Visit to Burlington

A few weeks back I had to go up to Burlington for a hockey meeting, and believe me when I tell you that I didn't want to go. I love Burlington, it's a very cool city, but it's a two hour drive, and I was going because the yearly youth hockey meeting was happening up there. They always hold it up there because it's a hockey mecca in that area. They have it good because there are so many teams within an 45 minute radius, including NY state and Canada. We here in small town New England must drive to get to them.

I felt an obligation to go because it's the annual scheduler's meeting where schedulers meet and put their hockey season together. It's a terrible system because the minute you walk in, it's chaos. You can imagine 30 people trying to talk and organize their season, one game at at time. They don't have any sort of obvious identification, either, so you have to ask each person who they are and if they need games. It's a pain. To compound the matter, many of the people, myself included, already have most of their schedule in place, so the meeting is just about filling in the gaps. Finally, the northern teams all know each other, so they tend to gravitate to each other and work together more effectively. A lot of them, and I don't blame them for one second, don't really want to make the long trek down to us. In fact, many of the teams in the southern part of the state don't even bother attending in light of this.

I also went because the board wanted me to, and I've missed this meeting for the past two years, ever since I became scheduler. It was actually nice to meet some of the schedulers, many of whom I've corresponded with but had never seen in real life. Good to put a face to that voice, or rather, email message. I didn't get a whole lot done, but I did get some things done, so it wasn't a complete washout. Even still, it was hardly worth making a 2 hour drive for something I could have accomplished at home via email.

Then again, nobody said the hockey life was easy. Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Scott Puls for the pic.