A Skeery Weekend for Updates

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.

GremlinStripeByIntiUnfortunately 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

brendan-shanahanI 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.

2014-10-28 17.15.01If 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.

2014-10-28 17.14.56Another 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

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?

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.

  1. How much do I charge my full timers for the season?
  2. 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

20skaters-champsYes 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

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:

  1. A full timer, who previously declined this game, changed their mind and decided to attend last minute.
  2. 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. covers

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-iceIn 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!

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

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!

We Have Pretty!

jersey (1)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?

flyer2.pdf_006We’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.