Christmas Hockey Tournament

Ten of the guys from my Renegades Hockey Team joined forces with six guys from another team and played in a Christmas Hockey Tournament out at the River Cree Resort and Casino on the west boundary of the city.  For $500 we were guaranteed to play at least three games.  Each of our guys kicked in $45, which gave us enough to cover the tournament fee and provide some extra beer money.  The prize for first place was to be $5,000.00.  

We went in expecting to play three games....  The organizers at the casino provided us with gift cards and coupons good at the lounge adjacent to the rink.  We also each got a beer mug.  Our first game was on Sunday night, December 27th, at 11:00pm.  We said our hello's to each other and skated out onto the ice to be soundly thumped 7-0 by our opponents, who went on to finish second in the round robin.  Our next game, at 2:00 in the afternoon on December 28th, was against a team from our league, playing a couple of divisions above us.  We were leading for a good part of the game but they got a couple of late goals to beat us at the end.  This was enough, based on goal differential, to put us into the playoff round.  On Tuesday morning around 10:00AM we played our third game of the round robin.  This was against a team from Enoch.  It was a hard played, fast-paced game and we managed to get ahead and coast to victory.

Our first playoff game was in the late afternoon on Tuesday.  We faced off against a team called Channel 4 News.  These guys were a big, fast team, but were short a couple of players.  They jumped out to an early lead but we managed to bounce back and eventually won the game 6-4.  This put us into the second round of the playoff, this morning, December 30, just before lunch.  By this point the competition was getting a lot stiffer.  We faced off against a team from Hobbema.  They were a big, fast team that had obviously been playing together for a while.  The play was pretty lop-sided but we hung in there and with a couple of minutes left in the game, we were only down by a 6-4 score.  We tried to put on a late push but they pumped in a couple of last minute goals and coasted to victory.

We hit the lounge and had some beer and some snacks, using up all the coupons and gift cards that we had been given.  It was a great few days of hockey with five hard played games over four days.  I don't think we had any gas left in the tank and probably couldn't have accomplished much in the later rounds even if we wanted to.  The entire tournament wraps up tonight and the finalists would end up playing 4 games in under 12 hours.

But it was a great experience and all the guys on our team really enjoyed ourselves.  The hockey was fast paced and hard played and should really tune us up for a push going into the latter half of our regular season of league hockey, continuing right after the new year.