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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.