And Then There Was Swiss Hockey
So my first season playing Swiss ice hockey has come to an end and I understand my mentioning of this in Bluebirdy is greatly overdue. I realize also that I never write about hockey much even though it’s my second largest endeavor behind my horse-related obsessions, and I’m always surprised to discover that some people don’t even know I skate. They just know me as that “crazy horse riding chick who also owns some weird pet bird that eats human food.” This is mostly accurate, so I won’t deny it. I also like chickens, which is another massively misunderstood fact about me that I’ll save for another day.
Hockey is actually the one constant in my life that’s nearly always there even when I’m not riding horses or feeding my pet bird Google dinner leftovers. Unlike the horse activities which are fickle and subject to fluctuations in fortune, time, location, and interpersonal relationships, hockey happens almost anytime, anywhere, as long as I’m of sane enough mind to show up and skate (and believe me, your craziest instances in life are usually when you play the best hockey).
There are two things that make hockey grand and have managed to keep me playing even when I moved to the other side of the world. First, all your shit fits in one big wheelie bag that you can take anywhere with you. Second, there’s usually a minimum of fourteen other people expecting your lazy butt to show up at practice, or at the very least, the game, so it’s hard to stay home without repurcussions. Of course, then there’s the small detail that every time I feel like not going to hockey, I go and have a great time. Like I said, trivialities.
I’m in my seventh year of hockey, which is hard to believe, because that’s pretty much the number of years I’ve been out of graduate school in snowy Pennsylvania, where I picked up this nasty little game. I’m starting to think that I was actually predestined to grow up somewhere where there’s snow and ice, and that my birth in Palo Alto, California was a cosmic mistake. I never seem to feel more at home than I do when I’m residing somewhere it’s snowing like the Dickens, I’ve tricked someone else into digging my car out of the pile-up for me (Huckleberry Finn style), or I’m blazing a Jess-shaped path down the obliterated winter sidewalk. As such, it seemed only natural that I’d continue my hockey explorations after moving to Switzerland.
There was only one catch - people play hockey in Swiss German here. This is only a half-catch in that the hard part was figuring out how to get into a league in Zurich, not necessarily how to play hockey. As it turns out, the Google Zurich office is literally down the street from the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) headquarters which handles all things European hockey-wise, despite what the name may suggest. In July of last year this geographical coincidence finally paid off when I was randomly invited by a Googler to attend a BBQ at the IIHF’s posh little establishment on Brandschenkestrasse. Not only did I meet all kinds of people who don’t play hockey at all, but I met the IIHF president and got a tour of the castle that is essentially the office where they do hockey-related paperwork. Who knew. On top of this I met an emotionally disturbed goalie (a redundant description, if you will) who bragged that she only played for men’s teams now because female hockey players are too catty-drama. “And who might I contact if I’m interested in engaging in such catty-drama here in Zurich?” I asked her.
That’s the second time I received contact information that I already had, when earlier in the year a particularly chatty Swiss lad at the Kreisbüro called up the IIHF for me and wrote down the same contact person. I’d spoken to this woman before, but alas, my hockey equipment took so long to arrive from the U.S. last year that by the time I had it, summer was in full swing and the season had ended. It was the end of September when I finally made it to my first practice, which I found out later was more a try-out to see if I could actually stand up on the ice. Frankly, I’m surprised I could, as by that time I hadn’t skated in eight months. What I didn’t know is that, after jumping off a plane from Malaysia half a day earlier, I’d shown up in Zurich at the A league practice, skating alongside some women who, for all intents and purposes, were being paid to play.
This small misunderstanding on my part made my utter exhaustion and infuriating incoordination at the fifteen minute mark into practice that much more embarrassing, as I had no idea I was skating with at least two women who played division I college hockey in Boston and Canada. “Man, I am seriously out of shape,” I said off-handedly to one of the players after practice, as I was riding home in her little car filled with miniature stuffed animals dangling from the ceiling. “What makes you say that?” she asked in her softly accented English. She whipped around a narrow, winding road on the way back into the city and the animals and I all leaned to the right, pressing on the side of the car to keep from falling out. “Uh,” I replied, scooting my ass back into the seat, “I could barely keep up with those girls tonight.”
She glanced at me with a somewhat unbelieving expression and then looked back to the road, suddenly veering left through a roundabout. I gripped the side of the seat. “Those girls,” she said, “play on our national team. There were only three women out there who are part of our regional league that you’ll be playing on with me.”
So ok, sometimes I have unrealistic expectations of myself. At least I can say that sometimes it’s not always my fault either. The truth is, I was out of shape - eight months of chocolate and cheese wasn’t doing me any favors, and the level of play was just enough to make me work harder than I ever had to in the U.S., and sometimes I just could not for the life of me figure out what our coach was saying, but overall I kept up respectably for someone who happened to grow up in the non-hockey-playing-burbs of the bay area.
