More Organizer
Our ask: will you tell one organizer about us?

You likely play in other pickup hockey games that have yet to try 20Skaters. Or maybe you have friends that play in games that don’t use 20Skaters yet. We want those organizers to know about us. Help us grow by telling an organizer about us! They will have a few questions, some of which we already answered here.

One more thing, if an organizer already knows about us, please tell them again. It helps when they hear from multiple players in their game. It builds confidence that their players will use, and enjoy, our platform.

Other Cities
Please don’t keep this only to games you play in. Our platform is already running games across North America. If you know someone across the country who plays hockey, let them know and help us jump geographies and get started in new cities!

Thank You
We value your time and any help you offer. We do our best to ask any new organizers how they found out about us. In the case we can track it back to you, we’ll be in touch to send you a t-shirt or some swag as a thank you.

How We Got To Here

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 26 Jan 2018 11:02:00 -0500

I had the idea for 20Skaters for a good five years before acting on it. While I’d never run a weekly pickup hockey game, I subbed and played in them a lot. I noticed the attendance at these games being all over the map. Some weeks 9, some weeks 23. I’d rented ice myself so I knew the costs to rent icetime. Everytime I played, I would do the math in my head and the numbers clearly meant the person running it was losing cash.

I also witnessed the weekly frustrations of the players in the room when you only had 9 skaters and 1 goalie, or worse 23 skaters and 3 goalies.

It was clear that you had a lone person spending a ton of their personal cash to organize a weekly game for friends. They were losing money, while having those same friends bitch and moan about attendance.

I remember one specific case where a friend decided to run two pickup games. I didn’t attend but I asked him a few weeks later how it went. Sarcastically he said, “great, I had 20 skaters committed for both skates. We had 9 skaters show up at one, 14 at the other, I lost $245 on them and I’m never doing that again.”

I sat on the idea for 20Skaters for years because I didn’t think it was the right time for hockey players to pay for pickup hockey online, ahead of time. It was too soon, not enough people had purchased items online yet.

Eventually it started to feel closer, the majority of people I knew were starting to make online purchases and use more online services. To prove the market was ready, I ran some tests. I purchased a few icetimes from the city. I built a very basic webpage that showed the game details along with the players who were committed to playing. I added a Paypal ‘buy now’ button to allow players to buy spots online for the game, directly from the game page.

Next, I emailed the link for the webpage around to some friends to invite them. The webpage was a static webpage. To make it ‘dynamic’, when I received an email from Paypal telling me that I had a sale, I would change the webpage on my laptop to include the person’s name into the ‘players attending’ list. I’d then ftp that new webpage up to the website. Boom, a dynamic gamepage.

I had the occasional keener who would email me right after purchasing to say “hey, I just paid for hockey but I don’t see my name on the site, maybe I did something wrong?” I would change the webpage, ftp it up, then email them saying “Sorry about that, issues on my side, have a look now, should be good”.

While the manual work to make the site appear dynamic was a pain, that was a solvable problem. The magic proof of those early tests was that I sold those games out and players grabbed spots without talking to me. They shared and invited players I didn’t know well. I had all my money collected before heading to the rink. I’d proven to myself that hockey doods would pay for pickup hockey online ahead of time.

I recall one particular evening where I was going to be without internet access for several hours the day before a game. I still had 5 spots open and was worried I’d be short. When I returned to having internet access, I had 4 purchase emails sitting in my inbox and was down to one spot left. It was that experience that sold me. The fact that my game was working, and filling itself, while I was completely offline, that was the magic!

At the time we started there were a lot of early sites built to help you run your team in a league. There didn’t seem to be anyone building for the unique use case of running a weekly drop-in style hockey game. After the successful experiments, I started to share what we were building publicly more. I got some other good folks involved, who have been pivotal in getting to where we are today, namely my cofounders Bill and Eric. Our early name was NoReferees Hockey, which we eventually changed to 20Skaters Hockey.

The final straw in getting our first working product launched was one of our now long standing organizers. I had pitched him the product in person at an event. Since that time he’d been emailing me asking questions about it. Jamie is a startup founder himself so he understood the journey. He phoned me the week before labour day and gave me a final kick in the arse. He basically pitched my product back to me, told me he’s tried everything, event sites don’t work for him, the team sites are built for leagues but are a pain for pickup hockey, email lists aren’t enough, he wanted our product and didn’t want to start his upcoming season without it. His season started in 3 days.

I spent most of that labour day weekend locked in my office building. I don’t think I pulled any full all nighters but they were long days and late nights. I managed to build enough of a beta to get Jamie’s game launched with us and we’ve been organizing his game ever since.

We’ve now run thousands of games and are heading into a growth season. While that’s the story of how we got to here, we’re hoping this is just the beginning so stay tuned!

How Many Full Timers Should You Have?

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 16 Jan 2018 11:13:00 -0500

I get asked this question fairly often, usually it’s from people who are new to organizing a weekly pickup hockey game, how many full timers should I have in my roster?

First, what’s a full timer? A full timer is a player that pays you at the start of the season. They are paying for the right to attend any of your pickup games they’re able to make. With 20Skaters, full timers are invited first each week and they obviously have first shot at spots in the game. It’s only after a few days that subs start getting invited if there are spots available. As well, typically a full timer’s cost per game is lower than what you charge a sub.

While we have some games with 0 full timers and we have a few games that have more than 20, generally the answer is simple in that you should aim for 20 full timers in your roster. Having 20 skaters committed gives you the best shot at selling out your game every week. Those 20 folks have already paid for the season so they are going to make the effort to get out each week. The more games they play, the better their deal for being a full timer is.

Having 20 full timers also makes for a better game through the season. It means you’ll have some consistency in your lineup, folks get to know each other over the season and the banter in the change room gets better. Of course that can also go the other way in that you may have guys develop some nasty rivalries but that’s rare when there’s no refs on the ice.

I’m hosting a new game of my own this year. I only have about 5 full timers and it hurts us some weeks. If there’s a holiday or a sporting event worth watching, your sub numbers will be low as they have no commitment.

How much do you charge full timers? If you can get 20, my suggestion is to charge your full timers enough to cover your entire ice time costs. You will collect fees from subs through the season as you’ll rarely get all 20 full timers out. Use that money to throw an end of season party, buy jerseys, or reduce full timer fees next year. We have games that are also giving full timers refunds based on the sub fees they’ve collected.

If you’re like me, and don’t have 20 full timers, then start recruiting now for next season! Don’t wait until the summer when you have to chase folks over email. Pick the people you want to invite and let them know now that they have a full time spot next season if they want it.

Free Pickup Hockey in Kitchener

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 14:21:00 -0500

Ok, yes there’s some clickbait in that title but it’s also true. This past fall saw 20Skaters kickoff a pilot with the City of Kitchener to test the premise of using our platform to organize their weekly pickup hockey games. That pilot had us hosting some afternoon games in new timespots at 3pm. Our goal to move their pickup hockey games online, improve the organization of the games and offer a better overall service to the hockey players of Kitchener

More Games Every Week

Starting this week we are expanding by moving their current lunchtime games over to 20Skaters as well. As part of this increased schedule we’ve had to make some changes to our platform. The primary one being to send aggregated lists of the week’s games in email. This allows you as a player to see all the available games this coming week and grab spots in the ones you want to play in.

Free Hockey

So where’s the free part? As part of the rollout, Kitchener is offering all games through 20Skaters for free to players in the month of January. Come February, it will return to $7 for players but it’s free for the rest of January!

Spread the word, register yourself, invite friends! Send anyone interested to the Kitchener games page at 20Skaters.com/Kitchener. From that page you can jump into one of this week’s games or register to receive the weekliy email invites.

5 Ways to Find More Players for Pickup Hockey

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 11:33:00 -0500

We help people manage and run their weekly pickup hockey game with their players. All our games are basically private, curated rosters that are fully managed by the organizer. Our organizers are pretty protective about who is invited and in what order.

Having said that, we often have games that need to grow their roster because they aren’t getting 20 skaters out every week. I’m one of those people as my new weekly game has only soldout a handful of times.

Here’s my list of top 5 things to do if you need more rookies in your weekly pickup hockey game… Ok, so step 0 is of course to make sure your game is simple to share, ie use 20Skaters! Sorry but if you aren’t currently using our platform then this post isn’t quite as helpful.

1. Ask Current Players

Your current players know your game, what skill level and type of players you’re looking for. They know other hockey players, and it’s always nice to be able to invite your buddies for a good skate. Make sure your current players know that you want to grow the list of subs and encourage them to invite their friends. Until you ask, players are often not sure that they’re allowed to invite others.

Tell your players to point their friends directly to your upcoming game page. If you’re doing this, have us setup a permanent url(facility page) for your lineup, if you don’t have it already. You can see an example here with my game, which is 20skaters.com/brydon. This page will always show my upcoming game and allow someone to register to be invited to all upcoming games. So it works today, or a few weeks from now when they get around to clicking it.

2. Ask Us

When players register with our platform, they can fill in a form that indicates they are looking for more hockey. We can email that list for your city and let them know about your game. As well, we’ll happily post to our Facebook page. Just contact us and send us a few sentences that describes your game to a player considering it.

3. Get Social

Post your game’s permanent url to the social networks you use. Make sure to tag your friends who play hockey, tag your city as well, and of course tag us @20Skaters. In the post, Ask your hockey playing friends to share and tag their hockey playing friends.

4. Classifieds

In my area it would be Kijiji but it could be Craig’s list or whatever the hawt classified site is in your area. Post you permanent url along with those few sentences to help a potential player decide if they would fit in well.

The challenge here is you are opening it up to random strangers but the risk is low. If you get a player out who is a poor fit for your game, you can just move them to inactive in your lineup and they won’t be invited to any more games.

