07-08 Begins
Yesterday was one of my favorite days of the hockey pre-season. Not the day that the Devils open camp for hopefuls, not the day when the veterans return, the glow of summer days yet to be replaced by the glow of a 2-hour skate, not the day of the first game (at any level) when we see how the pieces of the puzzle fit together (or not).
Yesterday was the NJ Youth Hockey League scheduling meeting. League scheduling is a process that seems to beg for automation, with each club offering up its home ice slots and then handed back a complete schedule, as neat and impersonal as what you’d find on nhl.com. However, scheduling is an art, a science, and I am merely an apprentice to Cathy, our master scheduler (and I use “master” here in the context of Master Splinter, sensei of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). It requires a bit of knowledge of your team, of the potential opponents and their strengths, of the weekends when you’ll be opposing school vacations, holidays, Bar Mitzvahs, and tournaments, and of course a healthy dose of Garden State geography.
The last point was brought home with a yellow highlighted exclamation point yesterday, as I found one of our teams placed into the NJ Southern Conference. Turns out we’re the northernmost team in the southern conference, and this is the equivalent of the University of Hawaii playing Pac-10 football. Road games are at least 30 minutes, and up to 3 hours (with winter weather) away. And we’ve never played some of these teams in league competition before, so it’s a new set of experiences for everyone. Scheduling this became an exercise in balancing travel distance with ice slots, avoiding games at 7:30 in Hollydell (2 hours away, that means a 4:30am wake up call), and similarly offering afternoon slots on our ice to teams spending their Sundays on the New Jersey Turnpike en route to West Orange.
24 league games, a few non-league games, and a sheaf of notes with manager emails noted, and it was time to start the next level, a mere two hours after we started. The first scheduling flight always takes the longest, as you remember the spoken protocols of offering what you have, knowing something about the ice provided by other clubs, and learning what the schedulers look like that you need to find in order to complete the last few required league game slots.
The output: a filled in schedule with times, dates and places only. The scores are up to the boys, and it’s a sheet full of possibility.
I love this day.