Once a Warrior, always a Warrior...

As a follow up to my older (and balder) brother's nostalgic posts, I got that reminiscent feeling myself.

Recently on Facebook, a couple of guys that I used to play Skater Hockey with in a team called the Wakefield Warriors set up a page and got in contact. It turns out that Richard Shawright, our number one supporter had taken a number of videos of our early games! Aprehensively I loaded the video files up, anxious not to tarnish my memory of myself as being a "great" player with the actual truth! I was dissapointed to find that I was actually crap - but then again so was everyone else (we were only 15!).

I am far from being a team sports type myself, preferring the solitude of the gym or a run around town as my poison. However my times with the Warriors was some of the best of my life, the comradery was second to none. As all of the players for Sheffield teams were transferring around like glory grabbing mercenaries, the (less than fashionable) Warriors stuck with what they had. We managed top 5 finishes most years (out of 10 before you ask) and I think our Youth team (one with which Paul Wilson and I were very much involved) won the national championship the year that Paul and I were too old to play.

Indeed my greatest achievement was Junior "most improved player 2000", which I was proud of for around 20 minutes until my first line defense colleague Paul got "player of the year". I think the intimation was that I was rubbish to begin with.

One of my biggest regrets was not sticking with the uni team and carrying on playing. There are still nights when I imagine I am ghosting past players and scoring the winning goal, the stench of years of sweat dripping down from out of my helmet. Still, I was never a goal scorer and was only really good at knocking other people over - I hear the Junior league is non-contact now, I wouldnt have stood a chance.

Anyway a couple of videos are shown below, the quality (of both video and play) is crap, but this is one of our first games, before we played at the inline arena. Its a challenge to spot Paul (#75) or I (#16) either in the picture (which I think may be as old as 1996, age 14) or the videos (partially because Paul is usually sent off!), but we're in there somewhere! I am usually referred to as "Hugsy" or just "Hugs". You may hear our coach (the no-nonsense Dave Maize) shoulding various things such as "go-on Hugs, skate you lazy git" amongst other things

I wonder what they are all doing now...