Joe Rogers laughed during a pileup on the ice during a game at the Iceland Sports Complex.
The players are members of the Never Ever and Never Ever, Again ice hockey teams.
(Photos by David C. Burton, Special to The Courier-)
Michelle Rawn holds up a plastic Darth Vader-like piece of leg armor.
"All right, do they tell you which way it goes on?" asks the 36-year-old Louisville attorney.
Michelle Rawn donned shoulder pads and chest guard before entering the rink.
It was the Louisville attorney's first time with the First Evers.
The other women in the locker room at Iceland Sports Complex shake their heads, as clueless as Rawn about what to do with their ice hockey gear.
Jodi Katz pulls on a pair of padded black pants, adding inches to all the places women never want them.
"Oh, my God, these look huge," exclaims the 46-year-old stay-at-home mom who became a fan of the sport watching her 15-year-old son play.
Jodi Katz became a fan of ice
hockey watching her 15-year-old son play.
It is the first night of the "Never
Ever" league, as in never, ever played
ice hockey before, and the second time the
Louisville Adult Hockey Players
Association has sponsored such a
league.
The league, which started in April and includes 10 weeks of
instruction and play on Monday nights, is open to men and
women ages 18 to 80, says Rob Jenkins, commissioner of the
players association. But Jenkins is quick to add there are
no 80-year-olds in the league, just 60-year-olds.
And the games aren't quite like National Hockey League
games where players regularly "body check" or slam into one
another. The Never
Ever players collide, but it is
because they can't stop, not because they want to cream the
other team. Checking is not allowed.
The league
is the inspiration of Iceland
general
manager Chris Richardson, who saw a similar one in
Michigan. Unlike golf or bowling, "where you can just give
it a try," says Jenkins, hockey requires more equipment,
skating skills and learning the rules of a game that is not
particularly popular in Kentucky.
In the past the only option for beginners was to join an
existing league, a prospect Jenkins compares to "throwing
them to the wolves."
Which is exactly why Patrick Katchak never took up the
sport before. "I would have been too intimidated to go out
and try it with people who I thought knew what was going
on," says the 37-year-old regional chain manager for a
beverage company.
But when he did the first coed league earlier this year, he
says, everyone else was as clueless as he was. The second
night he persuaded his brother-in-law, Dan Klein, a
33-year-old banker, to drive all the way from Bowling
Green, Ky., for the league.
Now the pair are back for another season, this time in
the Never
Ever, AGAIN … contingent, a small step
up from the Never
Ever League. There are 21 men and one
woman in the "Again" group.
Of the 28 "Never
Ever" participants, eight are
women, Jenkins says.
Don Burton, who coaches both leagues, says that, unlike
some of the children he coaches, the adults all "want to be
here."
"They're old enough to realize, 'I want to try this, I'm
going to give it everything I've got,' " says Burton.
Don Burton, director of
hockey at Iceland, put the players through drills
before playing their first game.
On the
ice
After a short chalk talk
by Burton, about 40 men and women hit the ice. The
Never
Ever, AGAIN … skaters make their way
toward the center of the ice, while the newcomers hug the
wall.
The first lesson -- how to fall. Hitting the ice seems to
come easier to the skaters, who are weighed down by around
20 pounds of gear, than getting back up.
Next comes pushing down the ice on one foot. A participant
raises a glove-clad hand.
"How do you stop?"
Burton promises to teach them -- later. And he does. But
some don't quite get it, coasting, turning in circles or
simply falling when asked to stop.
Last time, when Brooke Dailey came to watch her husband,
Paul, she found it entertaining.
"They couldn't stop at all, and they kept running into each
other," says Dailey, a 24-year-old massage therapy student.
Her father-in-law, Gary Dailey, 50, also enjoyed the show.
"They just looked bewildered because they wanted to go in
one direction and they'd end up going in another
direction," says the special-education teacher.
Both, along with Gary Dailey's younger brother David, 47,
have joined the league. With Paul Dailey, a 26-year-old
engineer, in the Never
Ever, AGAIN … there are now four Daileys
in the program. Brooke Dailey, who has skated before,
catches on fast. The Dailey brothers have also skated
before, and even played some hockey -- but that was more
than three decades ago.
Brad Seger watched as
drills were explained
Partway through the drills, David Dailey steps off for a
breather.
"I was ready to throw up," says the assistant principal
from Brandenburg, Ky.
Jamie Whitehead joins him. It is Whitehead who got the
Dailey family into this, recruiting Paul and his twin
brother, Tim, for the first league. Halfway through the
season Tim Dailey, who is in the Army, was sent to
Virginia.
Whitehead left even earlier.
"I had a little accident," says the 33-year-old rebar
detailer.
Fifteen minutes into his first practice, before his stick
ever touched a puck, Whitehead fell. When he tried to get
up, he set his left foot down wrong and ended up breaking a
bone.
On his first night back, he is taking it easy but is quick
to join in when the scrimmage starts.
On the ice a player reaches for the puck with his stick,
trips over another player's stick and falls. The second
player apologizes. Someone tries to stop, spins in a circle
and falls; another loses a stick and then falls trying to
get it. Players take their time getting up, enjoying a
minute of rest. Once up, they head toward the clump of
players surrounding the puck and make their best effort to
touch it with their sticks before subbing out.
On the bench, Gary Dailey catches his breath.
"It's a lot harder than I remember," he says.
On the other team's bench, Katz has come to a new
understanding about why her teenage son always returns from
hockey practice soaking wet.
"It's quite a workout," she says.
And "much harder than it looks from the stands," adds Rawn.
But when it's all over and the exhausted crew is heading to
the locker rooms, the mood is upbeat.
"I've been waiting my whole life to play a game of hockey,
and I finally got to," says Whitehead. "I can't wait until
next week."
Reporter Katya Cengel can be reached at (502) 582-4224.