Valley-based sled hockey team hopes to compete

PALMER — However loud and brutal it can get, there’s a certain beauty to the sport of ice hockey.

It is, after all, a sport played on skates with much grade, gliding and power involved.

The same is generally true of sled hockey. If you’ve never seen or heard of sled hockey, don’t feel bad. The people who play it at the Curtis D. Menard Memorial Sports Center say not many people do.

“I never knew anything about this until I got hurt,” said goalie Matt Thompson.

His initial plan had been to try to get into some kind of competitive archery group. He loves to shoot arrows, so he called up a service organization, Challenge Alaska.

“Nothing really came from the archery part, but he started talking about sled hockey,” Thompson said.

And now here he is, two seasons in and loving it.

As the name implies, sled hockey is played on a sled. The propulsion comes from dual-use sticks that have a blade on one end and spikes on the other. The blades are for puck handling, the spikes for gripping the ice.

Many sled hockey participants, like Thompson, are in wheelchairs. But judging by the locker room, none of them have let that keep them from being active.

If hockey is a sport that takes forever to gear up for, sled hockey takes even longer as participants whip out ratchets to do quick adjustments to their sleds.

Jeff Dick is the Challenge Alaska Paralympic Sport Alaska Coordinator. He said the Valley squad is the only sled hockey team in Alaska, which means that most of the games are scrimmages.

The sport locally began in Eagle River in 2009 and very early on scored a second place finish in a tournament in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Later, interest started to wane.

“We moved it out here and it exploded,” Dick said.

Now the team is consistently able to field 5-on-5 squads and 6-on-6 squads for practices. Dick said that the team is about 50 percent Anchorage-based and 50-percent Valley-based.

Getting to tournaments can be difficult. Money is hard to come by. Usually, the team has to do fundraising which, Thompson said, can be tough when the first half of your sales pitch is spent explaining just what exactly sled hockey is.

Dick said that aside from a grant from the late Sen. Ted Stevens, the team has mostly been able to get by and sometimes compete in tournaments through sponsorships.

Fundraising events like bake sales and the like just didn’t seem to bring in the right amount of revenue. He said this year’s tournament is in Massachusetts and the team would love to go.

“We’re open to anyone who wants to sponsor us,” Dick said.

Thompson said he’s one who would love to compete. Hockey wasn’t something that appealed to him before he got hurt one day working on the North Slope in December 2011.

“In my stand-up life I never could skate,” he said.

But on a sled he’s found a hobby he loves and, in the goal, he’s found the right position.

“Call me crazy, but I enjoy getting pucks shot at me,” he said. “It’s a challenge.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.