5. Post In Your Rink

This one’s a long shot but it can work. Most rinks have boards that you can post old school ads on. Print out that description and game url and post it to your rink board.

5b. Bordering Games

A bonus, if there are pickup games playing before or after you, ask that organizer if they’re alright with you inviting their players. Some players may be interested in playing back to back games some weeks. Make sure to ask the organizers permission as you don’t want them thinking you’re trying to steal their players.

Good luck! If we missed any key tricks and techniques, just let us know and we’ll share it up.

What Is A Healthy Pickup Hockey Game?

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 16:38:00 -0500

One of the bigger misconceptions we constantly face is that our platform is only valuable for weekly pickup hockey games that are struggling in attendance. It happens almost weekly that I’m told something like “I told our organizer about 20Skaters but our attendance is pretty good as we have 20 full timers”.

In truth, our best games are the healthy ones. They tend to be run by busy people who have little time to mess around each week. They have a good dedicated group of full timers. Our platform works instantly with groups like these. With these groups, we are able to ensure they have 20 every single week.

Even just moving from averaging 18 to 20 skaters, over the course of the season, can account for almost $1000 in additional money into the game which means lower fees for full timers next year....or a wicked end of season party! An additional $1000 means you can lower your fees for your 20 full timers by $50 next season!

When we’re working with games with consistently poor attendance, we do our best to support them to find and grow their roster, however, that’s not core to what we do. For those games we want them to get to a healthy spot and then we can best support them moving forward.

So, what is a healthy weekly pickup hockey game anyway? While we certainly have exceptions, such as some games with 0 full timers, here’s what we’ve witnessed.

20 Full Timers

You want 20 full timers. A full timer is someone who pays you in order to play in all your games. Doing this creates commitment since the more games they attend, the better value it is for them. If you don’t have 20, I personally have about 5 right now in my game, then you want to increase this each season until you get to 20.

Large, Engaged Sub List

Even with 20 full timers, you will almost never have a game where all 20 can play. Create a large, engaged list of subs. In the case you have 20 full timers, I’d suggest having 30 to 40 subs. You can prioritize those subs so I’d suggest putting as many players as you can into your last round. They’re only invited if you need them each week.

When I say engaged, you want players on the list who actually grab sub spots when they’re offered. It doesn’t hurt to have unengaged but you may as well remove players who literally never come out.

If you’re like me, on the low full timer side, then you really need a large sub roster, like 80+ hockey players. They are not committed, since they are only paying when they can play, and you need to find 15+ of them every week.

Improve Every Season

If you’re on the low end for full timers, start recruiting now for next season. Get commitments from subs now for next season, even get an early cheque. Make sure everyone knows you are looking for x new full timers for next year.

Sellouts Breed Sellouts

If you can achieve the above, you will start selling out on a weekly basis. Getting to consistent sellouts creates demand in your sub list. When players are looking at a soldout game page every week then they will jump to grab sub spots when they’re offered up. As well, they will make sure to attend your games and be a good citizen of your game because they know others are ready to grab their spot. We quite literally have games that now sellout within minutes of their email invites going out each and every week. You can get your game there too! We can help.

Ways to Keep Score in Pickup Hockey

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 13:47:00 -0500

Yes, the majority of pickup hockey games do not keep score. Our platform is targeted at people who organize a weekly game of pickup hockey. For most, that means a similar group of players each week. Keeping score in some fashion with a close, consistent group is a great way to keep the compete levels up. I thought I’d lay out some simple to more advanced methods.

Simple mini-games

Run mini games, each going to a score of 5. This gets the players on the ice keeping score, pushing the pace if they’re down, maybe even playing some D if they’re protecting a lead. Once a winner reaches 5, goalies or teams switch ends and start a new game. In a 50 minute timespot you should be able to get a few of these games in.

mini-games, with weekly winner

This is just a step further in that you keep track of which team wins the most mini-games. This matters more if you are keeping teams somewhat consistent week to week. It certainly will add to the dressing room chirping after the game each week.

Timed games

This is more work, as you need to access the game clock or time on the bench. Running a few timed games makes a big difference in the competition. You’re now playing against the clock rather than the game extending until a team scores 5. In the new game I’m running, we play three 25 minute timed games. With a timed game, you can also pull your goalie and push to regain leads late in games.

Tracking teams and wins

This is next level stuff, I will admit that I’m new to this. We are using our team selection feature, and picking teams at random each week. Using this feature means that we have the full history of who played on which team each game. We’re tracking wins and we’re assigning each player 1 point for a game win and an extra point if their team wins the night. We can then track ‘player stats’ and share them week to week. I’ll keep you up to date how this works as we’re only three weeks in. I’m prototyping this by using a shared google sheet, you’re welcome to take a look if you like. Assuming this works, we’ll build this into our teams feature shortly.

Are you keeping score in your weekly pickup hockey games or doing anything interesting to keep your skaters pushing? If so, let us know so we can share it with others here.

Finding/adding goalies for pickup hockey

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 17:14:00 -0500

I mentioned my personal goalie crisis last week. On the day of our pickup hockey game, we had two goalies drop last minute. That triggered a few questions from some of our newer organizers about how to manage goalies in our platform.

I’ve been playing with a new tool lately, to answer questions like this by just showing how. So I made a quick video that demonstrates how you make someone a goalie in your lineup.

Of course, if you prefer reading, our FAQ is still there. Remember that we have a list of players looking for more hockey. If you need more goalies in your lineup, we’re happy to promote your game and try to find more for you.

Dear Diary: I Started Pickup Hockey Game II

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 11:32:00 -0500

Dear Diary:

I entered into week 4 with optimism of getting back to selling out our game. Boy was I wrong. We entered into gameday with 10 skater spots open. Then around 11am we had one of our committed goalies bail on us. The challenge in this case is that we had two committed goalies all week. That means our platform doesn’t even bother to invite other goalies, as the spots are taken. Goalies dropping out on gameday are a pain.

I’m pretty sure I emailed 50+ goalies but by 4pm we were back to 2 goalies and we only needed 5 skaters. Once again, skater spots kept filling up through the day, with no thanks to me.

At 7:30pm, a little over an hour before we skate, another goalie dropped out because of a family emergency. Two* goalies dropping out on gameday is a major* pain. We scrambled but ultimately weren’t able to find a goalie last minute so we played with one goalie and a hole-a-goalie at the other end.

No ill feelings towards the goalies. Life happens but it’s tough when multiple goalies dropout on gameday.

Goalie Subs

One part that takes getting used to with our platform, is to just put as many goalies as you know into your lineup. Goalies in your later rounds are only emailed if the goalies in your earlier rounds don’t take your two spots. So you may as well have 30 goalies in your final round. That way you don’t have to chase and send emails if you’re short a goalie, we handle it for you.

So, new lesson learned this week is to take my own advice and get more goalies into our last sub round. Yes, it doesn’t really account for really last minute drops but having lot’s of goalies in your lineup is never a bad thing.

As well, this experience points to a new feature we need to build. When a game goes from being soldout for goalies to having a spot open, we should email all invited goalies to invite them again. This email could be fully automated or require the organizer’s permission. Another consideration, if it’s x hours from gametime should we send an email to the entire lineup letting all the players know that we need a goalie. The latter email shouldn’t be needed if your lineup already has a good large list of goalies in it.

Dear Diary: I Started a Pickup Hockey Game

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 16:34:00 -0500

To date, I’ve personally only ran the occasional pickup game myself. This year I decided to start hosting my own weekly game. I’m eating my own dog food as they say. (Yes that’s a real term, no it’s not worth looking up.)

I thought I’d write in my diary as I go through this season to share my firsthand experience organizing weekly pickup hockey. So, here goes…

Dear Diary,

It’s Brydon here and it’s been a while. Sorry, it’s me not you. So as you know I built this platform to help people run their weekly pickup hockey games. It’s built to make life easier for the organizer and the games better for their players. It works great.

Last week was my 3rd game and I managed to validate two core things so far.

Holy crap, I’ve always said organizing weekly pickup hockey is a thankless chore but I’m not sure I truly understood it. It sucks!
Holy crap, I thought our platform was great but it’s awesome. I can’t even contemplate dealing with this without our tool.

Where my game is at?

We soldout week 1, which was a great start and had me complacent. No problem, this organizing thing is cake. Then week 2 we had two goalies, which is key, but only 13 skaters! We resorted to playing 4 on 4 which was ok but the game slows down quickly.

On the finance side for week 2, that’s 7 spots not sold which translates into $140 uncollected. This is the big problem we’re working to help solve. Most games, including mine, are basically poorly run non-profits. You set the price so that you recoup your costs and you assume perfect attendance as you don’t want to make money on this. The problem is when you have a few weeks like my week 2, you’re done. You don’t ever have a week with 27 skaters to make that up.

Last week, week 3, we ended up with 17 skaters, 5 skaters paying within the final 4 hours before game time. Our games have been great, I feel that demand is building to play in the game. I’m bullish that we’ll sell out this coming week’s game!

Lessons?

What have I learned so far? No one is really committed until they pay, bottom line. Everyone wants you to run a game, it’s just more hockey options for them. Until they pay, you really have no idea if they will play.

Keep pushing and add as many subs to your lineup as you can until you are consistently selling out week after week. You can see below in my lineup view, emails scribbled to protect the innocent, I have 60+ players on my list right now across all rounds but it’s still not enough.

More full timers. We have lot’s of new games like mine that are selling out from the get go. Those tend to have 15 to 20 full time players who have already paid for the entire season. In that case, those players are committed to playing and you’re likely to only need to sell about 5 sub spots each week. The caveat being that we do have people who run game with no full timers and still manage to sellout every week. Those folks have large sub lists(80+) and engaged sub lists.

