quote:

Originally posted by lastmanstanding:
<snip>
Hockey is a religion in Minnesota
<snip>

Yeah, the whole state shut down to watch the annual high school hockey tournament. It was a delight to see teams from little towns like Warroad besting the big Twin Cities schools.

Never done it myself.

I did roller skate for the first time in a couple of decades. It went better than I thought it would.

quote:

Originally posted by Stlhead:
Wear a helmet. An old hockey helmet from a used sporting goods place will only cost a few bucks, and ice is hard on skull. Plus it sets a good example for the kids.

Good suggestion, but shops will not sell used helmets-liability, I’m told. Also helmets have an expiration date. Who knew?

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:

quote:

Originally posted by lastmanstanding:
<snip>
Hockey is a religion in Minnesota
<snip>

Yeah, the whole state shut down to watch the annual high school hockey tournament. It was a delight to see teams from little towns like Warroad besting the big Twin Cities schools.

I would plan my work vacation so I could be home watching the high school hockey tournament. I remember watching kids in the tourney who are now playing in the NHL. Jake Oettinger goalie for the Dallas Stars is now a multi millionaire and I watched him as a pimply teenager in 2014 playing in the tourney. Many others both present and past made it to the NHL. I think that's why hockey kids are pressed so hard in Minnesota the parents are looking to hit the NHL lottery. And if you are from Minnesota your chances are better than most. But still very slim.

The tourney was much better before they divided it into class A and class AA schools. Warroad with a student body of 600 kids from right up by the Canadian border would come down and give hell to the big city teams of Bloomington Jefferson or Edina with student bodies of 4 or 5 thousand. Now of course it's gotten crazy with parents selling their homes and moving solely because they want their kids in a specific school district to play hockey. My daughter being a high school counselor has to deal with these often times entitled athletes and their more entitled parents when Johnny hockey is failing classes and is prohibited to play sports until he gets his grade levels up. She has some stories to tell!

So you are telling us that ice skates had been invented when you were a pre teen ?

There was a ittle girl my daughter was in class with from preschool to maybe second grade with. Her dad was a hockey fanatic and switched his girls from gymnastics to hockey. They moved to New Jersey sometime ago to get into better leagues and now their one girl is going to Princeton to play hockey. It's not just the NHL.

Yikes! Most of us try to avoid falling on ice once we reach middle age.

It has probably been 40 years myself and still counting. There used to be a mall that had an ice skating rink in it and that is where I went occasionally as a kid. Other times I would happen to be in the mall I would take some time to just watch people skate. The mall then closed sometime around 2008 and parts of it were demolished and outside businesses built.

This post made me wonder if Austin has any ice skating rinks so I did a search and there are several including that they kept the ice skating rink going to this day at that location. Just had a huge amount of memories come to mind about that mall as I haven’t thought of it in a long time. I had a lot of cool experiences with that mall.