OKAY! OKAY! OKAY!

Thank you guys. I think it was a great Olympics.

Peaceful. Full of good healthy competition and great hosts.
In my books Canadas woman showed the men overall they brought home more than the men.


sent from s4
 
What a great game, watched it with my Canadian buddy at his house, big screen TV, lots of beer and snacks, and we hooted and hollered and woke the neighbours up! :thumb:

I'm always amazed at how well we do, our country's population is about 10% of the US, and for comparison the Tokyo area has MORE people than all of Canada, but we still win at hockey. This shows that if you have a passion for something, you can do well at it.


This video kind of explains it.
 
Yeah but Stu , Hockey is having an issue at the grass roots level now due to costs for kids to play. If its not fixed there is serious concern about it affecting the future of the game. Its costing more and more each year to play at local league level and numbers are falling off quiet seriously given state of economy.
 
IMHO, it is not the country that makes up the Olympic men's teams any more. It's the country that puts together the best team out of the pool of pros in the world. Personally I'd like to go back to the old days were pros were not allowed and the players in all sports had to be citizens of the country they represent. I think that is the way it use to be, not just hockey, but all the sports. Course, you wouldn't see as great of played games. I may be wrong about this but it seems I remember that is how it was.

If I remember right this started when Basket ball was introduced into the Olympic. Of coarse no other country could compete with U.S., so they started getting pros to play. So then to keep the edge the U. S. did the same. I may be completely wrong here, maybe some of out resident Olympic experts can straighten me out.
 
Yeah but Stu , Hockey is having an issue at the grass roots level now due to costs for kids to play. If its not fixed there is serious concern about it affecting the future of the game. Its costing more and more each year to play at local league level and numbers are falling off quiet seriously given state of economy.

Funny when I was a kid it was a pond, a pair of ice skates and some old sticks wrapped with electrical tape. I think part of the problem has been people trying to scale up the small scale up and complicate kids playing instead of just letting the kids play.

In general I'm not a huge fan of where a lot of sports (including the olympics, although I'm not sure if they were ever really that different) have gone. It seemed more "fun" when it wasn't so corporate and was on a smaller scale and more participatory. I realize that doesn't tie in very well with the ability to sit on the couch and drink beer all day.. but I'm not really convinced that that is where we should be either :p
 
Ryan can only agree. I never ever will forget one of my most memorable immigrant Canadian moments in our initial few years of being here. My sons had been put into hockey by me on the basis of "when in Rome you do as the Romans do" anyhow end of a league game one day someone i our smaller group (not the whole team) mention us all going out to a specific pond after for a game of Dads versus sons. Well at this stage i could only just stand on skates but i was not going to be left out. So we left the arena and went to this particular pond that was at the time still covered with snow. Cleared the snow which revealed great ice surface. A couple of moms pitched in and brought the nets over from home and the boys had a game with their Dads ex me i hung onto the goalie net :)
Then one of the kids had a uncle that was also on the ice and he happened to live right near the pond and also happened to be a home brewer. So he went and got the dads some brew and game proceeded. The snow began falling and play continued. Got some pics somewhere taken with snow coming down.
Was a real Canadian day and special event to me. All those kids now men remember that day specifically.
After the game we ended up at the uncles Dads place. Kids went inside to play video games and the dads all went to the workshop with a woodfireplace and the grandfather handing out shots of homemade grapa and the uncle roasted some chestnuts on the fire.

Now a kid playing hockey in a local house league needs to have min $1000 dollars to play. The towns charge so much for the ice that it kills things. But the paraphanalia that some coaches and parents want their kids to have makes it near impossible for a less fortunate kid to play unless he asks for charitable help from a local organization trying to pave the way.
This is what happens with Town user pays policies. We want the kids off the couch but make activities into a business. Dont even mention the aspect of sticks. Kids have been sold the status of a carbon fibre stick and now the $30 wooden stick is not acceptable they HAVE to Have...yeah right....the fancy $200 plus sticks the pros use and you would not believe the parents willing to buy it for them. This causes any other kid without THE stick to feel like a loser and disadvantage.
Oh let me get off the soapbox this issue just winds me up too much when parents have less brains than an ant.

sent from s4
 
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