Body Check

by Matt Christopher

  After the shooting drill, the coach had players take a break. “Afterward, we’ll split up. Defensemen and goalies will work with Coach Seabrook, and the rest of you, stay with me.”

  “Goalies, put on all your gear,” Coach Seabrook called out. “Masks, blockers, everything. Okay?”

  A hockey puck is a disk made of hard rubber. If it hits a player, it can really hurt, especially if it strikes an unprotected part of the player’s body. Nobody has more pucks flying at them than goalies. That’s why, in games, a goalie wears a mask to protect his face. But the mask is designed for safety and not for comfort. A goalie also wears much more other gear than the rest of a hockey team: bulky thigh and knee pads and pants with extra padding. On the hand that holds the stick handle, he wears a rectangular pad called a blocker, a device with which he can block shots without getting bruised forearms. On his other hand, he wears a catching glove, like a heavy version of a first baseman’s mitt in baseball. This, too, he uses to block or even catch pucks.

  A goalie must wear this gear to keep from being injured in games and whenever shots will be coming at him, but Coach Maxwell usually let the goalies practice without heavy gear, when pucks wouldn’t be flying at them.

  Brent was surprised when Coach Seabrook told the goalies to put on their full gear. The team wasn’t going to scrimmage right now. Brent saw that Chip, the Badgers first-string goalie, a guy who usually wore a smile that wouldn’t quit, wasn’t happy about having to put on what he called “his suit of armor” just to work out with the defense. But he didn’t say anything. When a coach says “jump,” you don’t whine about it, you just jump. So Chip and Max, the other Badger goalie, trudged into the locker room to get the rest of their stuff. Max was muttering something to Chip, who just shrugged.

  Cam, watching the goalies walk through the locker door, said, “There go two unhappy guys.”

  “Maybe it’s good for them to work more in full pads,” Brent said. “Coach Seabrook is supposed to be a defense specialist. He must have his reasons. Maybe they’ll get in better shape this way.”

  Cam stared at his friend. Then he laughed. “Wow! You really are trying to give the guy a break.”

  Brent didn’t see what was so funny. “I said I would, didn’t I?”

  5

  Coach Maxwell gathered the centers and wings together after the break. “We’re going to start with something that should be fun,” he said. “This drill is designed to help with your puck-handling and maneuvering. Let’s have five of you guys — Ted, Gavin, Sandy, Brent, and… okay, you, too, Mick. Each of you get a puck from the bench and get into the face-off circle, here.”

  Pucks in hand, Brent and his four teammates stood in the circle, which was thirty feet across.

  The coach nodded. “Put your pucks down in front of you. When I blow my whistle, you’re going to try to stay inside the circle, moving your puck with your stick. You also have to try to poke the other guys’ pucks out of the circle. If your puck goes out of the circle, you have to bring it back into the circle.

  “But, before you can come back into the circle, you have to go around the outside of the circle, twice. When only one of you is left in the circle with his puck, he’s the winner. Any questions? Okay, after we have a winner, five more of you will give it a try.”

  Coach Maxwell blew his whistle, and the game started.

  It wasn’t easy, Brent soon realized. He had to keep watching for poke checks from the other players, while moving his own puck and watching for opportunities to slap an opponent’s puck out of the circle. Just as he tried to jab Sandy’s puck away, Gavin got Brent’s puck and knocked it loose. Brent chased it down and raced around the circle twice, as fast as he could. When he got back, there were still three other players inside.

  Brent was quick to see why this game was a great drill. It was really good for sharpening reflexes, and it forced you to make lightning maneuvers on your skates and use your stick as rapidly as you could.

  He was really breathing hard a minute later, when the only ones left in the face-off circle were he and Ted. His stick had begun to feel like lead in his hands when he lunged forward to try to poke away Ted’s puck. But Ted made a quick backhanded move to keep his puck out of Brent’s reach and shoved his own stick forward at Brent’s puck before Brent could recover. Brent’s puck skittered out of the circle just before Sandy got back in, leaving Ted all by himself, the winner.

  “Very good!” Coach Maxwell said. “Wrists and arms feeling tired?”

  Brent grinned. His wrists were aching. He didn’t often give them such a concentrated workout.

