Bill Eckert, who works for the Howard County Department of Recreation… (Candus Thomson, Baltimore…)
January 30, 2011|By Candus Thomson, The Baltimore Sun
On a small sheet of ice, ringed by a rustic frame of cattails, the boys of winter play their game.
The pond hockey season below the Mason-Dixon line can have the lifespan of a mayfly, so they embrace the moment with all the energy of an end-to-end rush.
This is hockey as nature intended: pure, uncomplicated, joyous. No one complains about having to shovel the surface clear of snow or when slush soaks sweatpants as a skidding puck throws up a rooster tail of spray. Backpacks and winter boots mark goals and everyone is a referee. There's no penalty box, no benches and spectators had better be prepared to stand.
"Three on three or four on four is just perfect," says Bill Eckert, 56, the unofficial commissioner of pond hockey in Carroll County. "If you're still a kid at heart, it's still fun. It feels good afterward and you sleep good at night."
A Philadelphia transplant, Eckert learned to skate on the Gwynns Falls pond in Woodlawn Cemetery in the late 1960s.
"We didn't skate in Philly. Nobody did. So we had to learn here," says Eckert, a budget analyst for the Howard County Department of Recreation and Parks. "In the winter, it was something fun, something outdoors."
When Eckert and his wife moved to Eldersburg in 1987, he "immediately began looking for places to play."
First, the tiny storm water pond at Liberty High School leaped onto his radar screen. About a decade ago, as his four children were growing into their skates, he discovered a bigger puddle near Century High School — not too deep, accessible to the public.
Each year as the calendar reaches its final days, Eckert keeps an eye on the thermometer. After a week of sub-freezing weather, when the ice grows thicker than a man's fist and safe enough to skate on, he begins calling friends and neighbors and rounding up his children.
It's impossible to spot the pond tucked between Century High and Liberty Road. It's only by following the sound of steel biting into ice and the crack of stick on puck that you can find these players, oblivious to the elements.
"Sometimes you get here and it's just bone chilling. But once you start skating 5, 10 minutes and you warm up, you think, 'Boy, there's nothing I'd rather be doing in the outdoors today,'" says Eckert.
The truth is with fickle winter weather and a lack of hockey tradition, real Maryland pond players are as far apart as Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin's front teeth. In Harford County, the North Stars Mites and Squirts play an occasional game at Forest Hill. The considerably older Laughing Skulls of Laurel play most of their games indoors but venture outdoors for the USA Hockey Pond Hockey National Championships in Eagle River, Wis. (This year's tournament Feb. 11-13 has attracted 250 teams and has a waiting list to enter). The Young Guns of Highland, Team Moe of Cabin John and the Maryland Ice Claws of Bethesda have skated right past nationals to the World Pond Hockey Championships, being held in New Brunswick, Canada, the same weekend.
Still, the allure of hockey played in biting cold and — if lucks holds — blowing snow, has clearly struck a chord with the public. In 2008, the National Hockey League made the Winter Classic its signature New Year's Day game. More than 300,000 fans tried to buy tickets for the 2010 Winter Classic at Boston's Fenway Park, with a $250 grandstand ticket fetching many times its face value. This year, the Washington Capitals beat the Pittsburgh Penguins on slushy ice before the largest television audience for a regular season hockey game in 36 years, according to NBC. A game between Michigan and Michigan State last December drew more fans — 113,411 — than any event in the history of Michigan's storied football stadium.
Last January, UMBC and Rowan University played to a tie in the first outdoor game in American Collegiate Hockey Association history.
But those outings are as quirky as a goalie putting one into the opponents' net and will never be mistaken for real pond play.
Most of the Eldersburg players look like they got dressed inside a Goodwill bin. No one puts on airs. No one has fancy gear. No one hogs the puck. It's not even apparent anyone keeps score. "Next goal wins," someone shouts. "It's either 2-2 or 3-3."
Norman Williams of Eldersburg referees amateur hockey games all week. Playing outdoors on a pebbled surface that makes skate blades chatter and the puck take wild hops, he says, is, for him, "just for the pure fun of it."
Dan Bennett, who goes to Towson University, jokes that an ice-cleaning Zamboni "would be nice but I don't know where we'd put it. Maybe behind the bleachers."
While they enjoy their intimate surroundings, the idea of league expansion clearly intrigues them.
"We'd like to have more people play, but I think they're afraid of getting knocked down or falling. That's not our style," says Eckert. "All you need to join us is a pair of $40 used skates and a stick."
candy.thomson@baltsun.com
