Hockey team continues to grow, improve
What is now the GCSU club hockey team once started out at a bunch of friends shooting a puck around on a basketball court.
“A Canadian, a Filipino, an American and a Russian were the founding fathers I would say,” senior forward Jeff Brittain said. “They’ve all graduated but I feel like we’ve carried on the legacy pretty well.”
The club hockey teams roots go back to 2004-05 when a group of students that came to GCSU who were all friends from high school that had played ice hockey in Alpharetta, realizing there was nothing in place for them, began to play street hockey, floor hockey and ball hockey. These students were all freshmen at the time and because they lived at The Grove, began to play at the fenced in basketball courts playing hockey with a ball and shooting on the basketball post. Once this began happening, other people began to notice and starting joining in.
The GCSU hockey club team prepares for a faceoff in a tournament earlier this season. The team began in 2004-05.
“Eventually the street hockey players had enough numbers to where it merited to making an actual club out of it,” senior forward Jeff Brittain said. “So even until a few years ago we were still playing at the Grove in that basketball court.”
The club hockey team predominantly most of the students that play with the club have played in the past, with both ice hockey and inline hockey background that want to continue to play hockey. Although, occasionally they will have someone who has never played before and club team welcomes them to come out and play.
“We’ve progressed to where we can actually skate and have practices now. It’s not a top of the line facility but it’s better than where we came from,” Brittain said.
Practices now take place at at the local Rocket Roller rink, which they rent. Training for the club hockey team is done on an individual basis. Some players will work on improving their cardio while others players like to lift weights. To train as a whole the team has practice on skates twice a week at the Rock’n Roller rink. They also have floor practices where they play running with shoes on at Centennial Center once a week. The team participates in two separate playing arrangements. They play in a league in the National Collegiate Roller Hockey Association in the South Eastern Conference. The NCRHL has a master roster that gets signed of by the league, which inquires a high level of commitment from the club hockey team. The other playing option that the team offers is more of a tournament based team, which is comprised of players from the league team but also consist of players who can only make one or two games out of the year. The team will travel to different tournaments around the southeast and there is a number of tournament schedulers that are hosted.
“These are different tournament bodies that will host games for teams of all ages,” Brittain said. “When we play in those, we enter in the men’s division because there’s not a special college division for these. We will just participate as a men’s rec team and go out there and play anything from middle-aged guys from somewhere in South Carolina to a maybe another college team from Georgia.”
The team is optimistic for the future because once the Wellness & Recreation Center at West Campus is completed, it will contain a multipurpose court that has a plastic tile surface for the floor which can incorporate for indoor volleyball, indoor soccer, basketball, and skate and play inline hockey.
“I am really excited and sad at the same time to talk about the future of the club. I know that I’ll be leaving in the spring and won’t be able to see it develop further,” Brittain said. “I’m also excited because I know it’s got a lot of potential and there’s a lot of positivity in the rink. I know that there’s a lot of good people who would be able to continue the program into the future which is reassuring for us now.”
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