However you do it, you have to create demand! You create demand by selling out games. Soldout games means more people want to be full time, subs grab spots sooner and it snowballs.

It’s been so good to catch up again diary and clearly my hand writing skills are still top notch....

Site Down

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 17 May 2017 09:52:00 -0400

Some of you may have noticed that our site was down yesterday. We were heavily impacted by some changes in our hosting infrastructure. It was a long day but our service should be back to normal today. If you accepted or declined any upcoming games yesterday, please head back to your dashboard and make sure your attendance is correct for those games.

Apologies but outages happen, this is our first major one and hopefully our last for a while. Thanks for your patience and support.

More Kitchener Waterloo Pickup Hockey!

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 11:56:00 -0400

Hey, we have a few weekly games in Kitchener Waterloo who are open to having ‘rookies’ jump in. For each game, you can jump in and grab a spot in this week’s skate using the link below. Or if you can’t make it, register to get invited each week for that game.

Tuesday Night
This is a new game starting this week. It’ll be 30 to 50 age bracket, a good paced skate. They are in need of some goalies right now but will take on lot’s of skaters as well.

Note, this game says Lion’s right now but these are actually at Activa, we’ll update that shortly.

Grab a spot

Friday Afternoon
This is a long standing game. It’s a bit faster paced so make sure you’re up for a good skate and have played the game at a decent level in the past.

Grab a spot

Looking For More Hockey?

Make sure you’ve filled in our ‘Play More Hockey’ form if you’re looking for more pickup. We’ll email you when we have other games looking for skaters.

Run Your Private Pickup Hockey (get your time back!)

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 09:59:00 -0400

We are clearly not marketers as we have yet to successfully articulate what we do here at 20Skaters. I know this because I get asked the following question way too often....

“Hey, someone who plays in the weekly pickup hockey game I organize told me about your system. They used it as a player in a pickup game this summer and loved it.

I run a weekly game of pickup but my question is, can I just invite my players? I already have a good list of skaters, we’re a good group and I only want to invite them.”

So, my clarification is....yes, 100% yes! That is precisely what we built this for. As an organizer, you manage your lineup of players. It is fully in your control. We do NOT add or even invite players to your weekly game. We simply take all your admin work off your plate.

Each week we invite your paid full timers in first. They can accept or decline for free, as they’ve already paid you for the entire season. Then a few days later we start inviting your subs in. Those subs pay online to secure a spot in that week’s game.

On gameday, we email a reminder to everyone who’s committed to playing. That’s it, you are in control, it’s your game!

If you happen to need some new players then we’re happy to spread the word and invite new people to your game. If you get a ‘rookie’ out then after the game you can decide if you want to keep them in your lineup so they get invites each week. Or you can move them to inactive if they didn’t fit in well with your group and they won’t be invited again.

That’s it. You buy the ice and manage your roster, we’ll take care of everything else!

The Good Old Hockey Game....is Back!

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 07 Oct 2015 11:47:00 -0400

For you NHL players who made your team’s roster, the good news is....you get to play in the NHL today! The bad news is you’ll have to wait a bit longer before you can enjoy the game the way it should be played, pickup, with friend…without stripes!

Welcome back!

What Pickup Hockey is all about: First Goal!

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 07:48:00 -0400

There’s no referees, whistles or announcers, just 20 guys playing the game they love. The skill levels vary, the bounces are crazy, and the goalies get little rest. But we love it.

Pickup hockey is about more than competition. That’s why we love what we do at 20Skaters. Helping organizers put an optimal number of players on the ice makes it more fun for everyone. More importantly, we love when we get to hear the tales of glory from our wonderful and growing group of pickup warriors.

Our friend ‘stevetehpirate’ recently broke down the first goal he scored playing drop-in hockey. Not everyone is Sidney Crosby out there; for most of us scoring is hard work. I’ll let ‘steve’ tell it himself, “Got in front of the net. Actually caught a pass. Somehow, put it up top, glove side… blocked. Snagged the rebound and pushed the puck through the swarm of sticks towards five hole. Easy pad save. Snagged the rebound yet again and tucked between the post and the goalie’s skate before falling backwards on my ass.”

It doesn’t have to look pretty. As they say, “there’s no pictures on the score board.” Perseverance is everything in hockey.

We were thrilled that he was sporting his brand new 20Skaters jersey. When we get him the dark version, he might just turn into Alex Ovechkin.

This story reminds us that there’s always that guy out there with you, grinding hard, trying to bury his first, even though you already have 5 tonight. Put the puck on that guy’s stick, and give him the opportunity. It might not work out, because as Steve put it “Give me a soccer net and I’ll still have a tough time.” Yet, when guys like him are scoring, everyone is having a good time.

Because after all, that’s what pickup hockey is all about. As he mentions “conked my head on the ice, which might have hurt if I wasn’t so damn happy.” We were happy for you too!

Handling Last Minute Pick-up Hockey Dropouts

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 09 Sep 2015 07:48:00 -0400

Your phone buzzes. Before you look at it, you already know what the message is going to say: “Sorry man, something came up, I can’t make hockey tonight.” One guy short is fine, but your phone vibrates again, with more bad news. It’s a few hours before game time, and the guys you recently turned away have already made plans.

Last minute pick-up dropouts infuriate the entire squad, and make you look bad as an organizer. When you go into the room to tell them we’re short this week, again, you know they’re going to let you have it. They told you your buddy was unreliable a million times, and they have at least 3 friends who would play each week.

Now instead of organizing a friendly pick-up game, you’ve become some combo of politician, mediator, and judge all in one. Why deal with the hassle? You’re doing this as a favour to the rest of the gang, and these dropouts are killing morale.

Stop Dealing with Dropouts

With 20Skaters, we send out email notifications throughout the week, including gameday reminders to attending skaters. Players have to sign up in advance with our first-come-first-serve system. You can still give you main guys priority, but have a larger list when spaces need to be filled.

We’ve found that the commitment level rises and dropout rates decrease dramatically with 20Skaters. The commitment-phobes with their last minute decisions are forced to make up their minds early in the week – otherwise their spot is gone. How much are you willing to bet that your buddy who cancels last-minute, every other week will get his shit together in a hurry?

Obviously slackers make up only a percentage of your dropouts. Things come up, including emergencies. You can’t blame guys for ditching pick-up if something more important comes up, because after-all, it’s for fun. Falling asleep on the couch is not an excuse!

Our system is designed to deal with last-minute dropouts, and will send out emails to the guys who didn’t get in, letting them know a space is available. You’re more than welcome to manually reach out, but we take that hassle off your hands. No more frantic calls a few hours before game time; we’ll make sure you have a full 20 Skaters.

Hit Them Where it Hurts

Their wallets. With 20Skaters, your subs are required to pre-pay via credit card in order to save their spot. If they cancel last minute, the money is already in your hands. You get to decide if they get it back or not. If they’ve already paid, we seriously doubt they’ll cancel for anything less than a solid reason. If they do, well, you’re not losing money!

Our goal is always to put 20 skaters, and 2 goalies on the ice, week in and week out for your pick-up hockey game. Last minute dropouts can be a pain in the ass, hurting the quality of your game, and your finances.

Let us be the bad guys. We’ll get your slackers back in line, and back on the ice. You can get back to the beach!

How many Skaters do you need for Pickup Hockey?

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 08:54:00 -0400

It’s every pick-up hockey organizer’s biggest dilemma. How many skaters do I need to have on my list? Well, there’s a reason we call ourselves 20Skaters. As you probably know by now, twenty is ideal for ensuring a competitive and cost effective game.

Having too few or too many players can ruin the experience, or hurt you financially. Organization is the key, but investing your time into spreadsheets and frantic, last-minute messages is too stressful for your thankless job. Here are some pitfalls to avoid, and ways to ensure you get 20 skaters every time:

Need more Skaters

You have a guy down on one knee behind the red-line, struggling to get up. Another player is standing alone at centre ice, waiting for his sixth break-away pass in a row. The lone guy on the bench looks like he might have a heart attack. Worst of all, you lost $100 on the game, putting you deeper in the hole. Sound familiar?

Having too few players ruins the competitiveness of the game, and will lead to you personally financing the games. It isn’t always because your roster is limited and/or simultaneous vacations; you might need better organization and more reliable players.

Too many Skaters

When guys are changing in the middle of the room, you probably have too many skaters (or play in a really old arena). Having anything more than 1 set of subs (20 skaters total) can ruin the experience, and lead to resentment from the guys. Every pick-up hockey game has one or two players who take 5 minute shifts, even when there’s 8 guys waiting on the bench.

While it might benefit you in the short term financially, having too many skaters will eventually lead to guys finding other games to play in. Your impressive roster will cease to function if you start losing your core guys in droves.

How we can help

20Skaters takes the hassle out of organization. You can rank your players, listing your core guys, secondary, and tertiary skaters. We handle emailing your players, confirming attendance, processing payments, and following up with your last minute bailers. We don’t mind being the bad guy.

For games that need more skaters, we have a substantial list of pick-up hockey players who can fill in during your slow weeks. We monitor the confirmations so that we can take action if you are short guys in the days leading up to the game. You might even find someone to permanently replace an unreliable player!

Best of all, our system works for you. Adding a last minute friend of a friend is simple and easy.

For organizers with too many skaters on their list, our process is straightforward. You set up the core guys who have guaranteed spots every week, the rest get to play based on first-come, first-serve confirmations. Those last-minute Larry’s you keep having to harass two-hours before game time? You better believe they’ll be signing up when our first email goes out.

Make sure to avoid oversubscription

If you grow your list too quickly, you could end up with too many full-time guys. Always keep your core guys happy, and add only when you need to.

