February 27, 2002
Fun goal of drop-in hockey
Weekly sessions draw players from age 20 to 70 years old
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
When you've been playing hockey for 57 years, strapping on your skates and taking to the ice is almost as essential as breathing.
Jack Baker of Traverse City is a regular at the area's drop-in hockey sessions, which are held three times a week - Thursday, Friday and Sunday - at Centre ICE. He is one of dozens of men of all ages who come when they can for the 90-minute sessions.
The western Upper Peninsula native grew up with the sport and has regularly played it for recreation in the decades since. Now a mostly-retired mechanical engineer, Baker has skated with the rotating cast of drop-ins for nearly 15 years.
"It is a great workout," Baker said. "Everybody here has the right idea, nobody's out to win and the camaraderie is great. The pressures out there are a lot less, we just go out to skate and have a good time."
Baker noted that the players who come are drawn from a variety of professions and cover a range of ages from early 20s to pushing 70.
"It's an interesting thing to watch the professions that go through here - doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, dentists and engineers," he said.
Fred Deschler has organized the drop-in hockey sessions for more that 30 years. He started in 1969 when the Park Place Hotel had a rink in their parking lot. Growing up playing pond hockey, Deschler had never played organized hockey, with a referee, until then. He has organized year-round sessions ever since, motivated by the sports' fitness benefits and fun.
"It's a great cardiovascular workout for one and a half hours, that's why I do it," he said.
Each session sports a different mix of faces, and players easily divide themselves up into teams. Sporting a vivid menagerie of jerseys and colors, ranging from local leagues to college teams to their favorite pro team, the players eventually sort themselves into teams by color, some donning a black or white overshirt for consistency.
Positions are divvied up as needed with few players specializing in a position as the goal is ice time for as many skaters as possible. Two goalies usually attend, though a recent session found one missing so players on one team had to hit the empty net's pipe to make a score.
Reflecting their easy-going approach to team making, substitutions go just as smoothly. A winded player simply heads to his bench and calls out his position to get relief; the first one over the wall takes over.
"There's always that core of players with new ones moving in and other moving out," Deschler said. "It gets to be like a club. There's some really good players here and we get some of the professional players out here during the summer months."
The current iteration of drop-in hockey does not have a ref. Instead, the players call off-sides and enforce the rules themselves. One inviolable rule for every player is no body checking, which keeps the still-intense playing from getting too heated.
"We don't allow checking, although there's the occasional accident," said Deschler. "We police it ourselves."
Former Traverse City Senior High School hockey player Wes Hernden has been a regular at the drop-in sessions for years. Hernden skates two or three times a week there, except during the summer when his job of selling building products keeps him too busy.
"A few of us play on leagues but there is not necessarily any better play but it gets more intense once you start keeping score," said Hernden who has played hockey for nearly 30 years and skated with the Trojans during the late 1970s. "This is a great group of guys and it is fun to joke around with everyone and get exercise at the same time."