  “I’ll show you guys a couple of exercises you can use to build up those arms with weights,” the coach said. “It’d be good for you to build yourselves up a little. All right, let’s have the rest of you guys in the circle.”

  While the second group did the drill, Brent looked down the ice to see what Coach Seabrook was doing with the defensemen. At the moment, he had them practicing hip checks. A player would move forward dribbling a puck, as if he were on an offensive drive. A second man, playing the defender, would face him, bend down, turn sideways to the line of the first player’s advance, and throw a hip into the guy’s hips and thighs. This maneuver, if done right, would separate the offensive player from the puck, maybe even knock him off-stride and out of the play for the moment.

  As Brent watched, Cam threw a hip check at a defender named Arno, a quiet kid who Brent didn’t know too well. Cam did the move well, and sure enough, as he hit Arno at hip level, the puck skidded away from Arno’s stick. It looked fine to Brent, but Coach Seabrook shook his head and beckoned to Cam, who came over, looking puzzled. The coach spoke quietly to Cam, gesturing and squatting as he talked. Cam nodded, and the coach signaled for the two players to go again.

  This time, Cam hit Arno lower, at about the knees, and Arno sprawled on the ice. Brent wasn’t close enough to be sure and hadn’t had a clear-enough view, but it looked to him like Cam might have drawn a penalty for such a move, maybe even a major misconduct. But Coach Seabrook nodded and clapped his hands in approval. Cam started over to help Arno back up, but the coach held out a hand to stop him, shaking his head. Clearly, he didn’t want Cam to help his opponent up. Arno got to his feet on his own.

  Brent turned back toward the drill that Coach Maxwell was running. He found it hard to concentrate on what he was watching. Had Coach Seabrook been showing the Badger defensemen a dirty play? He couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t want to be unfair and make a hasty judgment. For all he knew, there was nothing illegal about what he’d seen. He decided he’d talk to Lee about it that evening. Lee would be able to give him good advice.

  A whistle from Coach Maxwell took Brent’s mind away from his troubling thoughts about Coach Seabrook.

  “Good work, guys,” the coach said. “Now, let’s work on face-offs.” Face-offs are crucial in hockey; they begin every period and start play after a team scores, after a time-out, or when the action is stopped for a penalty. A player from each team, usually the center, faces an opponent in the middle of the circle, with the other players (except the goalie) just outside the circle. When the teams are set, a linesman drops the puck on the face-off spot, between the two centers, who must have their sticks resting on the ice when the puck is dropped. Each center tries to get the puck out to one of his wings or, if the face-off is near his goal, to a defenseman behind him.

  The coach placed two centers, Ted and Gavin, on either side of the face-off spot. He pointed to Brent and Sandy. “You two are Ted’s wings for this drill. Barry and Gil are on Gavin’s team. I’ll drop the puck. Let’s see which team can control the puck off a face-off. Ready?”

  The players lined up as directed. The coach made sure that the centers had their sticks on the ice and that the wings were outside the circle, then he dropped the puck between them. Ted knocked Gavin’s stick away and scooped the puck back to Brent, who skated toward the boards, away from Gil, before passing to Sandy.

&nb
sp; The coach whistled to stop play. “Good move, Ted. Gavin, before I dropped the puck, I noticed that you were watching Ted. On a face-off, keep your eyes on the linesman. That’s the way to know the instant the puck is dropped. And you’ll control your stick better if you slide your bottom hand down toward the blade before the puck is dropped. That way, you’ll have more power to move the stick. Let’s try it again.”

  The group worked on face-off techniques for a while. Finally, Coach Maxwell said, “Good work! When the defensemen join us, we’ll work on face-off plays with them. For now, I want to —”

  He was interrupted by loud voices from the other end of the rink. Several players were milling around. Coach Seabrook was trying to get into the middle of the bunch, where something was going on. It was impossible for Brent to see what was happening. Coach Maxwell immediately headed across the ice, followed by the offensive players.

  Brent saw Cam and Chip standing on the edge of the crowd. They both looked unhappy and tense. Coach Maxwell moved between them and blew his whistle sharply. “What’s going on here?” he called. “Whatever it is, cut it out! Now!”

