(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!

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!

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….

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.