#olympic hockey doesn't allow this bullshit

[fourdiagnosesinatrenchcoat]

LEVERAGE TAKES ON THE NHL??? And Nate is on the side of how important enforcers are in hockey?? Is he fucking Canadian??

Ok it's a fake minor league team but the principle is the same.

Pick up Boy on Ice, the biography of Derek Boogaard, and tell me you ever want to watch another hockey fight. It's possibly worse than the fuckery they get away with in the NFL. Americans don't on the whole care about ice hockey so players with serious health complications from standard play barely even gets news attention. And Canada is so "it's not hockey without the fighting" that it's impossible to stop.

I cannot handle Eliot as a French Canadian player. I was supposed to go to bed. Dammit.

[raininyourblackeyes]

learning you are a judge was shocking but also makes perfect sense. honestly i was wondering how often it is you judge at competitions? and have you judged at any major national level competitions or has it been mostly local so far?

Sorry for the extremely late answer. I am either buried under piles of paper for the final few exams, or I forget about this... Is me being a judge making perfect sense a good or a bad thing haha? Because I can be a bit too harsh and blunt in my opinions sometimes (thankfully, I manage to refrain from saying stuff most of the time). And I know that the general opinion on judges isn't stellar.

This is quite a complex question. Answer is simple, both. But in terms that there is not much difference between local and major national level here. So I get to judge several times during the season, thanks to COVID the number of competitions has been reduced to minimum. I miss it a lot, but the skaters must miss the competition thrill much more.

The thing is, I come from an extremely small federation in a country where no sports other than football get any help or support from the government etc. and even they are in shambles. Just a few months ago we had a young swimmer medal at a major world level competition and she doesn't even have a pool in her city. Her city being the third biggest one in the country. That being said, finances are a problem. The Olympic ice rink is nowdays used by organisation managing recreational winter sports locations etc for recreational skating. We use the ex-Olympic hockey rink for both training and competition in winter. In summer, it is a littery whether we will be able to provide the skaters the rink at all. This all hinders the growth of sport and the athletes, cutting their chances short.

Furthermore, the success of the skaters isn't really possible as the girls (and we'll get to the disciplinnes later), are expected to stop skating on a competitiove level around the age of 15. This has nothing to do with the coaching system or injuries, but the fact that they are starting highschool around that age which parents deem the age proper to stop "loitering" around and start seriously studying. It sounds stupid, but that's literally what's happening. Also, this sport gets more expensive as the times goes on, and people here are relatively poor. So majority of our skaters are all girls aged 15 maximum, and with the lack of support our federation is providing (both due to our fault, but those issues are a lot to unpack trust me, I'd need a separate post for bullshit small feds pull let alone big ones, and the ministry of sports' fault) it is very difficult to ensure a chance for them to compete internationally. Skating here is seen as a hobby for little girls.

Why just little girls? Because, sadly, I live in a country where birth of a son is celebrated with huge parties and births of daughters are followed with "I hope your next child is a son". And as soon as the son makes his first steps, he is taken to the mountains and parks and put in front of a football bigger than his leg. 90% boys who do sports here play football, because that is somehow the only acceptable sport for a boy. The other 10% are karate and alike, and basketball. Girls mostly do swimming, or volleyball. It is a sad thing for a country that hosted Winter Olympics to have nearly non-existent culture in those sports. We do have some skiiers tho!

This all being said, for me as a judge, it's a good thing that ISU seminars are the same for national and international judges alike. Furthermore, I am sometimes allowed to sit in on the pre/post-competition judges briefing of the international competitions in order to gain more experience. That's an experience in itself, you get to hear some things that make you confused as they are totally different than the score sheets ("Name of a skater can't figure skate at all. Worst in their entire team..." and then the scores are out there like they invented the sport).

What I have recently started doing is talking to our girls about the history of the sport since that is something rarely mentioned and this is a sport with such rich and wonderful history despite all the judging scandals and everything we're unpacking now. Btw, I wouldn't be allowed to do that as a judge if this were a bigger fed, the judges aren't allowed any contact with the skaters. Honestly, it's so fun to see kids' faces light up in awe when they see an old program that is masterpiece. I sincerely hope, that at least one of them will fall in love with the sport enough through her training and the "history lessons" even though I am probably the strictest judge on the panel and my scores can be super discouragingly low, for that love to presevere and that we will find the way to support her/them to possibly keep competing for longer than expected.

Sorry, for the really long reply. I got carried away.

[jeanmoreaudefensesquad]

Hello it's me, back on my "I like real life sports and I have OPINIONS about exy as an actual sport" bullshit. Today, we're talking about the transition from college exy to professional exy. Not the personal transitions, but the league stuff. Under the cut, as I don't know how long I'll end up going this time.

Okay. So, to start with: yes, Kevin and Riko were purportedly playing on professional teams at the same time as college teams, but I am calling bullshit. There is no way, logistically, that could possibly work. US Court, yes, I'll allow that. There was a girl on my university's women's hockey team who played for the school and also represented her country at the 2018 Olympics, while still also in college. So I'll allow Court.