When you first start any sport, everything’s imbued with a little bit of wonder - from the equipment to the rules to the teams to the rituals and the superstitions. After a while though, it all becomes rote, and you go through the motions methodically, only pausing to think here and there about strategies and to make instant decisions. There’s an element of familiarity that I love about this and that makes playing a sport in another country just like running into an old friend at a cafe in a new town. You may be in a strange land but this person, this person you know. After an entire season here in Zurich, I still get asked by people how I can possibly play ice hockey here if I can’t understand the coach or other players.
Well, there’s two issues I have with that statement. The first is that when people speak standard German, I can usually figure out what’s going on. It’s the Swiss German that throws me off. I may not have met many true-to-life Swiss people while working in the Google office, but there are plenty of them when you go out into the big, wide world that is Switzerland with your glorious attempts to integrate. I still remember the first time I thought I was actually understanding what was going on, as dictated by a coach, only to get stuck when he said “weese und rot.” “What and red?” I asked the Swiss-American girl who often translates for me. I knew he was talking about jerseys but I didn’t catch that first part. “White and red,” she said. “Oohhhh!” I exclaimed, “WEISS und rot.” She looked at me distastefully. “Yeah Jess, that’s how we say ‘white’ in Swiss.”
The second issue I have with the aforementioned statement is that hockey, like many sports (except for horse polo) is filled with set plays and standard drills and exercises. I had the good fortune of being introduced to hockey in a town where the game is well respected (Pittsburgh, PA). As such, I had all kinds of great coaching and clinics at my disposal, where I was properly taught rules, positioning, strategy, as well as a ton of warmup and practice drills with cute names like “horseshoe” and “breakout.” These all exist in Switzerland as well. The challenge is figuring out what they’re called here, and what tiny variation has been inserted to throw me off just a little bit. For example, the women always do the horseshoe drill as the last warmup exercise before a game starts. They of course don’t call it that, but by simply watching how we lined up I immediately knew we were going to do the horseshoe drill without having to say a word. They vary this drill by sometimes having a defenseman skate out along with a forward, and sometimes there are two forwards and one defense. They call this variation “Zwei Eis,” and I’ve come to understand the translation for that as “two on one horseshoe drill.” Of course no one would ever understand my translation - it’s just my personal Jess translation for the purposes of this blog entry and my head when I’m actually at practice.
Harder than practice is being in the locker room with the women, where everyone is speaking in Swiss slang and cracking inside jokes and otherwise speaking a mile a minute on topics I probably wouldn’t get in the first place. My Swiss-American friend, who I’ll call Rosetta for her enduring willingness and unending patience in translating the hard stuff for me all this season, occasionally fills me in on the jokes or if not, tells me that at least I haven’t missed anything important. It was Rosetta who told me that in German, “laufen” means “run,” but in Swiss German it means “walk,” and when referring to ice hockey exclusively it means “skate.” You won’t get that from the software program of the same name, I can guarantee you that.
Remember that sense of wonder I talked about earlier? You might think you never get that back once you’ve been playing a sport for a while, but you can. Just try playing it in another country. All of the rinks we play at in Zurich and the surrounding area are outdoors. Occasionally we play inside if the weather is horrendous, but sun, snow, or rain, we’re usually outside. It can be a drag when it’s raining but when it snows it’s magical, and there’s something about playing outdoors that I know I’ll miss terribly when I leave Zurich. It reminds me a little of learning to skate outdoors in Pittsburgh at the rink in the park, seeing your breath and the city lights rising up from between the rivers below.
At practice we often have orange cones and small golf cart tires laid on their sides, both used to mark parts of the ice as a skate-around, passing point, temporary goal, and so forth. I’ve seen these used before and am pretty familiar with them. What I wasn’t ready for were the miniature nets we’d use to play 4 on 4 or the short side of the ice. These are goal nets, perhaps about 1′ high by 2′ wide (rough guess) that I assume Frodo Baggins would use if he and the hobbit gang decided to pick up ice hockey. Obviously the idea here is to make it harder to score when you don’t have a goalie. Sometimes the coaches turn the regulation-sized nets back to back and make us play that way, forcing the goalies to look all the way around to defend their goal. The best, however, has to be the long, yellow, triangular padded blocks that the coaches use to mark off sections of the ice. These look just like, well, just like giant Toblerone, and that’s what the players call them too. As Rosetta said when explaining a drill to me once, “So you skate around the Toblerone and then you come back to the center…”
The day I finally received my jersey and socks for my first Swiss game, a guy helping with the game preparations pointed to my helmet in the locker room and asked if it was mine, then asked if he could take it. While I wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it, I happily decided that it was something official and proceeded to let him run off with it. Five minutes later he returned with my helmet covered in stick-on advertising. “What the-” I mumbled when he plopped it into my hand. I had just become a skating billboard. In fact, our jerseys and socks are covered with sponsor logos as well. In Europe it’s considered perfectly acceptable to sell out your team and cover their equipment in advertising. You’ll even see it on TV if you watch the professionals play over here. It’s not something we do in the U.S., strangely enough, even though we plaster advertising all over everything else.
