Do you remember when school bike racks were full and it wasn’t an exception to have to slow your car to navigate through a street hockey game?
The way children play today is far different than a generation ago. And, of course, while the same can be said in comparing any two generations I get the feeling, having been raised in Richmond, there are far fewer children playing on the streets these days (there are far fewer children, but you get the point).
Nowadays, we need corporations, like Canadian Tire, to get kids involved in the outdoors again. There are even pleas being made by the provincial government to “Make Room for Play” as seen in the recent series of Healthy Families BC commercials. How ironic.
In the adjacent, photos you’ll see me, the goaltender, playing street hockey with my brother and a couple of friends. I’m guessing the photo was taken in 1989, just before my siblings and I started to play some really competitive street hockey games.
Here, I’m wearing a set of rubber Cooper pads; I hated them because they never bent well with your movement.
As the years progressed, the games got bigger. At one point, we needed substitutes because we couldn’t play more than five aside. When roller blades became popular, we made the natural transition with a few stragglers on feet, who would eventually be assimilated.
Our cul-de-sac was a prime spot — vast open spaces heading north-south with several hedges buffering errant shots from breaking windows or denting cars. (We broke one window and replaced it out of our own pockets.)
Timeouts were saved for when the last ball got lodged in a hedge. I played in that cul-de-sac up until Grade 12 and through the summer before heading to university. By then, we had all the gear and would only use hard, orange hockey balls (to the chagrin of the unprepared goalie).
We only had one curmudgeon who would phone city bylaw enforcement and, sometimes, police since by the letter of the law what we were doing was illegal as we may have impeded traffic. We never obliged to stop playing, nor should we have. I’ll always remember how the bylaw folks took the calls far more seriously than the police.
I recall one day we got spooked by a police cruiser pulling into the circle, only to have the officer ask us what the score was; It was something like “2-0 white shirts,” if I remember correctly. Surely, she had better things to do than to bother a bunch of kids keeping healthy and having fun.
We had a couple broken bones, a few sprained wrists and a ton of scabs, but it was worth it. Here’s to the next generation that takes it upon itself to do the same.