If more than twenty skaters show up, it’s an easy process of elimination to determine who didn’t sign up. We know from experience that the guys who play by the rules will help you put the pressure on the slackers.

Finding Two Goalies for your Pickup Hockey Game

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 17:18:00 -0400

It’s two minutes to game time and there’s only one tender in the room. As the Zamboni finishes flooding the ice, the guys groan as they realize they’re shooting at an empty net. Again.

If this sounds all too familiar, you understand the difficulty in finding two goalies for your pickup hockey game. Nobody likes shooting for posts, even for only half the game. Instead of continuing to disappoint the rest of the squad, there are a number of simple ways to avoid busting out the old goalie tarp.

Treat them with respect

Goalies are fickle. They know how important they are. The next time one of your skaters ices the goalie as they’re covering the puck, remind them of a few things:

You can easily get along without that skater, but not the goalie
Goalies have to work harder than everyone else
Goalies are in demand. They don’t need your game

Treat them with respect. There’s a reason why NHL teams leave their goalies in peace in the locker room. They are, without a doubt, the most important player on the ice. The same goes for pick-up hockey.

They don’t pay

This is a general rule for pick-up games. Goalies should always play for free. It’s simple supply and demand; you need them more than they need you. Plus, their equipment costs significantly more.

When pricing your game, always exclude tenders in your calculation. Your squad should be more than happy to shell out a couple extra dollars to ensure that there’s two keepers every week.

Have a back-up

Versatility is the name of the game. Ask your skaters if they know someone who could step in at the last minute if needed. They might even be a better fit than your regular goalies.

Some guys might even have two sets of gear. Treat them like the Gods that they are. Having a solid plan B in case of an emergency always helps. It’s up to you to decide if these guys should pay when they play as skaters. Work it out on a case-by-case basis, but remember, lugging two sets of gear to the arena every week is a hassle. It might not be a bad idea to let them play for a discounted price.

Rentals

Pick-up hockey goalies know their value. That’s why some guys have made some serious cash on the side by renting out their services. You can check out your local Kijiji listings (we’re not kidding), social media, or rental websites. The costs can range anywhere from $30-$50/hr depending on local availability. It’s not ideal, but it beats an empty net.

Managing your Game

You can avoid most of the headaches of finding two goalies for your pick-up hockey game by getting 20Skaters to manage your game. Our extensive list of local hockey players, including goalies, is a great resource for filling the creases in your game.

Our game management system allows organizers to see exactly how many confirmed players they have in a given week, including goalies. Players are sent a series of emails throughout the week, reminding them to confirm or decline their attendance. To avoid any payment hassle, players designated as goalies don’t have to pay.

For those that live in the GTA: if for any reason you’re short a keeper and we don’t have an available fill-in on our list, contact the guys at Goalie911. They’ll give you a $5 discount just for telling them you’re signed up with 20Skaters.

Even after you have two solid regulars, stressing about potential no-shows or last minute emergencies can ruin the fun of pick-up hockey. 20Skaters takes the hassle out of organizing your game. Stop worrying, and enjoy your game.

Comments

Archived from the original blog. Comments are closed.

Niki 2015-08-23

Good Read. Super interested in speaking shortly, I'm interested in how 20skaters is doing and curious to know how I can help. PS we'll soon make it even easier to find a goalie at a moments notice :) - Niki (Founder - www.Puckapp.ca)

Brydon 2015-08-24

Sounds like a plan...you can reach me at brydon at 20skaters.com when you want to connect!

Adult Hockey Practice?

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 27 Apr 2015 07:38:00 -0400

Most adult (beer league) hockey players I know have taken significant time off from hockey at some point. For me, I stopped playing the game entirely for about 15 years. I didn’t even go public skating during those years.

Whether you’ve taken a long stretch off, or you’re new to the game, you know you need practice and possibly some coaching. Playing drop-in, and games, is obviously the point but being able to practice, having lot’s of time with the puck, work on skills is required to really improve your game

If you’re in the Guelph, Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge area then checkout Eric Calder’s programs. Specifically, Eric runs an adult power skills and power skating programs once each week. It’s 70 minutes which means the beer will taste great after!

Pickup Hockey...without the ice!

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 16:02:00 -0400

It’s that sad time of year. The snow has melted, the backyard rinks are an ugly mess and the city has pulled most of the ice out of the rinks.

While there is lot’s of summer pickup ice hockey games already underway, we’re also excited to see John from HockeyTron.ca starting up a weekly inline pickup hockey game.

Haven’t heard of inline hockey? Well melt the snow remaining in your ears my cave dwelling friend, this is hockey…without the ice! The beauty of playing with John is that you can also rent inline equipment from him to try the sport out!

John’s weekly pickup hockey game is Thursday nights in Waterloo at 10pm. From his 20Skaters page, you can click Attend to play this week, click Register if you want to know about a future game.

Kitchener Rangers Playoff Game

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 09:24:00 -0400

We have a suite tonight at the OHL playoff game between the Kitchener Rangers and the London Knights. We only have 8 tickets and we’d like to offer them up to 20Skaters players. The cost of the suite is covered so you only have to pony up for the ticket cost.

If you’re an active organizer with us, it’s free as we’re covering the ticket cost as a thanks for being an early organizer with us!

Grab a spot on the game page if you can join us?

Canadian musicians and pickup hockey

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 10:30:00 -0400

Ever heard of the Exclaim Cup, aka The Hockey Summit of the Arts? It’s an annual hockey tournament, held on Easter weekend. There are some unique aspects to this 30+ team tournament to say the least. Teams not only play hockey but they also play live music sets at the evening Hootenannies at The Horseshoe. There’s also live rink rock playing at the games when the puck’s not in play.

If you’re a musician, actor, or otherwise make your living in an artistic manner AND you can play hockey, you have to find your way into this tournament. With teams from Montreal, Halifax and several from Vancouver, this is the pinnacle of music + hockey!

I’ve been lucky to play in the tournament off and on for over a decade, starting with the legendary Three Gut Feelings.

This weekend I’ll be playing with the Guelph Royal Pains who have brought a trophy home the past two years. Along with catching as much of the live music as I can, I’ll be working on spreading the word about organizing pickup hockey using 20Skaters. I’m bringing along my friend John from HockeyTron as well. We should have some sticks for folks to try out and we will have some gifts and giveaways.

See you this weekend, make sure to find our setup and say hey!

Big data for your pickup hockey game!

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 10:18:00 -0400

We’re working on end of season statistics for our weekly games. We have a lot of interesting data about our games, we want to share it with our organizers and the players in their games. We need your help figuring out what stats you’d like to see?

If you play in a regular game with us then please take less than 5 minutes to fill in this form letting us know what data interests you? If you aren’t a 20Skaters player today then join now, then go fill out stats form! If you organizer a weekly game, start organizing with us so we can provide you and your skaters stats!

Automate Your Weekly Pickup Hockey

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 16 Mar 2015 15:47:00 -0400

The best people to explain a product or service are it’s customers. I love hearing our 20Skaters organizers pitch our service to other people. I learn something new everytime I witness this.

I once heard it explained as an RSVP service for your pickup hockey game. My favourite recent pitch was that we are a pickup hockey automation service.

Based on the fact we automate your pickup hockey enough that you can run it while living on a beach, I suppose it works. Know someone spending hours each week responding to emails, texts and phone calls in an attempt to run a pickup hockey game, let them know about our automation service!

Some other testimonials from our organizers....

“With 2 games every week I thought it should be possible to automate the process, and keep the games full each week, and it has worked”, Tom in Ottawa

“I’m happy to say that I am no longer subsidizing the game I love playing on a weekly basis, which makes it that much more enjoyable to play.”, Keith in Guelph

“20Skaters has saved me countless hours organizing this year’s skate, it has simplified the process of collecting money from subs, and ensured a better turnout for us overall at our games this year. We are sold on 20skaters”, Danny in Toronto

Pickup Hockey, Uber and Corridor Principle

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 14:59:00 -0400

With the proliferation of ‘Uber for x’ businesses out there today, I hesitate to reference Uber but here goes…

1) Ever heard of Uber? If you haven’t, they are a multi-billion dollar company that is completely disrupting the way people move around cities.

2) Ever heard of the corridor principle? In a nutshell, you have no clue what doors(options) are available to you until you start walking down the hallway.

1 + 2) Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick openly admits that Uber was a fun lifestyle business when it began. “In the beginning, it was a lifestyle company. You push a button and a black car comes up. Who’s the baller?”

Even Uber alludes to the fact they may not have mapped out where they are today back when they began. While it applies to Uber as a business, the corridor principle applies equally as well to customers. While few people would describe the process of taking a taxi as pleasant, they also weren’t actively complaining. Until Uber allowed us to start walking down the hallway, we didn’t know what options were available and how much better the experience could become.

To date, every organizer who has tried automating their weekly pickup hockey game with us is still with us today. Until you experience it, it’s difficult to imagine how annoying, painful and time consuming it is to run a game. Chasing full timers to see if they’re coming this week, chasing subs to commit, last minute drop outs, forgot my wallet, this sucks why do we only have 11 skaters, and on and on....

“It’s working, I’ve completely ditched my old spreadsheet entirely and love not chasing money and having it just flow into my bank account”, Tom (two game per week organizer in Ottawa)

If you play pickup hockey, trust us when we say that your organizer spends way too much time and money running it for you. Let them know about 20Skaters and suggest they fully automate their weekly game!

Organize Your Pickup Hockey...from the beach

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 16:34:00 -0500

It’s easy for us to say that we reduce the amount of time required to organize your weekly pickup hockey games. Yes, we email and invite your full timers in first. They accept or decline with us instead of phoning or texting you. Then we invite your subs and get them to pay you online, ahead of time for sub spots. We automagically get your game to 20Skaters each week.

