The roster of an adult tournament hockey team is usually a patchwork of regular players and anybody else who can stand socializing for all hours, sometimes sharing a bed with another player and then waking early by any night owl’s standards to play a game of hockey. Then repeat that schedule for three days.
The Ice-O-Topes is a women’s recreational hockey team made up of mostly Vancouver players, including myself, who play in the most competitive women’s division of the Adult Safe Hockey League out of Burnaby 8-Rinks. The roster is a good indication of the camaraderie; rarely do players stick around for only a season, and former players who move to other parts of the province are welcomed back to fill spots for out-of-town tournaments such as the 17th annual Apex Shoot-Out held this past week, Jan. 7 to 10.
The special thing about this tournament is that it’s held on an outdoor rink built near the bottom of a ski run in Penticton. Outdoor ice seems to take off the competitive edge existent in regular league play, likely due to the combination of no surface lines so both the men’s and women’s games are more like shinny but with referees.
The outsider lineup for the Topes included a goalie who hadn’t played in a year and required at least two defencemen to help her strap on the pads, two beginners including one who hadn’t skated for four years and a forward for the Hong Kong national women’s hockey team.
Cecilia Chan told the story late one night of how she was selected for the Chinese team in August while the Topes were sitting around the farmer’s family-sized dining table in the rented house on the mountain. Chan, who everybody calls C.C., met a couple players on the national team at a rec tournament in her hometown of Toronto a couple months earlier who found out she was eligible by way of her birth certificate.
So, just for fun, because she was already going to Hong Kong for business, she brought her hockey gear to join in on a practice.
“I went on a breakaway during a scrimmage and I was going against this goalie who’s one of the coaches who is supposedly hard to beat,” she remembered.
“I went forehand, tried to go backhand, and lost the puck! And it just went through the five-hole.”
The coaches came to the dressing room afterwards and informed her she was on the team. It was unexpected. Chan, 34, hadn’t played hockey for 15 years, having abandoned it for a full-ride NCAA Div. II basketball scholarship at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2000. Four summers ago, she played semi-pro basketball in Hong Kong only returning to hockey in March as a way of rehabilitating a torn ACL. Apex is a warmup for playing in a national hockey tournament in China, which she left for this past Monday, with enough room in her hockey bag to fit her lucky, careworn basketball.
Former Topes defenceman Angelina LeBlanc, who now plays for the North Peace Eagles, flew to Vancouver for the tournament along with Chan who is her teammate from the Fort St. John senior A women’s team. “The first time I saw her, she showed up for practice with a broken finger,” LeBlanc said. “She had one glove on and just an open hand. And she was pretty good!”
Most of the Topes are multi-sport people who somehow fit either lacrosse, mountain-biking, road-biking, rec basketball, or jiu jitsu into the hockey schedule.
Tournament call-up player Catlyn Marshall added another pastime to the list with log-skidding, which is an old forestry practice of dragging logs by controlling a team of, in Marshall’s case, Belgian horses in a ring. She took first place in Armstrong’s Interior Provincial Exhibition in September with 97 points, which is so impressive the hit count of the online video of the feat is in the tens of thousands of views.
The Topes placed second in the tournament after dropping a 7-3 score to another Vancouver team, Kat Zambo’s Warriors in Sunday morning’s final.
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