But professional teams? No! For argument's sake, let's say that the teams were in the same city. I pulled game schedules for two shared game days for the Pitt Panthers ice hockey team (college) and the Pittsburgh Penguins ice hockey team (professional). Tumblr won't let me add a chart, which is unfortunate, so I'll do my best to make this neat and readable.

November 6th

Pitt vs. Navy, game in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Penguins vs. Wild, game in St. Paul, Minnesota

December 4th

Pitt vs. Robert Morris, game in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Penguins vs. Canucks, in Vancouver, British Columbia

This isn't taking into account travel times, practices, and classes (for the college players).

The point of this is to say that I refuse to acknowledge Riko and Kevin playing both professionally and for college. We are ignoring that entirely. Doesn't exist. Nope.

Okay, back onto the main topic of this post.

It is very strongly implied that exy takes the football (NFL) route instead of that of baseball (MLB) or hockey (NHL). The latter two both draft players coming out of juniors--generally at age 18 (players can sign later, out of college, but we're not focusing on that right now). The NFL, conversely, drafts after college, and playing college football is a requirement. The fact that Kevin and Riko are still playing college exy, and the entire existence of the Ravens exy program as it exists, would mean that exy also follows the having to play college route.

And that means that players wouldn't just sign out of college. There would be a draft. Obviously Kevin would go first overall in his draft class. Good for him. He deserves it. But it also means that the whole thing with teams courting him and him refusing to sign for less than he's worth? Wouldn't happen. It's very sexy to think about, but I can't imagine there not being a draft. It's not how sports work.

Additionally, I know we all love the whole everything of Neil and Andrew ditching stuff to go see each other while they're playing on different teams, but, once again, logistically, that wouldn't work. Professional athletes have tight schedules, with travel, practices, and games. They can't just choose to vanish off to see their significant others. They'd have to be content with seeing each other when their teams played.

Listen, I love Nora for having written this series. But sometimes I look at content and go "ah, you know nothing about actual sports and their logistics, do you?"

[selkienicke]

I’m expanding on my point from twitter earlier about how genuinely the reasons for not allowing women into the NHL boil down to ‘sexism, specifically fear that the women will perform better than current NHL average and possibly better than top players in the NHL’

1 nhlers and former players themselves acknowledge that the old style heavy-fighting minimum protection nhl was not so much a skill game and that the parts of that that influence the game now don't require as much skill as passing/skating/scoring

2 relatedly when the nhl started there was way more space for players than there was talent and talent developed slowly over time w consistent practice. but like, if you watch some old NHL games? it’s like, yikes.

3 currently there are many players in the nhl who don't check much or get checked very much + who are quite small (and in Many cases smaller than women's players). So even if you buy the like blah blah women are more fragile physically bullshit theres not a logical reason to ban them from competing on men's teams like there is in like, football or w/e (not that I’m agreeing with that premise OR that size correlates particularly strongly with fighting skill in the current nhl, just saying it doesn't apply here)

4 this ties into my enormous issue w the nhl as an institution and the way they STILL overvalue violence as central to the sport even though

5 like it's not. Like, the KHL is huge and very popular and playstyle isnt actually that different from the NHL (but still closer to womens league rules); I think this applies to the SHL as well but I don’t really know enough about that league to say this definitively

6 there is ALREADY a governing body (the lIHF: international ice hockey federation) and rule set in place. it’s not like rules would need to be written from scratch

7 in order to make the rules of the nhl mesh with like the nwhl rules for example the main changes would need to be ones that increase player safety and like the only 'drawback' would be that they have to...play safer....not hit as hard, avoid certain types of checks, etc. (For example in the women's league everyone is required to wear a full cage mask which is REALLY JUST SENSIBLE, you arent allowed to fight (like Actually not like nhl you arent allowed to fight), the ice is bigger in some cases (which again, requires more skill imo, but anyway the NWHL uses NHL standard ice instead of Olympic standard ice which is larger), and it's not as contact heavy

Which means players can play for much longer bc their brains arent being fucking scrambled by constant and completely unnecessary head hits. There was a player on the Finnish national team who is in her 40s, and a lot of nhl players play overseas after they retire, in like the KHL especially

8 it's been demonstrated thru like the all star games that the best women generally perform as well as or better than the best men when given the same tasks. Tasks which are specifically supposed to measure like....eliteness

So it's literally just adherence to tradition wrt fighting and sexism

That's like...it

Like for real the women at the ASG this year were all top 1-2 in the events they played in as like A Fun Demonstration (this was a whole thing bc the players get 10k for winning the event but they didnt want to give it to the woman who won and i think eventually they just gave both her and the dude who came second the prize money. Which was extra fucking garbage bc FTR the nhl contributes 50k TOTAL to the NWHL (it might go up to 100k total now that the CWHL folded but like....the MINIMUM player salary in the nhl is 750k and most of the women in North American hockey make less than 10k YEARLY

It’s just incredibly fucking transparent that lip service to ‘growing the game’ is ‘as long as you remain constrained by limits that make it difficult for you to reach parity and then when you do it any way we refuse direct comparison so you don’t make us look bad.’