We can say all that but it’s a lot better to share real stories. My latest story is about an organizer of ours named Tom.

Tom currently organizes two games every week with us in Ottawa, Ontario. He’s considering adding a third game to his weekly schedule. His games typically sellout well in advance each week.

Tom is currently sitting on a beach in Hawaii. He’ll be there for about a month. While he sits on a beach soaking up the rays, his games continue to run as smooth as sand through his toes (yes I’m a poet).

Yes, Tom sent me this picture! He makes pickup hockey look great!

Pickup Hockey in Oregon

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 16:19:00 -0500

Last month we helped organize our first games in Oregon, specifically Eugene Oregon. That got us curious about the hockey scene in Oregon in general and Eugene specifically. Eugene is the second largest city in the state of Oregon with an estimated population of 159,000, which makes it just a bit larger than our home city here in Guelph, Ontario.

We asked our organizer Jake about the hockey scene and here’s what we learned.

There are 16 rec league teams with three skill divisions. About half of the teams in this league are apparently sponsored by local breweries. Those sponsorships often include beer for the team each game. Jake’s sponsorship includes four growlers each week for his team.

So a quick tangent here to peek at the beer situation in Eugene. This city has more than it’s fair share of beer and microbreweries. I’m starting to think a roadtrip is going to be required.

Back to hockey, Eugene has a tier three junior team named Eugene Generals. The University of Oregon also has a club team.

While our home city here in Canada sports eight busy ice surfaces, Eugene manages to survive with one. Their rink is a converted horse arena on the city fairgrounds. Previously called the Lane Center, it now goes by The Rink Exchange.

As with most cities, the age range for hockey and pickup play runs the gamut from 18 to late 60’s. Having grown up in a one rink town myself, I’m sure the hockey community is a tightknit one. We look forward to contributing to it in our own way by helping them run their pickup hockey. At the time of this post, every game we’ve helped run in Eugene has been a sellout!

How Team Selection Works

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 16:35:00 -0500

We have a new optional feature that has us selecting teams for your weekly game. Our hope is that this will save you and your crew time each week. You won’t have to pick teams and every skater coming on the ice doesn’t have to count up darks and whites before stepping on the ice. I also have a dream that it cuts down on the number of yellows and reds! As well, hopefully it allows the games to start quicker and make good use of your ice time.

Currently, it’s random but as an organizer, you can adjust the lineup behind the scenes if you want. We have a lot planned for this feature, including having captains pick teams and even the ability to make some trades. For now we’re keeping it simple, I wanted to share some details on how it works today.

Game Page

Every player is assigned to the white or dark team when they join a game. They can immediately see which team they’re on based on the white or dark jersey by their username on the game page.

Changing The Teams

As an organizer, you can go ‘Behind the scenes’ on your game page to see the current numbers for each team. Under the team column, you can see which team each player is currently assigned to. Clicking on “change team” flips them to the other team.

That’s it, simple as pie. When we send out our gameday reminders to the people playing in your game, we let them know what team they’re playing on.

Let us know if you want it turned on for your game?

Automatic Team Selection for Your Pickup Hockey!

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 14:40:00 -0500

Our goal at 20Skaters is to make lives simpler for our pickup hockey organizers, saving them time and money each week, while making the experience for their players better.

We started with taking over their weekly game admin work, setting up a game page each week, handling all of their emailing and reminders, collecting sub payments etc. We’ve been working our way towards some of the more interesting and fun features, including the following which are rolling out this week....

Team Selection

At most pickup hockey games, team selection is effectively random and requires ongoing balancing as folks are coming onto the ice. That means that every skater stepping on the ice has to count up the dark and white jerseys to decide which they should be. It’s not complicated but it’s annoying.

Starting this week, organizers can have us pick teams for them. As each skater joins a game, they are assigned to dark or white team. The organizer can adjust and balance the teams behind the scenes if they’d like. When we email our gameday reminder to each skater, we’ll remind them what colour they are wearing today.

For our games that do select teams which span multiple games, we will soon be adding the ability for you to assign a default team to each skater in your lineup.

Hopefully this results in less counting, less balancing, and we can get games started sooner, which means more icetime!

My Scheduled Games

One of our organizers, Tom from Ottawa, recently sent us a wicked list of his dream features. In that list, he mentioned that he bookmarked his upcoming games page and often started from this page. We’ve now added a “My Scheduled Games” link to our main navigation to make this simpler.

Note that for some of our organizers, we’re still generating your game each week so this list could be short.

Attendance Change Notifications

Another one we’ve heard from Tom and others is that they’d like to know when previously accepted skaters decline. Currently we email organizers when a new player chooses to attend your game. We’re expanding that definition so that we will now notify you when the number of attending skaters for your game changes, either up or down.

By the way, if you don’t want these ‘attendance change’ emails at all, we can turn them off for your game.

Comments

Archived from the original blog. Comments are closed.

Andrew 2015-01-28

Have you heard of http://hockey-community.com? You guys remind me of them. Keep up the great work, would love to see more choices out on the west coast!

Brydon 2015-01-28

of course we've heard of them! Our focus is a bit more narrow, we certainly have a tight community but we're laser focused on helping people run their weekly pickup hockey games and that's it.

You're finding HC useful for yourself?

Want To Run Pickup Hockey?

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 15:41:00 -0500

Obviously the main thing we do is help others organize their weekly pickup hockey game. I also book my own ice now and again and run pickup. I’ve recently had a few folks ask if I’m going to run regular pickup. My answer is always no....

but you should rent some ice and I’ll help you run it and fill it!

I figured I should make a wider offer along those lines. If you want to run pickup hockey, I’m happy to help you do that. In our popular cities, we have a large set of skaters who have already filled in our “Find More Hockey” application. I can invite all those folks to your skate. If we’re not yet busy in that city then we can actively work on finding more players before you actually book your ice.

Bottom line, we love pickup hockey. If you’re contemplating running some, we’re here to help so don’t hesitate to ask! It may be easier than you think!

Drafting Pickup Hockey Teams

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 11:49:00 -0500

Something fun that we’re working on is allowing our pickup hockey organizers to pick teams for their weekly games. We all know that the way to pick teams for pickup hockey is the age old tradition of tossing sticks. Everyone puts their stick into a pile and someone closes their eyes and tosses sticks one at a time towards either net. Whatever side your stick lands, welcome to your new team!

Tossing Sticks

This first step is simple, just let each player know whether they’re wearing black or white for today’s skate. This is just random team selection, tossing sticks. We’ll include that information when we email our gameday reminder to each player on the day of the skate. It should cut down on each person having to count up skaters before they decide what colour to put on.

So where’s the fun? We want to move beyond random team selection. I wanted to share some ideas we’re playing with. I’m hoping to get some feedback and thoughts on where we should go with this? Please comment below or email me directly with any thoughts.

Balancing Teams

With this approach, we randomly select teams for week one. After the game’s over, we find out which team ‘won’. Each player on the winning team is assigned a point. We randomly select teams the following week, however, over time we start to factor player point totals into the team selection. The hope being to balance teams over time.

Obviously this requires keeping score in some fashion each week. That could be as simple as the organizer choosing a winning side.

Captains

Each week we select two captains. Those captains pick teams, pretty straightforward.

Fantasy Sports

This one’s a bit out there but could be fun. We randomly select teams as skaters sign up. Each attending player is then allowed to make one trade each week. That trade allows them to swap a player on one team with one of the other team. We could either allow that trade to happen immediately. Or we could build in an approval model. Maybe the organizers have to approve trades or the players being traded?

This one’s obviously a bit more involved but provided we build the UI so it’s light weight and fast to interact with, it could be a lot of fun.

Gift for Pickup Hockey Player

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 12 Dec 2014 12:01:00 -0500

If your significant other, kid’s, or parent’s are trying to find that perfect gift for you, send them to this page!

We’ve whipped up the perfect gift for the pickup hockey player. It includes your black/white pair of practice jerseys so you’re no longer the guy wearing red that no one passes to at pickup hockey. As well, we’ve included a coach’s pack of tape and some pucks.

We only have a few of these left so contact us directly if you’d like one. We’re selling them for $80 + HST and shipping.

20Skaters Holiday Package includes:

1 white practice jersey
1 black practice jersey
6 rolls of clear tape
1 roll of white tape
1 roll of black tape
2 hockey pucks

Practice Hockey Jersey Sets For Sale

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 16:14:00 -0500

We have the perfect Christmas gift for that person in your life who shows up to every pickup game sporting a yellow, red or grey sweater! Buy them a pair of 20Skaters practice jerseys, one white and one black!

For a short time, we’re selling these in pairs for $60+HST, includes shipping in Canada. If you’re interested, just email us directly! If you’re in the US, there will be a small additional charge for shipping.

If you’re a 20Skaters organizer and interested in a team set, we can help there as well.

Free Hockey Equipment?

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 26 Nov 2014 16:51:00 -0500

We help you organize awesome weekly pickup hockey games. We take over all of your admin work. We invite your skaters in, in rounds, and your subs pay online ahead of time to secure a spot. Our goal is reasonably simple, do everything we can to sell out your weekly game of pickup hockey.

“Their product has saved me countless hours organizing this year’s skate, it has simplified the process of collecting money from subs, and it has ensured a better turnout for us overall at our games this year”, Danny

After quietly building up our platform, we’re now ready to work with more organizers. To that end, we’re developing a referral program as we realize it takes time on your part to talk us up.

If you know someone organizing weekly pickup hockey, tell then about us! Email them a link to our How It Works page, tweet about us, and like our Facebook page. Once they’ve organized a few games with us we’ll send you one of the following, your choice, as a thank you.*

Twelve rolls of clear shinpad tape.
New Tron visor.
A 20Skaters practice jersey (your choice of black or white).