  Players moved away from whoever was in the middle. Coach Seabrook, red-faced, came toward Coach Maxwell. He smiled and shook his head. “It’s nothing, really,” he said. “A couple of the boys just got a little… excited, that’s all. The kind of thing that sometimes happens when boys are playing, I’m sure you’ve seen it all before… ”

  Now Brent saw that Vic and Arno were wrestling with each other on the ice. Brent knew Arno to be a quiet boy who never lost his cool. It would have taken something major for him to get into it like this, especially with a strong guy like Vic.

  “Both of you, on your feet,” snapped Coach Maxwell. He wasn’t yelling, but his face showed that he was seriously angry. He turned to Coach Seabrook. “No, I haven’t seen it all before,” he said. “I’m not used to seeing two teammates behaving like this. What started it?”

  Coach Seabrook said, “Well, it was really nothing much, just the kind of collision that can happen in a sport like hockey. The boys just got tangled up, that’s all. Then things sort of got a little heated. But no harm done.”

  He put a hand on Arno’s shoulder, but the boy shook it off.

  “This guy tried to knock me into the boards,” Arno yelled. “He did it on purpose!”

  Brent looked at Vic, whose face looked like it was carved out of stone. He didn’t say yes or no, didn’t look angry or upset.

  Coach Seabrook smiled. “I think you’re making more of this than it really is, son. You’re not hurt, are you?”

  Arno looked ready to yell some more, but Coach Maxwell said, “Arno, are you all right? How do you feel?”

  “Okay, I guess,” he said. “But what he did, that was really rotten.”

  “What happened, Vic?” asked Coach Maxwell. “I’d like to hear from you.”

  Vic shrugged. “I gave him a body check, that’s all. And I guess it was a little close to the boards. So he, like, gets all bent out of shape, like I hit him with a baseball bat or something. He didn’t get hurt, it looks like.”

  He said something else, under his breath, that nobody could hear.

  Coach Maxwell frowned. “I missed that last bit, Vic. What did you say?”

  Vic looked at his father, then at Coach Maxwell. “Nothing. Only… hey, sometimes people run into each other in hockey. Right? That’s why we wear all the pads.”

  Vic’s father licked his lips. “Things like this are going to happen, Coach. And the main thing is, nobody got hurt. Isn’t that right?”

  Coach Maxwell looked at the two boys who had been fighting. He said, “Arno, you sure you’re okay?”

  Arno nodded. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Coach Maxwell said, “Let’s take a little break, so everyone can settle down. Coach, let’s talk for a bit.”

  As the two men walked to where they wouldn’t be overheard, Brent skated up to Cam.

  “What was that all about?”

  “I don’t know,” Cam replied. “I wasn’t watching. Coach was showing a new way of making body checks, and I was adjusting my pads. I hear this crash and next thing, Arno’s yelling stuff like, ‘Are you crazy, what are you doing?’ And they’re down on the ice, getting into it.”

  “What kind of stuff was Coach Seabrook teaching?”

  “What do you mean, what kind of stuff?” Cam was annoyed. “Defensive stuff. Different checks, stick-handling, you know. Stuff. What are you getting at?”

  Brent knew that Cam would be angry, and he didn’t want that, but he had to say what was on his mind.

  “Arno never goes ballistic. He’s too easygoing.”

  “Yeah, so?” Cam wouldn’t look at Brent. “So he got mad. Big deal. Vic’s right, it wasn’t anything to go crazy about.”

  Brent said, “I watched you put a nice check on Arno a few minutes ago. You totally took him out of the action.”

  Cam said, “Anything wrong with that?”

  “No way! It was perfect. Your check was hard, but it was clean. Then Coach Seabrook had you do it again. The second time, you hit Arno at the knees. Knocked him down.”

  Cam looked Brent in the eye. “Right. That’s how the game is supposed to be played. You’ll see a lot more of that from now on.”

  Brent felt a sinking feeling in his stomach. “We will, huh?”

  Cam leaned forward. He clearly wanted Brent to see the wisdom of what he said. “I know you don’t like it. But think about Coach Seabrook’s point of view. He makes a lot of sense. I like Coach Maxwell. He’s a nice guy who knows a lot about hockey.

