Four Canadian expatriates win world pond hockey crown
Pond hockey is far different from NHL hockey. You’ve got to deal with the conditions and it’s not as physical. It’s clean hockey, it’s fun hockey. You get the cold air in your lungs, your nostrils freeze up, and there’s nothing quite like it.
- Mark Cornforth
At it’s purest, hockey is not a game played on perfectly manicured rinks or in heated or air-conditioned palaces. It’s a game played on frozen ponds from Maine to Minnesota, from British Columbia to Newfoundland- and yes, there is even a World Pond Hockey Championship contested each year to celebrate the roots of the game. Wow…I can go to bed tonight knowing that I learned something new.
Plaster Rock, N.B. ó Four Canadian ex-patriates from the Boston area have become the first team to win the World Pond Hockey Championship twice.
The Boston Danglers held a steady advantage over the Stately Elms Fallen Leafs before beating them 14-8 in the final game Sunday afternoon to claim their second straight trophy at the four-year-old event in Plaster Rock, in northwestern New Brunswick.
“We thought we had a good shot, but we knew the competition would be better this year,” Cooper Naylor, a 34-year-old Dangler member from Pictou, N.S., who now lives in Scituate, Mass., said after the game.
Playing pond hockey is one thing. Playing pond hockey in double digit BELOW ZERO temperatures in East Nowhere, New Brunswick is quite another.
Spectators bundled in snowsuits braved the cold winds kicking up on Roulston Lake on Sunday afternoon as the Danglers and Fallen Leafs faced off in the final game….
The temperature in the area was -24 C, but winds blew up to 30 kilometres an hour, making the air temperature even colder. At times the wind kicked up some snow, blowing it clear across the rink where spectators shielded themselves.
For those Texas native I spend my days around who will never know the joys of playing pond hockey in -40 degree wind chills…well, you don’t know what you’ve missed. Of course, I have no real desire to revisit those temperatures now that I’ve lived in south Texas for eight years, but pond hockey is an experience unlike anything you will experience here in the tropics. My condolences….