We’ll also send the organizer you referred a new puck bag with 10 pucks. As they say in survivor, “worth playing for?”

* Currently only within Canada because of shipping restrictions.

Finding Goalies for Pickup Hockey

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 14:53:00 -0500

Being short a few skaters on the bench is tolerable but we all know two goalies is a must! If you’re organizing pickup hockey with us, our advice is always to grow your goalie sub list as much as you can. Once you have two goalies registered for your next game, we stop emailing and inviting your sub goalies. So there’s no drawback in having as many goalies on your sub list as possible.

If you find yourself chasing last minute goalies often, there are a few suggestions to help.

Ask for help from your skaters, let them know you want more goalie subs. Send a quick email to your lineup asking for their help. From your Manage My Players page, click your yellow Email all players button and ask your skaters to help you recruit some more goalies.
Rent a goalie. If you’re in a larger city, renting goalies is always an option. Prices tend to range from $30 to $50 per hour. As well, Mike and the team at Goalies911 are offering 20Skaters organizers $5 off if you need a tender. Make sure to mention that you’re a 20Skaters organizer when you phone Mike.

As requested by our organizers, longer term we plan to build deeper integrations with services like Goalies911. This will allow you to easily rent a goalie through your dashboard or have us do that automatically if you still need a goalie close to gametime.

Filling Your Pickup Hockey Game

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 17:10:00 -0500

Last week one of our organizers asked us if we could “serve up a Mack Daddy Super Duper banana split?” The banana split he was referring to was a feature he wanted us to build.

For our weekly games, the first thing we do is invite in your full time, paid for the season skaters. They can accept or decline directly from that email. After a couple of days we start to invite in subs who are able to purchase spots in that week’s game if they are available.

Currently if your weekly pickup hockey game is soldout and someone then declines on the day of the game, our team at 20Skaters is notified. That allows us to take some action to get your game back to 20 skaters.

What Rick asked us for was, sorry if this starts to look like pseudo-code....

If there are full-timer, paid skaters in who have not yet replied for this game
And someone drops out last minute, moving the game from being soldout to having room for skaters

Then we send an email to those full timers saying something like “Hey, this week’s game just had a spot open up. Quickly accept now to reserve your spot before a sub grabs it!”

The tricky balance we have is trying to fill all our weekly games while ensuring your paid full timers have spots if they can make it out. This new ‘banana split’ should help and we’ll be releasing it in the coming weeks.

A Skeery Weekend for Updates

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 17:04:00 -0500

Over the past few months we’ve been busy rearchitecting our game management and message scheduling area. It’s been a massive amount of work that puts us in a great position moving forward. It should quickly eliminate any anomalies in our game related messages week to week and allow us to run a lot more games for our pickup hockey organizers.

Unfortunately we literally pushed this release into production last Friday, on the scariest day of the year. We have since uncovered some gremlins in the machine, the ugly ones of course.

Hopefully you don’t spot any but if you encounter any issues with our site, apologies and feel free to contact us directly about the issue and we’ll work on fixing it asap!

Make Your Own Pickup Hockey Shoulder Pads

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 10:33:00 -0400

I know we all want to have shoulders like Shanahan right? As compared to a lot of pro players today, Shanahan and others appeared to not even be wearing shoulder pads. They were but they wore low profile shoulder pads that were hardly noticeable.

BEEP..............

[Pause for public service announcement…hockey is a dangerous sport. You should always be safe, wear proper equipment. You should never modify equipment. I’m not advocating you to wear less equipment as that would be dangerous.]

Most of us are long past our days of playing full body contact hockey. Personally I haven’t worn shoulder pads in well over a decade. Yes, I’ve had the odd puck shaped bruise but otherwise any major damage like breaks and dislocations, large shoulder pads aren’t going to prevent.

If you’re looking for lower profile, Shanahan like, shoulder pads, I have a few options. One is to hunt around on ebay for old school, used shoulder pads. Some companies are manufacturing new low profile pads but they can be hard to come by.

Another option is to make your own by modifying existing shoulder pads. First, find and purchase used shoulder pads that you like. You need to find shoulder pads that have the large hard shoulder cap as a separate attached piece. The only modification you need to make is to simply cut off the large plastic shoulder cap, as you can see in these photos.

What you’re left with are light, low profile shoulder pads that will protect you from an errant puck, slash or crosscheck without feeling like you’re robocop. If you need more shoulder pads than that for your pickup hockey....well maybe you’re playing with the wrong crew?

[edit. A few comments were generated over on a reddit post sharing this.]

You Can Always Return to Hockey

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 28 Oct 2014 12:53:00 -0400

Here in Canada, most of us start to run out of youth hockey leagues in our mid-teens. Unless you’re playing high level hockey, the available house leagues start to dry up around the age of 16.

I played some rep level hockey growing up but I stopped playing cold turkey around the age of 16. A lot of it is lack of interest and better things to do with your time. Even if you want to keep playing, the leap between youth hockey and playing men’s league is a large one. By the time I was in my mid twenties I honestly didn’t think I’d ever play hockey again and wasn’t concerned about it.

In my early thirties, a friend I was commuting to work with kept inviting me to play with their hockey team named The Klowns....

“I haven’t played hockey in over 15 years.”

“Do you have equipment?”

“Ahh I think my kid equipment is in my parent’s basement.”

“Can you skate backwards?”

“I mostly played D as a kid.”

“Just come out, you’ll probably be our best player.”

I went into my parent’s basement and dug out my childhood hockey equipment. After not having even laced up skates in about 15 years, I headed to the rink. I played that night and didn’t make a complete fool of myself. I went back again the next week and after a few months I was starting to purchase pieces of gear to replace my kid stuff.

Fast forward to today, I play 3 to 5 times each week and have been for a decade or more. If you’ve had a taste for the sport of hockey and have even the slightest interest in returning, what are you waiting for? You don’t have to find a team or play competitive hockey, just find yourself a great local game of pickup hockey.

PS. If your skates are more than 15 years old, replace them once you know you’re going to play regularly! I really wish someone had told me that.

How Much Do I Charge For Pickup Hockey?

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 15:50:00 -0400

The short answer is just assume you are NOT charging your skaters enough! While we have a lot of financially healthy games, the majority are not breaking even when they start with us. That stresses me out.

For games that use our system, we can reflect some very interesting data back to the organizers over time. What their average attendance is per game. Which full timers always respond late. Which full timers say yes I’m coming this week, then bail a few hours before game time.

The core question is always how much do I charge? The ideal scenario, from my experience, is that you have 20 paid full timers. You cover the bulk of your ice costs with those 20. You work with us to sell any available sub spots weekly. The money you collect from your subs quickly becomes gravy that you use to reduce your full timer fees next season.

This model works great as it encourages your full timers to respond early and accurately each week as they will see the rewards next season. As well, the lower your season fees, the simpler it is for you to have 20 full timers.

We have a very simple calculator on our homepage. I’m working on a more complicated version that’s intended to help organizer’s decide two things.

How much do I charge my full timers for the season?
How much do we charge our subs?

Have a look at the screenshot below which is the initial spreadsheet that I’m trying to simplify. The yellow background cells can be changed by you, the others are calculated. This allows you to play with how many subs you feel you’ll get, what you charge subs etc and see how that impacts what’s in the kitty at the end of the season.

You can see in the numbers below, this person would start the season $2000 in the hole. If they average 5 subs each week, they should quickly make that up. In this case, I would likely increase their season fees slightly to lower their risk. You can also see here that their full timers are only paying $14 per skate, assuming 75% attendance, which is a good deal versus the $20 sub cost. That’s a good incentive to pay for the season.

Helpful? Anything I can remove? What should be added?

20Skaters Fee Calculator

20Skaters League Champions

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 18:31:00 -0400

Yes we’re all about pickup hockey, however, so far in our history every men’s team we’ve ever sponsored has won their league!

Sure we’ve only ever sponsored one team but stats are stats. The 20Skaters team in Guelph’s NCWHL league won the B division and even took home a cup. Our friend Matt at DesigningSport worked his usual magic on the team photo!

Everyone Hates Skater #21

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 16:57:00 -0400

When it comes to pickup hockey, no one wants to be skater #21. The perfect number, as we all know, is 20 Skaters. Ten per bench, two full lines. Currently all our games are soldout once we reach 20. Done, closed for business, no others allowed in.

All of our organizers have full timers. Their full timers pay for the entire season, can attend any games and we always invite them in first. Currently, if a full timer tries to attend a soldout game, they aren’t able to. That’s bad for our organizers. All of our organizers would prefer that full timers can choose to join a game at anytime.

Our goal, however, is to sellout each week’s game. It’s difficult to do that if we have to allow for full timers to respond last minute or change their mind. This summer we’re making changes to allow a full timer to attend a game at any point. The only time this should result in 21 skaters is two scenarios:

A full timer, who previously declined this game, changed their mind and decided to attend last minute.
A full timer didn’t respond at all until last minute.

There’s always a chance life gets in the way and you end up being skater 21. We’re not looking to be heavy handed here but we also don’t want to open up a hole here that results us consistently overselling games. We want to find the optimum level of shame and peer pressure to gently encourage all full timers to reply in a timely manner.

An idea?

We get some lovely pink funfur skate covers made with the #21 on them. We provide a pair or two for all our organizers. In the case that week’s game has a skater #21, we email the organizer to let them know. They offer the pretty covers to skater #21 to wear for that night’s pickup game. Maybe we also decorate their avatar on the game page with some funfur?

Too much? Just enough? Not enough?

Pickup Hockey All-Stars!

