Life in the beer league: http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/7192553/
If you’ve ever skated in a men’s league - know your role
If the skates fit.....
In fact, there are hundreds, possibly thousands, of managers across Canada who will spend the long weekend making personnel decisions in time for the September dawn of a new season. Granted, the majority of these managers are in charge of teams with names like 'Old Puckers', 'Rusty Blades', 'Just the Tips' and 'Nine-Inch Males,' but don't be fooled; beer-league hockey squads can be downright tricky to put together. As with any successful organization, you need the right mix, and that means drafting from the following beer-league player categories:
Which one are you???
The Ringer
Some teams wait until the playoffs to unveil this option. Others go with it right from the opening face-off. Either way, without a ringer, your team is done. The challenge for managers is convincing a good player to suit up for a bad side. This can be accomplished a number of ways, including promises of goal-scoring glory and awe-inspired teammates. Most effective, however, is let him play for free. It's simple math, really. Everyone else pays an extra $50 and everyone else gets a shot at the 'DD' Division title.
The Young Guy
At first glance, he can easily be mistaken for a ringer, since the young guy still wears the shorts and socks of his junior or college team. But it's time for the next phase of life now, and that means an office job. The young guy stays in shape for the first half of the year. Sadly, an increasingly sedentary existence and late night partying catches up to him by Christmas. 15 to 20 pounds later, he's just another player, huffing and puffing with the rest. Welcome aboard, kid.
The Old Guy
Forget the 50-and-over league; that's not for him...even though his gloves reach up to his armpits, and he still uses a wood stick. To be fair, the old guy can be an effective player, especially if he's a wily old guy -- a hook here and a chop there, because that's how they did it when professional athletes were real men. ' Eddie Shore -- now there was a hockey player! Lost an ear against the Maroons. Sewed it back on himself. Never missed a shift.'
The Tardy Goalie
Hey, thanks for showing up. Only five minutes gone in the first. Not Like you play a crucial position or anything. Take your time, dickhead.
The Beginner
Required only for cheap laughs. On the one hand, you have to admire the beginner. It takes a lot of courage to buy all brand new equipment and take up hockey in your 40's. On the other hand, learn to take a pass, man. It's right on your stick. How does that knock you over? And now you're frigging offside! Not to mention the Beginner shows up at every game, no matter what time or what day. Sunday night playoff game at 11PM - no worries, Mr Beginner will be there.
The Complete Psycho
Also good for a few giggles from afar. Most likely a cop or fireman. The complete psycho is capable of anything: running the goalie, challenging an entire bench, a tomahawk chop -- all in the repertoire. Do not feed the complete psycho. He doesn't want to be fed. He wants to hunt and, look to him to carry on his act in the bar after the game.
The Naked Guy
Bane of the dressing room. Most players have the courtesy to stretch their hamstrings while sporting, at the very least, a bit of underwear. Not the naked guy. He'll carry on full conversations, and you had better maintain eye contact like your life depended on it....or come face to face with the swinging sausage.
The Guy with the New Girlfriend
An excellent way to lower everyone else's fees is to load up on a few of these. The guy with the new girlfriend will show up to three games, tops, so his payment will contribute to everyone else's and it's not like you'll lose ice time by putting him on the roster. That said, beware that the guy with the new girlfriend might very well turn into the guy with the new wife...at which point he'll never miss another game.
The Organizer
This guy is absolutely brutal but since nobody else could be bothered to do all the paperwork and collect the money he gets to play. Is frustrating to play with because they can barely skate let alone take a pass but nobody gets mad at him cuz he's a really nice guy. Is often heard in the dressing room saying 'Sorry guys, that one was my fault' and if he's lucky somebody will chip in something like 'No worries Donny, it's a team effort.' What everybody is really thinking is 'Hey Donny, my grandmother is a better player than you and yes you are right, that was your fault.' If you are lucky the Organizer is usually smart enough to take himself off the ice in critical situations.
The Minor Hockey All-star
Looks promising at a glance as they fool you with reasonably good skills but after you get zero passes you'll get the picture. This guy topped out at 'AA' Midget and can be spotted by the huge blinders attached to his helmet. Play is characterized by energetic rushes down the wing, (no passing), then into the corner (still no pass), behind the net (hey dickhead I've been open for the past 5 minutes), then into the next corner (everybody has gone back to the bench to watch) followed by a blind give away pass to the high slot / break out pass for the other team. Cut this guy.
The Johnny Try Hard
Great to have on your team but they suck to play against because they have somehow managed to keep themselves in ridiculously good shape. They were probably the star on their high school hockey team and won athlete of the year because they played hockey, volleyball and track all in the same year. Guaranteed they have a membership at the 'Running Room'. Play is characterized by constant hustle which if caught off guard can embarrass the more talented yet fatter player.
The Stanley Cup Champion
This player will raise their hands and cheer when they score. If this is an opposing player you must nip this behavior in the bud by catching him off guard with a sickening open ice hit that causes him to blow snot bubbles. If this player is on your team quickly chastise him in front of the other team to let them know that this is not how the rest of your team rolls. Remind him how much of a loser he is by retrieving the puck from the net the next time he scores and presenting it to him in front of the other team.
