Dec. 28, 2022 — Reflections on an inventory

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In the event you have a look at yesterday’s weblog entry, you’ll discover that it has a group of who we consider had been the nation’s high subject hockey scorers from 1982 to the current.

There are many tales involving these athletes, with, after all, one omission.

However there’s one quirk concerning the final 40 years. And that’s the nationwide scoring champion of 2008, an attacker from Allentown William Allen (Pa.).

That participant was Lucas Lengthy, the one male participant (that we will determine) to ever lead the nation in scoring in a sport which has been a predominantly feminine sport within the faculties since sticks had been first picked up in organized interscholastic play in 1909.

Positive, there have been males taking part in subject hockey within the U.S. in universities even earlier than Constance Applebee introduced the sport to Harvard, and there was even the depiction of subject hockey on a sequence of Boy Scout buying and selling playing cards printed in 1933 exhibits younger Scouts taking part in on a campsite.

However Lengthy is among the fortunate ones. His Canaries group had been the final opponent that Katie O’Donnell’s Ambler Wissahickon (Pa.) group confronted her senior yr. And Lengthy might have been a few inches away from being the state champion in that 2008 season.

Quite a lot of different boys have by no means had the possibility to play on a full high-school group. Some state governing our bodies of sport have thrown up boundaries to their play, some boundaries have been erected by concerted motion by coaches’ associations, and others by particular person college districts.

However for each record-breaker like Lucas Lengthy, there have been many younger males who’ve been banned from the sphere by each type of machination accessible.

Now, there’s been makes an attempt to prepare boys’ varsity subject hockey in varied locations. One college in Connecticut reportedly had sufficient for a whole starring 11, however there weren’t different groups close by trying to do the identical.

In California, two faculties — La Jolla (Calif.) and Lakeside El Capitan (Calif.) performed a three-game sequence in 2010 after quite a lot of prep on the a part of coaches Nick Conway and Sandy Martinez. However that experiment lasted only one season.

However now, we’ve seen the place Massachusetts — a state which has seen plenty of male gamers have an effect on the outcomes of some state tournaments — has been engaged on making an attempt to make it simpler for boys’ varsity packages to start out play. The answer: begin with a 7-on-7 league moderately than requiring sufficient gamers to subject an 11-player group together with the goalkeeper.

One college –Malden (Mass.) — attracted sufficient consideration in order that 80 gamers got here out to a clinic led by Harry Singh, the pinnacle coach of the U.S. males’s nationwide group. Malden is a city of 66,000 solely about three miles north of Boston. As such, it has an ideal likelihood to outlive by the variety of gamers .

Factor is, Massachusetts has some 230 public, non-public, and parochial faculties. I might assume that, with the variety of boys’ ice hockey gamers within the commonwealth, and with coaches who may see the advantages of free dry-land coaching in a comparatively contact-free sport, the sport may take root.

We’ll see if extra faculties take to the boys’ sport.

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