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 28 May 2014 15:38:00 -0400

In case you didn’t know, we work out of the ThreeFortyNine coworking space. That means we work around other awesome folks all day long. One of those folks is Matt Sharpe of DaringBoy and DesigningSport fame. We briefly discussed the idea of doing something for pickup hockey folks. The only photo I could find to test was the one used in the Metro article.

Look what Matt did to me....enough said!

All I’ll add is…more coming soon!

Dark or White Sweater Only for Pickup Hockey!

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 11:21:00 -0400

I posted a somewhat pissy update on twitter yesterday before our pickup hockey game last night....

View this post on X/Twitter

Maybe it’s just a personal pet peeve but if you know you’re playing pickup hockey, leave the yellow, reds, and grey’s at home. Make sure you have a dark, as in black, and a white with you. Put one on and bring the other to the bench in case you need to flip teams to balance things out.

who's on what team?

It’s a subtle difference but it actually makes for a better game of pickup when you can clearly delineate teams. There’s nothing worse that having to contemplate “red’s dark or white?” everytime you lift your head to make a pass.

While I seriously doubt anyone read my update, I will report that we somehow ended up with only dark and whites last night and it was a lovely skate!

Comments

Archived from the original blog. Comments are closed.

Reg Dunlop 2014-03-18

Grey jersey wearers deserve a special place in hell

We Have Pretty!

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 17 Feb 2014 11:46:00 -0500

We have a new logo! You can see it on our main website. We’re also working on getting some sweaters made up.

We’re planning on offering them in a pair of home and away. Then you’ll be set to play for either side when you show up for pickup.

What have you LOST organizing hockey?

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 17:42:00 -0500

We’re working on a LOST ad to put up on rinks and hockey shops. The goal is to emphasize that we help you organize pickup hockey while losing less of your personal time and money. What’ya think?

If you live near Kitchener Ontario, Eric is running a game tomorrow night so join us! $10 including an after skate beer on us. Based on people already signed up, it’ll be an intermediate skill level.

Think Your Pickup Hockey Is Too Expensive?

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 13 Jan 2014 15:51:00 -0500

(Quotes below are testimonials from some of our current 20Skaters organizers)

“All summer I had to think about whether or not I was willing to continue losing $100 per week to organize and play pick up hockey.”

If you have yet to literally put your personal money down to purchase icetime to run your own pickup hockey game, you may genuinely be curious who’s making the profit on a game? If that’s you, let me save you some cash and share how the experience goes. First you pick an icetime and book it by paying $285+ on your personal credit card. You obviously don’t want to profit so you run the numbers and figure you’ll charge $14 each for 20 skaters which gets you $280. That means you actually paid $20 to skate in your own game but you don’t want to risk anyone thinking you’re not paying or you’re making money.

You then bust your ass emailing, phoning, texting and you get your 20 skaters confirmed. If you’re really lucky, only five of those people fall asleep, get drunk, have a date night etc on the night and flake out on you. Oh, and then there’s the two who forgot to hit the bank machine or forgot their wallet.

If you’re lucky you collect $14 from 15 skaters and only lose $75 hosting your first pickup hockey game. Yay! What comes next is the immediate decision that you’re never running a pickup hockey game again.

“It was costing me about $2000 a year to play 20 games, and that’s my best guess, because it was very hard to do accurate bookkeeping with money here and there and promises to pay next week, etc.”

Here’s the simple truth. Most (read: all) people organizing regular pickup hockey are losing money doing it.

We encourage our organizers to charge more than they first estimate. You can always lower it but more importantly all it takes is one poorly attended game to wipe out that $10 ‘profit’ you earned on the previous few games. If you actually end up with cash at the end of the year, you can throw a ‘team’ party with extra funds. Or you can always lower next year’s season fees.

“20Skaters is saving me a ton of money, and making it a whole lot easier to organize the weekly scrimmage.”

End of day, we love pickup hockey and want more of it. Organizers losing money will not get us there so if you’re playing pickup hockey, pay your organizer early and often! If you’re organizing, we can help!

Taping Your Hockey Stick...Right To The Toe

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 05 Dec 2013 09:43:00 -0500

In watching HNIC this past weekend, they showed a clip of Ovechkin taping his stick before a shootout. I barked at the TV “he’s using my technique!”

So clearly watching Ovie tape his stick in a similar fashion means I must have seen someone do this in the past. I don’t recall and honestly thought I had come up with it myself. Let’s just assume I stole it from Ovie! Regardless of patents and copyrights, I figured I’d share how I tape my stick all the way to the toe of the stick.

First, tape your stick as you normally would. In my case I’m going heel to toe. When you reach the end of your stick and the stick starts to curve into the toe shape, stop pulling the tape tightly. Instead, start to lay the tape down. Don’t worry about how big and ugly and how much tape you use. The only key is that you don’t want any creases, which you’ll get if you’re pulling it tight.

Now you should have a tab of tape at the end of your stick. Now fold that tape back and forth to flattened and seal the tape to the stick as best you can.

Now get a pair of sharp scissors, as Ovie apparently uses, or a utility knife which is how I roll. Trim the excess tape off. Don’t worry about trimming it too tight as the tape ideally remains sealed together…like a nice pizza pocket!

That’s basically it. I rub all the tape using a puck to seal it all together well, including around the end where there’s likely some fringe left from your pizza pocket.

Personally I also wax it using cheap tealight candles but I’m not sure there’s any point to that except to give me another pre-game ritual. If you do wax, I usually squeeze the blade and run my hands down the blade after. This warms the wax and spreads it out. (hmm..wonder what SEO will do with those last two sentences?)

The final product!

Frameworks for Running Pickup Hockey?

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 13:57:00 -0500

Framework likely isn’t the correct term but neither is rules or how-to. What I wanted to share are a few of the ways I’ve seen pickup hockey games actually run. I’m curious to hear any comments and suggestions on how you’re running your games?

Picking Teams?

Obviously the intent here to achieve some semblance of balance. Typically the person organizing the game has the most knowledge of skater’s skill levels. Some games, the organizer selects the teams, telling each skater who should wear dark or white. Another option is to pick two captains and literally pick teams in the dressing room. The obvious annoying part here is someone gets picked last.

Most games leave this to randomness in that people jump on the ice with whatever sweater they put on. Then during warmup, the organizer works on adjusting to get the numbers per side correct and possibly some balance.

On our side, we’re testing some features where we select teams for our games. One has us informing you of your team in your gameday reminder. Then we keep track of which team ‘won’. We assign a point to each player on the winning team. The idea of the points is to allow us to balance the teams each better each week.

Keeping Score?

The most common approach is to not formally keep score. In this case goalies typically switch ends of the rink at the halfway point. My personal preference, however, is that you do keep score, playing mini-games to 5. When the first team reaches 5, your goalies switch ends and you start a new mini-game.

Resetting the score between mini-games helps to keep one team from completely running up the score. It can quickly become demotivating if you’re down 10 - 2, even in pickup.

We also have some regular weekly games who maintain teams from week to week, as best they can. They run a bit of a season where they keep track of wins. I believe at the end of the season the losing team pays for food and drinks on a night out.

Christmas Pickup Hockey...HoHoHockey?

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 15:02:00 -0500

I’ve personally hosted a game of pickup hockey or two over the past few holiday seasons. I often bundle it with tickets to a Guelph Storm game. We’re on the ice around 4pm, shower and grab some food and then catch a local OHL game.

A friend of mine used to run a similar game. He would pay for the ice and to play you had to bring a food or toy for donation.

With people taking time off work, the holidays are a great time to grab some extra icetime and host a holiday pickup hockey. To encourage and support this we’re working on a December promotion. It’s early in our planning and would love your thoughts and input?

Here’s what we’re thinking. We help you organize your holiday pickup by using 20Skaters. We donate 100% of our fees, not simply profit, for these holiday skates to a charity we’re working on lining up. You encourage your skaters to bring a non-perishable food donation that you gather and donate to a local foodbank project.

The more games we organize together, the larger the cheque we write on behalf of us and your skaters. I’d love to hear any feedback, ideas we should consider incorporating into this?

PS…of course I already grabbed a domain name....

Know a Pickup Organizer? Get You Some Hockey Loot!

Brydon Gilliss — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 14:45:00 -0500

While there’s a lot more coming, our product’s core value today is helping a pickup hockey organizer. If you’ve purchased some icetime, or regular weekly icetime, we need to talk!

We began working with most of our current organizers because of referrals from skaters in our existing games. We really like referrals as the best people to explain our product are you folks already familiar with it. We recognize that referring people takes up some of your time so we wanted to thank those folks who take the time to do so.

The plan’s simple. Periodically we go shopping and assemble a variety of hockey related gifts. I have the lovely job today of shopping for, and building, our first set of referral thank you packages. This first pack includes Bauer Premium hockey socks, a mix pack of hockey tape and a Green Biscuit so you can work on your sweet hands.

So if you know of a pickup hockey organizer we should be working with, please tell them about us! If they decide to host regular weekly games with us, you’ll find yourself the recipient of one of our lovely hockey surprise packs.

Why Don't You Run Regular Pickup Hockey?

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 13:55:00 -0500

In a lot of ways we’ve become pickup hockey counsellors. We’re fortunate to work directly with you folks who have the often thankless job of organizing pickup hockey. That affords us a front row seat to hear about, and hopefully solve, those pains. We’re excited to expand that, for example we’re hoping to get our organizers together later this year. In the larger cities where we have enough organizers, we’re hoping to run pickup of our own with just organizers followed by a dinner where we can connect you together in person.

What we don’t get to do enough is talk with people who are considering running pickup for the first time, or have run a few one-off games and considering making the leap to running a regular game. What’s holding you back? We’d like to eventually be an enabler to get more pickup hockey going so learning what your roadblocks are is important. Please comment below or contact us directly.

