Hockey and Work... LAME

Hockey, Life, and everything in between
The story


1. There is a reason why I have not been keeping the blog as active as I (and presumably you) would like. My ice hockey team has the privilege of hosing their national tournament. Of course that means that I have the privilege of hosting the national tournament. Of course this privilege comes with the duty of working more than I like. While most of you are tired of this bitching, I feel that it is justified this time around. From Sunday, March 4, to Saturday March 10 I will work 105 hours. This time is split between the EPIC ice rink, Moby Aux. Gym, and the Rec. Center.

On Sunday I intended on coming in from 9am until noon. I was just going to setup the field for the lacrosse game, watch it start and take off. Well 9am to noon turned into 9am to midnight. After I accomplished my intended goal baseball had one of their daily disasters. Today’s daily disaster consisted of their electronic scoreboard not having electricity. This little fix involved a couple of hours of my time, a giant ladder, and me dangling 20 feet in the air. How I didn’t break (or electrocute) my ass I still don’t know.

Following that I made the mistake of heading up to the office to check some email and ended up getting wrangled in by the ice hockey team that needed me to come to a meeting at 4:30. Since I have this issue with the word ‘no’ I ended up at the meeting. It took a couple of hours. By the time I was leaving it was time for the playoff water polo game at the Moby Aux. Gym. Wow, three hours at work was sure turning into a long day.

At the waterpolo game I drew the short straw and had to work. Since it was playoffs and the team we were playing had a couple of staff members on the team someone had to sit out. I did, my team lost by 12. It was an ugly game. I’m not going into any more detail than that. After that game the intramural staff was short staffed. Even though I no longer work in the area I stayed and worked. Little did I know that I would be staying until midnight.

The next morning I went to work like normal and worked the standard day. I still had a hockey nationals meeting at 5 and a student organization meeting at 6 but it was a normal day. I made the mistake of coming back into the office at that point. I was talking with John when a call came over the radio that there were two playoff basketball games scheduled on the same court at the same time. The obviously meant that I was going to be staying for a while longer so I could officiate the game on an extra court at the rec. center. I got out of the building at a relatively early 10:30pm. Damn, state of Colorado.

The next morning I again showed up at 8am. This was destined to be a long day. I knew that I was leaving late but I couldn’t expect how late that was actually going to be. I planned on leaving the office at 2pm to head to EPIC and help setup for the ice hockey tournament. When I got there I ended up helping out until 7pm when I got roped into showing my face at the coaches meet and greet. Of course all of the coaches got to eat real food, all I got to eat was a mouthful of hopes and dreams. After this was over all of the volunteers headed back to EPIC to finish up the sweatshop-esque duties. When all of the volunteers got back we ended up waiting around for an hour before the name tags and lanyards arrived from the printing company. Why on earth the printing company couldn’t put them together themselves I’ll never know. Anyways to let a painful memory leave my mind I’ll just tell you that I left EPIC at 11pm.

Wednesday (you guessed it 8am) was the opening day of the tournament and the initial plan was for me to come to Epic use wireless internet and do work from EPIC while I oversaw the hockey action. I should have known that we were destined to be short staffed. Not only was the tournament short staffed but the wireless internet that we were all planning on wasn’t available since we were utilizing free webcasts of all games. So instead of blissfully working I checked tickets for 5 hours before heading to CSU to go to a couple of meetings. The moment that those meetings were over I headed back to EPIC to help out and run a penalty box for the tournament. I was fortunate that I was able to leave at 10pm.

I’m going to make this a reader participation blog. Instead of me telling you when I arrived at EPIC Thursday I’ll let you guess. The answer is of course 8am. Good job kiddos. I arrived and ended up checking tickers yet again. I’ll explain why this duty was starting to piss me off. The ticket taking area is right in front of the ice rink doors that get opened every 5 seconds. Well, since this is a national tournament EPIC has decided to lower the temperature in the arena to 40 degrees to make sure that the ice is harder (thus moving the puck faster). Since the HVAC (cooling system for you normal people) has a positive pressure in the arena. Every the doors open a 10 mile an hour wind blows on to me. Those 5 hour shifts are starting to piss me off ever so slightly.

Going into Thursday night’s game CSU hadn’t won a game yet. The only way that CSU could advance to the semifinals was to win the remaining two games and hope for Sienna (the team that they lost to) to lose their remaining two games. On Thursday night I was scheduled to work the Davenport (really good) and CU game. I was working the CU penalty box. Guess what I wore. I wore all of the CSU green apparel I could find. In the game there were 39 penalties.

I did find out some interesting things about Davenport (MI). The team really isn’t a club sport. The school funds the team to a tune of $100,000 per year and pays for everything for the team. Not only that but the schools athletic director is also the hockey coach. While the players don’t receive athletic scholarships the player do receive academic scholarships for meeting the 2.0 GPA threshold while playing hockey. That sounds a little fishy to me too.

On the other sheet of ice CSU handily defeated Grand Valley State University. Also helping CSU’s case was the fact that Sienna lost to Miami of Ohio. Go Miami!!! So for Friday CSU needs to win their game against Miami and Grand Valley needs to beat Sienna. Grand Valley ended up winning 2-1 in a closely contested game. CSU won their game 5-4. GO RAMS! On to the semifinals. This was the point of the tournament that I started to hit the exhaustion wall. The three people who were here for the whole tournament had a look on their bodies like they had just been through war. Working this much with out more than 6 hours off can take its toll on people.

To sidetrack a little, this tournament is one of the reasons why I have never gotten into tournament management. There are many opportunities in my field to work managing tournaments around the country. Well working 100 weeks and living in a crappy hotel out of a suitcase does not sound appealing to me. I’m happy sleeping in my own bed at nights.

Saturday morning at 8 marked the start of both semifinal games. One was CSU vs. Michigan State; while the other was Eastern Washington vs. Davenport. At this point Davenport was the clear favorite. Prior to the tournament everyone who knew about this league called the Davenport bracket the “bracket of death”. This was due to the quality of teams in the bracket. Davenport cleaned up the bracket outscoring opponents 25-4 in 3 games. Given this statistic they also handled Eastern Washington 3-0.

I had a feeling on Saturday morning that CSU was dead in the water in the semifinal due to their miraculous come back from an early pool play loss. Not to mention that but on Friday nights game there were over 800 people in the crowd. For those of you that went to CSU you’ll know that getting any sort of turnout to a CSU game that starts at 8am is not going to happen. It was inevitable, less than 100 CSU fans showed up. Apparently the CSU team didn’t show up either starting off the game with a 3-0 deficit after the first period. The game ended up being 7-4 but CSU was eliminated.

Saturday did give all of the volunteers a 2 hour break between the semifinals and the allstar game and skills competition. Those events were fun and universally liked by everyone. After those events came the final game. At this point I was selling tickets and ran into an unexpected friend. Alison (Usen’s friend) came up to the game from Boulder. This was unexpected. Good to see her though.

The championship game started off with a Michigan State 1-0 lead at the end of the first period. The game ended up going to Michigan State 5-4 over Davenport. I’m thrilled to see that a state school won the tournament and those cocky rich people from Davenport didn’t win.



For those of you scoring at home, here are the hours I worked during the week:
Sunday: 15 hours
Monday: 14 hours
Tuesday: 14.5 hours
Wednesday: 14 hours
Thursday: 15 hours
Friday: 14.5 hours
Saturday: 18 hours
TOTAL 105 hours




2. The story that I mentioned in my last installment hasn’t gone away. I have come up with a topic that I will write about. Given the fact that I have been at hockey all week I haven’t had a lot of free time to write the story.