Beginnings

Our Hockey adventure began in the Spring of 2018, but that isn't where things started.

I began playing hockey several years before, at age 33. It wasn't pretty, but an organizer that would become a good friend, along with some good hearted people put up with me, and encouraged me to stick with it. I was off and on that first year in Fairview - just west of the Halifax peninsula - with long absences. Eventually, for one of a few times in my life to that point, I did stick with something.

My wife and I bought a home in 2014, and we welcomed our firstborn Charlie into the world - that is where it all truly started.

As we settled into life in our first home in Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia, I was coming home from work one day, and at the entrance to our road, was a public park. I didn't think too much about Acadia Park to that point, I remembered it as a ball field and a hall as a kid - but I didn't play ball. They launched an outdoor rink there a couple years before, and I took my sister to the opening with the mayor of the time cutting the ribbon, that was about it.

That day coming home, I looked over at the park. I saw tools, and noticed people working on a playground installation. My first thought, was that our kids would play on it someday, so with my trunk full of tools, I stopped and started helping.

That led to an invitation to attend a meeting. It led to further work to complete the playground alongside other volunteers. It led to a Food Security project, a Community Garden, and my first experience on a Board of Directors for a community group and charity.

I learned quickly what most volunteers know all too well. Volunteer for one thing, and you'll quickly be asked to do more, by more people and organizations. I had recently started working in roles as a Construction Superintendent or Project Manager, and I wanted to apply what I was learning and doing to groups around me in the community.

By early 2018, Hockey was still happening in the background for me, and the new worlds in my life were about to collide.

With Charlie about four years old, Sam having joined him in our lives in 2016, and Janet pregnant with our daughter Rosie, things were flat out. She was teaching and volunteering in Lower Sackville, I was working and learning as a Project Manager for an affordable housing non-profit, and my volunteer efforts had increased.

A dear friend was managing what had become one of my favourite pickup skates, Friday nights at the Halifax Forum. A great mix of players, including people who had been out the night of my very first skate several years earlier were regulars. By that point, it was the people I wanted to see as much as I wanted to be on the ice.

I almost spit out my beer one night before Christmas in the dressing room, when the organizer mentioned passing around the hat to collect for Feed Nova Scotia. Around that same time, we were doing our Square Roots Food Bundle project, and our Community Garden was about to become a reality. I floated over to the organizer, gushed about our own efforts, rambled about some kind of collaboration, and he looked at me sideways. It was probably my first time speaking to him after being yelled at once for messy scrambles. My elbows were up for sure, but it was because I didn't know how to skate.

Beyond elbows to his helmet, I got to know Pat quite well. Later in the new year, after a couple of months of declining attendance, he decided that it was time to give it up. He had been renting the ice for eight years, which is a great run in Halifax.

Another friend had been helping out with finding players on Facebook, posting on the Hockey Halifax Community page. I figured that if people were interested in sticking around, I could do the same thing. Drive it all with event posts and a page.

In the spring of 2018, that's what happened. I asked the players: If I was permitted by the rink to take over the booking, would they still want to come out. They said yes, and so did the rink. We were in.

It took a few weeks, but we were able to fill out the skates. We did event posts, I tried to be funny with pictures or gifs related to events in hockey - locally or from the NHL, and everything in between - and in spite of that, our attendance and Facebook group started to grow. I was playing in leagues at that point, and was Captain of a couple teams in various beer leagues. It was a way for a shitty player to stick on a team - bring the pucks and cooler, and be responsible for paying the bills.

Hockey Helps the Homeless, a pro-am charity hockey organization based in Ontario, with tournaments across Canada, first came to Halifax in 2018. I saw some advertised content for it, registered as an independent player and was thrown on a team. We've been there with teams ever since.

2018 didn't just see the beginning of our time renting ice, we were giving back that early too.

Time passed. In 2019, we added a weeknight skate at the Forum, and all of it was humming along well. Later that year though, I lost two jobs in a few month span as a Project Manager. A shortage of work for a tech-infused construction firm saw me flounder for awhile on the job market, before jumping into a Bridgewater, Nova Scotia based charity. I was hired to work on developing a housing project, and social enterprise construction company. I thought it could be a dream job. While I needed a gig, it was on South Shore - where Janet grew up, and where we aspired to relocate our family - it was ultimately shit timing. The organization was about to collapse under mismanagement while extending themselves a bridge too far. After a couple of months there, I went in one morning during the first week of November, to find the Executive Director waiting for me to tell me there was no more job.

I have been very fortunate in my years in Construction, to have maintained a bond to a locally owned company that uses union labour. I had earned my Red Seal as an employee of theirs in 2013, and had been employed on the tools for them for stints that dated back to 2002, and there I needed them again.

As they have during several of my various adventures, they took me back the day after I was done as a Project Manager (well, I was done as a paid one at least). This marked the beginning of a very challenging period both personally and professionally - but the hockey didn't ebb. It was poised to go on to new heights.

It all would take place with Covid looming over everyone. Just like for all of us, the next few years would bring incredible challenges. In a personal sense, professionally, and in every aspect of our venture, which had come to be known as Halifax Pickup Hockey.

More on that in our next post. Subscribe to receive a note when it's ready.

In the meantime -

Here are some links you should check out:

Halifax Pickup Hockey , South Shore Pickup Hockey

Metro Hockey League, South Shore Hockey League

Causes dear to us:

Hockey Helps the Homeless: Our teams are here, and here. Find a name you know, and show them some love.

Souls Harbour - Doing great work in communities across Nova Scotia.

Nova Adult Hockey - Buy us a Coffee, we'll perk right up.

If you wish to support my content, you can contribute to my efforts here.

I'll keep moving the puck up the ice..

Jason Craig