Prairie pond hockey
FTLComm - Regina - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 Images by: Matthew Shire, story by Timothy W. Shire
Regina the first annual Prairie Pond Hockey event took place in Regina this past weekend. Be sure to check out the organizers web site for the event so that you might get involved in next year's tournament.
The tournament got underway on Friday and continued through this past weekend. Matthew Shire and his five year old daughter Aurora (right) went out to the site Sunday afternoon and took these pictures. Matthew said that even though it was a mild -5ºC afternoon, the sky was overcast and there was a stiff breeze that actually made it feel pretty cold on the lake.
The area used for the tournament was on Wascana Lake east of the Broad Street Bridge. You will notice in the pictures that the First Nation's Univeristy of Canada is in the background as are other buildings that are part of the University of Regina Campus. There is a gentle hill just south of the lake at this point that is used by Regina folks for tobogganing.
However, hockey has been played in Saskatchewan since the arrival of the European settlers who brought with them steel bladed skates, albeit ones that strapped to your boots, but they were skates and the game is as much a part of the province as is stubble and frozen cow pies.
Father was the new CNR foreman in the tiny hamlet of Vandura east of Langbank and I was attending a one room school. Vandura did not have electricity when we moved there in the summer but that fall SaskPower got a line in and put up the hamlet's three street lights.
It was after Christmas that my older cousin invited me to join he and his friend for a game of hockey on a pond on the DeNevers farm south west of the hamlet. For me it was my first and last successful hockey experience. It was a cold clear day. We cleaned up the smooth ice surface as the snow around the cleared area was to form the edge of the hockey playing surface. Both my cousin and his friend were grown men, I was an ackward but developing grade six kid with passion for both skating and hockey.
It was a glorious game. I look back on it now more than fifty years later and it still makes me smile. My skates were working fine, I was warm, my stick was behaving better than usual and the play went from end to end on that pond rink.
I thought I had done it right but the guy got up spitting snow and definitely not amused. My cousin was not impressed with me taking advantage of the guy and setting him into the snow but I thought they both would get over it. But that isn't what happened a short while later it seem the cloud in the sky was part of it all my cousin's friend came up behind me and cross checked me and followed through driving me downward into the ice. Of course I was not wearing knee pads and I had to limp off the ice.
For the rest of the winter into spring and summer my knee would swell up and mid summer when I could not bear the pain to play my position as a catcher my folks took me to the doctor in Kipling who found I had a crushed tibia. The treatment was a cast for six long itchy weeks. There was no skating or hockey that winter and from then on my role on the ball diamond was behind the catcher calling the strikes and balls.
After that year I never did get into organised sports. The opportunity had been missed. I did get back into skating while I was in collage but I never played hockey again. However, I became a damn good skater and in the early 1970s I became a certified referee.
