332 Miles to Hockey

Blog entry. It’s been three months since my last entry. In that time the Hamilton Bulldogs have won the Calder Cup, the United Hockey League has tried to transform itself into the International Hockey League, Todd Bertuzzi has fouled the Stanley Cup, and the team with the most physical attitude in hockey since the Broad Street Bad Boys has seized Lord Stanley’s Cup and planted in the sand by the Pacific Ocean.

I won’t even go into the recent sort of meltdown suffered by the Chicago Cubs, who today, or at least this morning, were tied with the Milwaukee Brewers in a dead heat for the first place of their division. Can you say 100?

At least there aren’t dog-fighting scandals, refs inflating the score or any of the other problems associated with the other sports.

Those were the highlights of the world of sports from my viewpoint. On to the new season.

First, I need to recognize another website. Powderhorn hockey was started over the summer by Jane Rickard, whose photos often add life to my words. Jane has become frustrated by the inability of Sit down and shut up to showcase more of her work. You’ll still find her pix here.

Now she is also speaking from her own site too.

I take the first post of the year to gather my thoughts about last year, to propose the purpose of the coming season. What worked last year was covering the Chicago Wolves like a glove. Every game. That was really hard work, but the traffic moved from discussions about Billy Tibbets (still a fan favorite) to the Wolves. It didn’t hurt either that the Rockford Ice Hogs won the Colonial Cup and that I followed them too.

There was a least one person who asked why I was covering the Ice Hogs so intensively. Here’s why, when I talk about the season that ended in June, I talk a lot about the UHL. The best stories seemed to come from the U. I think the best of these was the “They sing, they dance, they score.” Although the coverage of the Ice Hogs versus K-Wings final was also excellent.

My first goal for the new season is to find that spark from the coverage of the U and move it to the American Hockey League coverage.

The next goal is to cover the AHL’s Wolves, every game, starting with the pre-season in Traverse City.

I suppose that is enough for the blog and the related stories that appear in the Chi-Town site.

On a larger scale, Jane and I feel we’ve paid some dues. The Wolves are frankly hostile to web media. It is giving us great satisfaction to be recognized by other teams as legitimate.

So, a third goal, get media credentialed by major media for the Wolves games. Obviously that can’t be Chicago media, so it will need to be out of town media.

On a technical note, I plan to add better tags to the photos so that Google can search pictures of specific players. That will be an ongoing project as there are lots of pictures from the past year I need to go through.

There is a nice looking group of kids at the Thrashers prospect camp. It is always nice to drop the puck for the first time and, yes Holly, the ice does smell nice.