PS..you can now add your games directly to your calendar of choice from each of our game pages.

Local Front Page!

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 10:54:00 -0400

A big thanks for Chris Seto down at the Guelph Mercury for writing a great story on us and getting us on the front page this past Friday!

“The website 20skaters.com was officially launched earlier this year. It allows organizers of pickup hockey games to easily keep track of who’s coming to the games and how many subs may be needed. It also helps them see how much money they’re taking in and if it’s enough to cover their expenses.”

They even interviewed some of our local organizers and skaters, which is great.

“Our roster is sort of ever changing, so I think this is a good way to be able to manage a big roster that aren’t all committed”

It looks as though a few hockey players read it as our lone skater signups in Guelph increased for a few days. We’re working this week to find some games for those new signups.

Extend Your Pickup Hockey Season, for 'free'

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 10:16:00 -0400

In ramping up this season and working with more pickup hockey organizers, there’s a pattern developing in games we are NOT working with. It’s cash related but is often expressed as a shorter pickup season. Although we certainly see our fair share of games that are well run, there are a ton that are struggling. Someone playing in their game is familiar 20Skaters, and our service, and then forwards us emails from their organizers…

“Brydon, can you please get this game to use your system? See below…”

So we’re going to play 16 games of pickup instead of 22. I need $300 from some people for the season, I only have 6 today. I have to pay the city this week so please send me some money. We only have 16 on our spare list so we’ll need more. If we have extra money later in the season then I’ll get us some more icetimes.

Bottom line, these games have untapped value in the form of icetime. We work to ensure they have 20 skaters every week. As discussed, that translates into cash in the organizers pocket. Cash rarely stays in organizer’s pockets, it quickly translates into more pickup games, end of season parties, lower season fees next year.

We can help but only if an organizers wants our help. If you’re organizing regular pickup hockey and recognize the email above, then get in touch and let’s start making your life simpler.

The Goons Roll In?

Brydon Gilliss — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 11:39:00 -0400

It’s interesting how often we’re asked by pickup hockey organizers IF their regular weekly game will start to fill up with goons when they start working with us. We’re asked this enough, we added it to our FAQ and I’m clearly writing about it here.

I don’t want to get mushy here but we love the folks who put in the hours to create, and curate, awesome pickup hockey games. It’s a thankless job that takes a ton of work. You can see that work when you step on the ice at a well attended game that has a consistent skill level in the players, good clean hockey, and of course a goalie in each net. All we want to do is support those organizers and make their life simpler.

So no, we will not randomly drop skaters into your regular game. As an organizer you are in complete control of who plays in your game. You can remove skaters who aren’t working out, you can add, whatever you need.

If you’re often short skaters and you explicitly ask us, of course we will work to introduce and add more skaters to your game. We can do that quite easily. We’ll work hard to ensure they fit your game. In the case one doesn’t fit, for whatever reason, you can simply remove them and they will no longer get invites.

PS…We’ve moved off gravatar for our avatars. You can simply upload your avatar to your account now. It’s great seeing all the hockey avatars popping into the games.

Picking An IceTime for Pickup Hockey?

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 08:50:00 -0400

While we may eventually add a feature to help you and your skaters select the ideal time to run a pickup hockey game, we’re currently focused on other more painful parts of the process. I figured I would share a simple tip though, for those of you who aren’t running a regular weekly time spot.

Most cities and rink owners will allow you to place a hold on an icetime. Just ask nicely, place a hold on a spot or two while you ask your skaters which time they’d prefer. Or more importantly you find two goalies.

There are obviously services available like doodle, Congregar, TimeToMeet and many others to support you in choosing dates/times within groups of people. So pick one, place a hold on your icetime and when you’re ready come talk to us to make sure you run a great game of pickup!

PS…As long as you’re avoiding any other major events like a friend’s wedding or the super bowl, my advice is just pick a time and invite as many as you can.

Seasons, sub levels and live games

Brydon Gilliss — Tue, 03 Sep 2013 14:38:00 -0400

It was a labour filled weekend over at 20Skaters HQ. We had a hard push this weekend to get some new features in place for some organizers starting their winter games this week.

For organizers who have been running pickup for a while, most eventually collect some form of annual subscription from players. You pay me $x for the year and you can come to any game. This lowers the organizers risks and they typically have to pay for the entire season up front so it enables them to do that.

We now support this model. Our goal with these games remains getting each individual game to 20 skaters. We’re playing with a twist in this model where subscribed players get a chance at a rebate on a game they don’t attend. The goal here is to get you to tell us when you can’t make a particular game. Then we can sell your spot and get a sub to the game.

We’ve also added the ability to invite game subs in rounds. Most games have players they’d like to have first crack at a sub spot. Our organizers can now specify rounds of subs.

As regulars opt out of an upcoming game, 20Skaters brings in subs in rounds. Subs pay the organizer immediately. Organizer brings in more cash, games have 20 skaters, everyone happy..happy…happy.

If you organize pickup hockey and want to try us out, let us know?

PS…This photo of Stanley Carl “Bulldog” Jonathan was sent in as a suggested default player avatar. It skeers me, that’s all.

Make $3200 Hosting Pickup Hockey

Brydon Gilliss — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 17:09:00 -0400

You organize weekly, recurring pickup hockey. You’ve lowered, or eliminated, your personal financial risk by having some of your skaters subscribe for the entire season. Let’s get specific and use real numbers from an organizer we’re working with in Toronto, call him Steve.

Steve has weekly ice for 32 weeks that cost him a total of $12,000 for his entire contract which he pays the city up front. To do that, he collects $500 from 24 players to commit them for the season. Yes these are real numbers, no fiction here.

I think of Steve’s subscribers as shareholders in his game. Steve’s effectively operating a non-profit, or a CSA for pickup hockey. He has 24 skaters who have bought a share of his contract.

Perfect! Steve’s covered his cash requirements, however, he’s created an attendance problem. His skaters are paying over $15 per skate IF they attend all 32. We all know that doesn’t happen. If you attend 3/4 of the games then your cost per skate is now over $20. Miss half the games and you’re paying over $30 per skate!

Steve invites subs and he charges them $20. Spot one of many challenges here? If I’m a subscriber and attend less than 3/4 of the games then I’m now paying more than the subs are, even though I ponied up my $500 at the start. I have to attend over 25 games to get my costs per game under the $20 sub charge.

The bottom line is that Steve, and his 24 skaters, are paying $375 per icetime. As shareholders, they all have a vested interest in making the best use of each and every icetime.

So the answer to the title of this post? Easy, if Steve’s average attendance for the season is 15 skaters, that’s $3200 lost in potential sub charges!! While the extra icetime, when only 12 skaters show up, can be nice, it’s literally costing everyone a ton.

Obviously making the best use of each icetime requires filling Steve’s game every week, within reason (hint, it’s in our name). If you’ve tried that yourself then you already know how much work that takes on Steve’s part. Emailing skaters every week about attendance, chasing subs, charging them, all in an attempt to get 20 skaters every week. Its sucks!

Our focus this upcoming season is working for Steve and his skaters(shareholders) to capture that loss! We work with them to suck all the value they can out of their hockey CSA.

In the coming weeks we’ll start laying out some of the ways we’re working hard to solve all the problems I’ve started to laid out here. If you know any Steve’s out there, send them our way or have them contact me directly!

Pickup Hockey Organizers Can Breathe Easy

Brydon Gilliss — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 18:09:00 -0400

We were interviewed by Techvibes last week which resulted in them publishing an article about us.

Pickup Hockey Organizers Can Breathe Easy with Canadian Startup 20 Skaters

“For organizers of pickup leagues, it’s not all fun and games. Rather, organizational headaches and financial stress make the job unattractive at times. Fortunately a Guelph-based startup is trying to take the pain out of organizing pickup hockey.”

Please have a read and let us know what you think? We’re queueing up new organizers for this upcoming season now. If you have any friends who organize regular pickup hockey games, remind them to contact us now!

Booking Your First Pickup Hockey Game

Eric Roberts — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:13:00 -0400

Instead of a standard “hey we have a blog” post, I figured I’d attempt to write something useful. I figured we could start at the start. If you’ve never ran a pickup hockey game, where do you start?

Caveat, I’m writing this for the pre-20 Skaters organizer. Obviously most of these steps are either painless or don’t exist if you’re one of the lucky ones working with us.

When?

The challenge is there is very little icetime available. In Guelph there are really only two people you have to phone in order to find out about icetime availability. The city owns six rinks, the university owns the other two. The city facility booking phone number is 519-837-5678. For the university, you’ll want to speak with Lorianne Fraser at 519-824-4120, extension 53790. Phone both those numbers and find out from them what’s available.

Once you decide on a time, it’s time to pay up. The only way I know of is to pay in full, you can give them a credit card over the phone. If you’re eventually buying a regular weekly time then you can setup a payment schedule with them. You’ll have to sign some waivers etc and drop them off or fax them to seal the deal.

Who?

First job is to secure two goalies. Goalies typically don’t pay for icetime. Phone, text, email, whatever it takes to make sure you have two tenders coming out. You’ll need that before worrying about skaters as most will want to know that you have two goalies coming out.

Next is securing skaters. It’s black magic having skaters who say they’re coming actually come out. Personally it’s tough to leave home once I have a fire going and start into a movie. Getting skaters to pay ahead of time can inspire attendance, at least for me. You may want to just assume some skaters won’t actually show up and oversell the game slightly.

Game Day

I email a reminder to everyone you think is coming on the day of. In that you may want to remind your skaters to bring a dark and light sweater. Depending on what you’re charging skaters, you may want to bring along some change as chances are everyone will have a twenty dollar bill. Water bottles? After game beers? Pucks?

Good luck, enjoy your first game as an organizer…

@20Skaters

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