Our games our filled with rituals, some of which are mysterious and some of which have, if not sensible, then at least believable back stories. Before games we do a warmup which consists of running around the block and some random running and jumping exercises in a circle, and then we do this mysterious drill in which we all link arms in a circle and start jogging (or rather sprinting) in place as fast as we can. The instructions are usually dictated by our assistant captain, and for the longest time I could not figure out what was going on. She told us to go left, go right, jump, double-jump, and sometimes we’d all come up and pretend we were taking photos with a camera then continue running. After this happened three or four times, Rosetta finally said to me, “It’s a horse race. Get it?” It’s amazing what I’ve learned playing hockey out here.
In the locker room the women blast hip hop and rock and pop on a boombox they bring in just for games, and we can partake of the tool chest that also shows up at games that’s full of free tape (every kind: grip, friction, sock) and anything you could need should your equipment suddenly fall apart. Once fully dressed and out of the locker room, our team captain has us chant something strange in Finnish. Half the team doesn’t even know what this is, but I understand it has something to do with the fact that some of the team members went to a hockey camp in Finland last summer and learned some dirty Finnish words which they’ve kindly integrated into our pre-game rituals. We then have to perform the standard version of a hockey high five (bumping fists inside your glove) with the captain and coach as we pass out of the locker room and onto the ice. Out on the ice, our warmups always consist of a passing drill on the short side where you do “anything” when you get the puck, such as turning sharply, skating backwards, going down on one knee, etc., before passing it to the next person. We finish with horseshoe variations and then everyone lines up on the blue line. At this point, the captain skates down in front of the blue line, touching her stick to everyone else’s stick as she does so, and then everyone raises their sticks to salute the opposing team, who all do the same. We then turn around and head for our goal, where we get in a circle, listen to some captainish words of wisdom, repeat our Finnish foul language shout, then skate in a line to high five everyone on the team. Everyone then either goes to the bench or gets into position at the center face-off circle as planned. Now, you might think I’m joking about this ritual, but it literally happens the same way every single time.
In between periods, the guy who stuck the stickers all over my helmet serves us sweet tea and sliced fruit, biscuits, and chocolate. If princess hockey ever existed anywhere in the world, this is it and I’ve hit the jackpot. Usually during this time our coach yells at us in Swiss German and I can hardly understand most of it, so I take to enjoying my tea and biscuits and the occasional kiwi fruit with a side of clementines. A long time ago when I was skating in Pittsburgh, I had seen a t-shirt for sale at an ice rink that said, “Hockey Princess” on it with a drawing of a bejeweled crown underneath. When I mentioned this one day to Superstar, he said that he had seen it too, and that he’d thought more than once about buying it for me. He’ll never know it now, but had he bought it for me it’d still be applicable. I love me some between period hors d’oeuvres service.
Away games are no less ridiculous. The A league apparently has their own branded coach, one of those enormous busses with the reclining seats and curtains and DVD system. We get to use this coach to travel to away games, I guess on account of being the “same” team even if we’re the C league version of that team. For late games, we bring this gigantic box that our coach calls the “Kochkiste,” that actually plugs into the wall after unloading from the bus. My German friends find this hilarious as “Kochkiste” apparently translates to “cooking box.” While this humor is way over my head, all I know is that the Kochkiste contains just-from-the-oven hot pasta and sauce, ready for us when the game’s over and we’re out of the showers. I’m also loving me some Kochkiste right about now.
The games themselves are what I’m used to, although the periods are a standard 20 minutes which is crazy long for people who play hockey twice a week, and the clock counts up instead of down (this confused me greatly the first time I watched a game here). Halfway through third period (at the 10 minute mark) the buzzer sounds and the teams change sides, which is a little peculiar. All the penalties called are the same, although some of the teams play quite rough, Canadian or tournament style hockey, and they’re not always called on these things. At my very first game two chicks got into a fight and I had to retract my statement that women never fight during hockey games. Granted, our coach and team were laughing during this fight, but maybe it’s because it was more of an afterthought fight than a real fight. From what I’ve been told, “real fights” are discouraged with a 500 franc fine. There’s very few people worth punching out if it’s gonna cost 500 francs, I have to admit.
The other big difference? The season ends in the spring. That’s right, and I’ve already had someone ask me what my summer sport is going to be which gave me a little bit of panic. Am I supposed to already have that lined up? I haven’t even packed my hockey bag away downstairs yet, but, mountain biking anyone?