  “But he doesn’t know about how to win. We’re not going to be a winning team, playing his way. Oh, we’ll beat weak teams, but good teams will beat us. We don’t play to win. It’s like, under Coach Maxwell, winning doesn’t matter. Now, we have the chance to turn things around. Don’t you get it?”

  Brent said, “Yeah, I get it. Winning is what matters. No matter how you do it. Great.”

  “You make it sound like winning is a terrible thing,” said Cam. “What’s the matter with winning? Why else do we keep score?”

  “I want to win, too,” insisted Brent. “It’s just that… there are things I won’t do to win. I thought you felt the same way.”

  “What do you mean?” Cam asked. The look he gave Brent wasn’t friendly. Brent hadn’t wanted this conversation, but now that he was in it, he figured he might as well finish it, whatever happened.

  “Here’s what I mean,” he said, meeting Cam’s eyes with a steady stare of his own. “Say you knew you could get away with an illegal play, like tripping an opponent on a breakaway to stop a goal. The officials wouldn’t see you do it. Would you commit the foul?

  Cam’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak for a moment. Finally, he said, “That’s a dumb question!”

  Brent shook his head. “No, it’s not. It’s a tough question. Would you cheat to win, if you knew you could get away with it? It’s not a dumb question at all. You got an answer?”

  “It is a dumb question, and I don’t want to answer.” Cam turned away and then wheeled around. “Wake up, Brent. Grow up! You play sports to win. End of discussion!” He skated off angrily.

  A few other players stared curiously at Cam and Brent. They had heard only the end of the argument and didn’t know what had happened. Brent wanted to go after Cam and try to put things right, but realized that he should just wait awhile. Maybe he hadn’t handled this right, but Cam would chill out, and they’d be friends again.

  He hoped.

  6

  Brent wished that he had heard what had gone down between the two coaches, but it wasn’t possible. It didn’t look like they had argued. And when they returned to the team, they seemed friendly enough.

  Coach Maxwell called the Badgers together. “Guys, it’ll happen now and then that, when you play hockey, there’ll be collisions and bruises. Once in a while, tempers will flare up. But I don’t want to see teammates fighting. Not ev
er. Let’s get back to work and put the bad feeling behind us, okay?”

  Arno skated over to Vic. “Sorry I got hot, there.” He stuck out his hand.

  Vic nodded and shook hands. But he didn’t say a word. His father grinned and said, “Way to be, guys! We’re a team. All right!”

  It seemed to Brent that Arno still looked unhappy. Brent also noticed two other defensemen whispering to each other. One of them jerked a thumb toward Vic, and the other one scowled. What was going on?

  “I want to spend the rest of the practice on power plays and penalty killing,” said Coach Maxwell. “For starters, let’s have Sandy, Brent, Ted, Arno, and Burt on offense. For penalty killers, how about Cam, Vic, Gavin, and Barry. Chip, you’ll be in goal. You already have your pads on, so we don’t need to wait.”

  Brent had forgotten to wonder why Coach Seabrook had told the goalies to put on all their gear. He decided he’d ask Chip or Max about that when he had the chance.

  But now he had to focus on practice. Coach Maxwell gathered the power-play group together, and Coach Seabrook took the penalty killers aside to give them a strategy.

  “This is a little different from the umbrella we worked on earlier,” said Coach Maxwell, holding a clipboard and a marking pen. “Sandy, you’re the center. Start in the middle, just in front of the blue line. Burt, Arno, get here… and here, ten feet from the boards on the left and the right, and ten feet deeper toward the goal than Sandy. Ted and Brent, you start fifteen feet from the goal and just wide of the cage on either side.

  “Sandy, you’re the guy who gets things going here. You pass to either Burt or Arno. Whoever gets the puck looks to see whether the defense commits itself. If defenders move toward you,” said the coach, drawing lines with his pen, “you can pass deep to Ted or Brent. They might shoot, pass it back out, or send it behind the cage to the other wing. See? The idea is to use quick passing to try to open up a hole in the defense and get a good shot on goal. Any questions? Good. Remember, it’s a two-minute penalty. You don’t have to rush to get off a shot. Let the play develop and don’t waste the opportunity.”