The Tough Guy
This guy maxed out at the house-league level, has never been in a fight and is characterized by antagonizing behavior on the ice. In extreme cases he will 'cheap shot' another player. The fact that your beer league does not allow fighting has given this guy a false sense of courage. What this guy does not realize is that this will not prevent someone from knocking his teeth out if he cheap shots the wrong guy. There is a number of fun ways to handle this player which all end with him lying on the ice bleeding, looking for his teeth and crying.
The Wrong Guy
Not to be confused with 'The Complete Psycho'. This guy shows up, doesn't say much and pretty much flies under the radar screen. The kid that gave him the cheap shot him will eventually look his name up on Hockey DB after his facial surgery and realize he had 355 pims in the East Coast 3 years ago.
The Gary Roberts
Can be described as being way too intense. This guy is one of your better players but is unable to adjust to the lower level of play. At the best of times he will try to coach players on the fly and at the worst of times he will snap and call his entire team a bunch of house-leaguers. He believes the game should be played a certain way and despises 'pond hockey' style play with no back checking or positional assignments. Most likely is suffering from a complex of 'unfinished business' from his previous hockey career and is looking to capture some shred of glory via the rec-league championship. This guy is probably better off playing with his own kind in a senior-A league.
Hockey Quotes
1. ”A fast body-contact game played by men with clubs in their hands and knives laced to their feet.” - Paul Gallico
2 ”A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.” –Wayne Gretzky
3 ”All that means is that I'll be 783 years old when I catch Scotty Bowman.” - Kevin Constantine
4 ”Aw, don't worry about that Doc. If it happens I could always come back as a forward.” - Harold Snepsts
5 ”Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking your potential.” - Liane Carlos
6 ”Either you give it right back or the next thing you know everyone and his brother will be trying you on for size.” - Doug Harvey
7 ”Goaltending is a normal job, sure. How would you like it in your job if every time you made a small mistake, a red light went on over your desk and 15,000 people stood up and yelled at you.” - Jacques Plante
8 ”Hockey is the only job I know where you get paid to have a nap on the day of the game.” - Chico Resch
9 ”I guess they respect my shot because they were all ready at the blue line.” - Patrick Way
10 ”I know my players don't like my practises, but that's OK because I don't like their games.” - Harry Neale.
11 ”I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” - Wayne Gretzky
12 ”I think he knows all my tricks. Or the fact I don't have any tricks - Brendan Shanahan on trying to score against Curtis Joseph. I'm hoping for a bench clearing brawl during the warm up so I can go out and grab his stick.” - Ron Tugnutt
13 ”I was happy to have an attraction in our building that we didn't have to pay for.” - Harold Ballard
14 ”Ice hockey is a form of disorderly conduct in which the score is kept.” - Doug Larson ”Hockey's the only place where a guy can go nowadays and watch two white guys fight.” - Frank Deford
15 ”I'd be lying to you if I said guys weren't afraid of him. I'm afraid of him, afraid of him running in to me.” - Paul Laus
16 ”If you've only got one day to live, come see the Toronto Maple Leafs. It'll seem like forever. ” - Pat
17 ”It takes brains. It's not like a forward, where you can get away with scoring and not play defense. On defense you have to be thinking.” - Chris Chelios
18 ”It would have been worse if we hadn't blocked the kick after Toronto's second touchdown.” - Alex Delvecchio
19 ”It's not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it's what you put into the practice.” - Eric Lindros
20 ”It's too easy when you're not winning to look for excuses and point at others for reasons. ”You ca say "Oh well, it's this guys fault or they don't do this well" or you can say "I've got to play better and contribute more". You've got to find another gear and come up with big games.” - Sean Burke
21 ”Last season we couldn't win at home and we were losing on the road. My failure was that I couldn't think of any place else to play.” - Harry Neale
22 ”My former wife made me a millionaire. I used to have three million dollars.”- Bobby Hull
23 ”Our first priority was staying alive. Our second was stopping the puck.” - Glenn Hall
24 ”Our system of forechecking is to shoot the puck and leave it there.” - Harry Neale
25 ”People talk about skating, puck handling and shooting, but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be directed, factoring in all the interruptions. Basically, my whole game is angles.” - Wayne Gretzky
26 ”The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vidal Sassoon
27 ”The three important elements of hockey are: forecheck, backcheck and paycheck.” - Gil Perreault
28 ”The will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital.” - Joe Paterno
29 ”To his US Olympic team - Every day you guys look worse and worse. And today you played like tomorrow.” - John Mariucci
30 ”Until we get an apology we,re not going to win a game. We vow not to win until we get an apology from Bettman.” - Dixon Ward
31 ”We take the shortest route to the puck and arrive in ill humor.” - Bobby Clarke
32 ”What a player does best, he should practice least. Practice is for problems.” - Duke Snider ”The five S's of sports training are: stamina, speed, strength, skill and spirit, but the greatest of these is spirit.” - Ken Doherty
33 ”When I look at the net I don't see a goalie.” - Pavel Bure
34 ”When I look at the net I see 2 or 3 goalies.” - Radek Dvorak.
