If you didn't know, my friends and I will be taking our hockey skills to Minnesota this January. I wanted to document this awesome adventure as much as I can, so in the days leading up to and during the tournament I will be keeping this blog. We will be competing in the U.S. National Hockey Championships, the title makes it sound like we have accomplished more then we actually have. See, to play in this tournament all you have to do is sign up, but it fills up quickly with more then 200 teams and most of the people who compete are from Minnesota. We will be the only team as of now from New Jersey, and we will be taking: Ben Doganeiro, Bryan Rudolph, Corey Pedersen, Chazz Briggs, Tyler Woyshner, and myself Ben Smith. I would assume if your reading this blog you know me and my group of friends, but if you don't know us, we live and breathe hockey. It's in our blood and when we heard about this tournament 3 years ago we knew we had to make it happen. So in my group of friends we all go to college except for one lucky guy, Ben. He's also known as BenDog but as of last night he wants us to just call him Doggy(you'll get use to all of our stupid nicknames through these blogs), he has just recently graduated from Penn State. Being students or recently graduated students makes it hard to come up with the finances to travel to Minnesota. Fortunately we live in a great town with great people who have made our friendships possible through the Moorestown Ice Hockey Club. We have all played for the club during our Middle and High school years except for Chazz, who even though never played ice hockey for the club, has been heavily involved in the town's recreational hockey. The club reached out to us when they heard about what their alumni players were trying to accomplish in Minnesota and they wanted to help. Graciously, they hosted a fundraiser at Pj Whelihans for us last night. Pj's does a dine and donate so as long as you said the check was for the club, we would get a percentage back. Before arriving to the restaurant I wasn't worried but I was wondering how much we would get and how much it would or wouldn't help us get to Minnesota. So I had gotten to the restaurant and I watched as friends and faces I hadn't seen for a long time came in and I started to look at this whole event differently. If Tyler Pedersen is reading this, he will give me crap for this being corny and sentimental, well Ty I promise this will be the only corny one, the rest will be all about hockey. As I started to look at things differently I realized this fundraiser really doesn't have to do with how much money we raise at all. The whole trip to Minnesota is about being with the friends that we had built relationships with for the past decade by playing hockey. So as I sat at the table looking at all the friends I had made over the years through this sport, and I looked at the parents behind me who had always greeted me after games telling me how well I did or "You guys will bounce back after that tough loss", and I realized that I am just happy to have this connection with this great group of people. Its a kind of connection I don't think I'll ever have with another group. I have to say thank you to the Moorestown Ice Hockey Club for creating that and I think its safe to say thats on behalf of our whole group. If you know me personally, you'll know that I lost my father about 7 years ago and on the day of his funeral our Varsity team had a big playoff game. When I saw about every member of the club including my teammates attend the funeral that morning I knew I had something special here. Without that support I wouldn't have been able to play that night, and by the way we won that game after being down 3-1 and Mike Weaver probably had one of the club's craziest goals ever. That's why we want to go to Minnesota to represent this state and more importantly this town. Each one of us has a personal reason for loving this club and this sport. We seriously are a crazy group of hockey fanatics. After drinking some beers and stuffing our faces last night at the fundraiser we decided playing roller hockey in 30 degree weather would be a good idea, this is a usual occurrence, I have no complaints. That also reminds me to say thank you to the town and to Mr. Briggs who allows us to turn the lights on to our rinks every night to play roller. I hope you enjoy reading these posts, helps me enjoy the moment and hopefully gives you some insight to this experience. Sorry if my grammar is bad, it's never been my strong suit. What can I say I'm a hockey player, be happy its not filled with just profanity.
-bSmith
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