I played my first big league hockey game of the year last night, and even though I ate complete shit on the ice and lost... Man did I feel like I put up a good fight.
Here in Kenora Ontario there's a decent hockey scene and it allows our community to get a handful of teams together regularly in a fast paced, competitive, high end hockey match up all season long. The unfortunate aspect of this arrangement is we don't have any lower leagues available for those learning to play the game, like myself. So the only regular options are outdoor scrimmage or late night big league play. The problem I've found for my personal development is that one is too relaxed, and the other is too stressful.
Last night's game ended in a pretty steep loss, 9-4. I didn't record my game with my head-mounted camera because I wanted to remain in the moment and focused on the game at hand without distractions. In reflection there were two big areas I failed at this game.
1) Glove accuracy. 4 of the goals made on me were completely makable saves low glove side. Above the pad but a reach down with the glove. It's clear that being beaten on this 4 times in one game shows that I truly need to work on glove positioning, gloves movement, puck release, and puck trajectory. If I caught those four pucks (which I strongly believe I could have and should have last night) it would have been a much different game.
2) Controlling rebounds. 2 goals that we made on me were because of careless rebounds that fed the next dangerous player an easy tap in goal. Rebounds happen, and bad rebounds happen too but these bad rebounds were controllable and avoidable. With more focus and control on these types of shots in these types of scenarios I would be able to bring my goals against down even further.
With that being said 3 of the goals on me were unavoidable and just good hockey plays and playmaking. Nothing to be upset about here. Good hockey is good hockey even when it's at your expense.
Here's taking this opportunity afforded to me by this team to play hard and learn about the game more to take it into my laboratory and fix my mistakes, practice my ass off, and be the best hockey goalie I can be. I've very lucky to live in this town and play with players of this skill set. It's not lost on me how big of an invite this can be and how it can motivate me to get better and hopefully have another invite to play like this again.
Failing forwards. It is truly a treat to have that perspective. Join me in this new year of 2026 as I fail at most things while attempting to make the world a better place.