35 ”Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” - Unknown
36 ”Yes, and I also like jumping out of tall buildings.” - John Vanbiesbrouck
37 ”You do dat, you go to da box, you know, uh, two minutes by yourself, and you feel shame, you know, and then you get free.” - Denis from SlapShot
38 ”You miss 100% of the shots you never take.” - Wayne Gretzky
39 ”Bob Kelly was so dumb, they shoulda written his name on the Stanley Cup in crayon.” - Gene Hart
40 ”Call them pros, call them mercenaries -- but in fact they are just grown-up kids who have learned on the frozen creek or flooded corner lot that hockey is the greatest thrill of all. - Lester Patrick
41 ”Get used to this phrase: how could both referees have missed that?” - Mike Brophy
42 ”Goaltenders are 3 sandwiches shy of a picnic. From the moment primitive man lurched erect, he survived on the principle that when something hard and potentially lethal comes toward you at great velocity, get the hell out of it's path.” - Jim Taylor
43 ”Half the game is mental, the other half is being mental.” - Jim Mckenny
44 ”He brings something special. I don't know what it is, but if you ask him, you couldn't understand his answer.” - Wayne Gretzky
45 ”He had better get married soon, because he's getting uglier every day!” - Mark Recchi "They were checking us so closely, I could tell what brand of deodorant they were using." - Gary Dornhoefer
46 ”Hockey is a man's game. The team with the most real men wins.” - Brian Burke
47 ”Hockey is like a disease, you can't really shake it.” - Goaltender Ken Wregget
48 ”Hockey would be a great game... if played in the mud.” - Jimmy Cannon
49 ”I don't like hockey. I'm just good at it.” - Brett Hull
50 ”I don't like my hockey sticks touching other sticks, and I don't like them crossing one another, and I kind of have them hidden in the corner. I put baby powder on the ends. I think it's essentially a matter of taking care of what takes care of you” - Wayne Gretzky
51 ”I grabbed it and squeezed it back into place. It gave a little crunch and popped right in.” - Jay Wells
52 ”I had all my own teeth and I wanted to keep it that way.” - Tom Glavine
53 ”I just made up my mind that I was going to lose my teeth and have my face cut to pieces.” - Johnny Bower
54 ”I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.” - Wayne Gretzky
55 ”I wouldn't ever go into a season trying to re-build from scratch. You can't trade good players for high picks because the world ends at the end of each season. Live with the idea that the world is flat and you're coming to the edge” - Neil Smith
56 ”I'd drink more.” - Bobby Hull
57 ”I'd rather fight than score.” - Dave "The Hammer" Schultz
58 ”If hockey fights were fixed, I'd be in more of them.” - Rod Gilbert
59 ”If I get run into again, I'm taking someone with me. I lost one knee. I'll take a head if it happens again.” - Grant Fuhr
60 ”If I play badly I'll pick a fight in the third, just to get into a fight. I'll break a guy's leg to win, I don't care. Afterward I say, 'Yeah all right I played badly, but I won the fight so who gives a damn.” - Derek Sanderson
61 ”If you train hard, you'll not only be hard, you'll be hard to beat.” - Herschel Walker
62 ”I'm not dumb enough to be a goalie. - Brett Hull
63 ”It's going to be good to be on his side for a change. I'll save a lot of energy since I don't have to concentrate on whacking him. I'm pretty excited about that. - Doug Gilmour
64 ”I've always felt we weren't physical enough on the back line. Now there's a no-parking sign in front of our net.” - Dean Lombardi
65 ”I've told you guys before, goalies don't think. - Chris Osgood "Ever since he's been a little boo-aw." - Marc Crawford
66 ”Playing goal is like being shot at.” - Jacques Plante
67 ”Some guys play hockey. Gretzky plays 40mph chess.” - Lowell Cohn
68 ”Sometimes you think they must have come out of the chimp cages at the Bronx zoo.” - Gerry Cheevers
69 ”That's so when I forget how to spell my name, I can still find my xxxx clothes!” - Stu Grimson
70 ”The hockey lockout of 1994-1995 has been settled. They have stopped bickering... and can now get down to some serious bloodshed!” - Conan O'Brien
71 ”The only way you can check Gretzky is to hit him when he is standing still singing the national anthem.” - Harry Sinden
72 ”They do a lot of talking, but I'm not sure they actually understand each other.” - Darren McCarty
73 ”They say you're not a coach in the league till you've been fired. I must be getting pretty good.” - Terry Simpson
74 ”We take the shortest route to the puck and arrive in ill humor.” - Bobby Clarke
75 ”We're right next to Mile High Stadium. I'm no rocket scientist, but...uh...(smile).” - Brian Skrudland
76 ”We've made a final offer. We hope Ziggy Palffy will come to his senses. We have NO hope his agent will.” - Mike Milbury
77 ”You miss 100% of the shots you never take.” - Wayne Gretzky
78 "We are built for the playoffs" - Ryan Collins