The Ice Bowl

Every year, my youth group has "The Ice Bowl" at the Cedar Rapids Ice Arena. We wear jeans and sweatshirts, (gloves for the less hardcore kids) and we have a battle royale on the ice. what happens is we get these huge helmets to wear, and these sticks with a little black thing on the end. I couldn't tell you what shape the black thing is...it looks like something fell off the end of the stick.

So after we've slapped our huge helmets on, we take our incomplete little sticks and go play. There's a red ball a little bit larger than a fist as our puck. We put the two nets not long ways on the ice, but short ways, because no one wants to skate so far for one goal. Then, the game begins. Usually only ten or twelve people show up, so it's five-on-five, hardcore broom ball. Sans brooms. That's the other thing I don't understand. We don't use brooms. But that's okay.

So once the game is on, I think we all feel our inner Wayne Gretzky take hold. Wearing not skates, but tennies, we slip and slide around after that little red ball.

I have to say, this may sound a tiny bit lame, but it's not. It's really fun. For one, it's fun to ice....skate. If that's what you call it when you're not wearing skates. That part is fun, as well as the whole scoring a goal part. I'm one of those players that stays mostly over by the net...so I can receive passes and score a goal. (I'm sure that I am completely slaughtering hockey terms, but ohhh well.) So after I received a pass, I'd shoot. And usually, I'd have shot it in a way to make it go not at the angle I was hoping, but straight in front of me, slipping right past the entrance to the goal, into the enemy's hands. Ooops. But I did score three or four goals (pure luck, I assure you) and it's very exciting. Plus, I'm not the sportiest person ever (understatement alert) and so it made me have that teeny taste of sportsdom....which is nice.

So after a good two hours, we trudge back off the ice, peel our helmets off our oh-so sweaty heads, giggle at everyone else's horrible helmet hair, and flop down, sweating and tired. Our faces are red and our knees our soaked (as well as other places, for those with unfortunate balance) but it was fun!

Every year, I go a little reluctantly, thinking that no one will go, I'll be cold, I could be doing homework (yeah right...), or something else, but I leave saying "Oh my gosh...that was so much fun. We should start a league!"

Yeah, a league. Who knows? We may just give the Rough Riders a run for their money.
Maybe. But first we'd have to use real skates, I think.