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(Logo by Couch Tarts)
Here's the final installment of the first edition of Odd Woman Rush. If things go as planned, this should either be a monthly or bi-monthly feature here at CLS. Feel free to recommend other bloggers and topics in the comments. Share your feedback as well.
Part I
Part II
Part III
The Prompt
Why are you a blogger? What pushed you across the threshold to go from fan/journalist/whatever to someone who publishes hockey posts? Did it have anything to do with "proving" your knowledge? Describe your motivation for starting your blog(s).
The Bloggers
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Su Ring of Daily Su/hockey editor for King5.com
This whole “hockey blogging” thing has been an interesting journey so far. I’ve been a hockey fan since my college days. My school (University of Alabama Huntsville) has an NCAA Division I hockey team and I went to every home game while I was there. But, I didn’t start blogging about hockey until after I joined the fan forum at NHL.com following the Penguins’ loss to Detroit in the 2008 Stanley Cup Finals. I needed a place to commiserate with other heartbroken Penguins fans and found a great community there. I started out by writing a couple of things to express my feelings, mostly about the good that players do off the ice. I did not blog a lot, just when the feeling moved me. I wrote about random things: reliving the 1980 Miracle on Ice through my dad’s eyes. The heartbreaking loss of Luc Bourdon. Comparing and contrasting the tragedy surrounding Alexei Cherepanov with the situation faced by David Carle, whose heart problem was caught just before the NHL Draft. Tampa Bay drafted him anyway, as a symbolic gesture. And then came the night I sang the Canadian and American anthems at a local junior hockey game.
That November night at Comcast Arena in Everett, Washington, launched my hockey writing career. It started with a search for a former Everett Silvertips player who was so popular, fans still scream his name during the Canadian anthem.
“LOVE!”
I went searching for Mitch Love after that night, interviewed him and found him to be so charming, I asked him to blog about life as a player in the AHL. He wholeheartedly agreed. After that, I had no choice but to start covering the Everett Silvertips and cross-region rivals, the Seattle Thunderbirds. And as I interviewed player after player, I found that I liked it. Game recaps came next, although very awkwardly and painstakingly. One game would take up to four hours to recap. I’ve gotten that down to about two hours now, but game recaps are still the most difficult to write.
I’m into my second year covering hockey for my station’s website and branching out with more personal offerings on my personal blog. I still find it easier to interview players, coaches and others tied to the great game. Game recaps are still the most difficult but I plug away. Am I trying to prove something? Maybe. To whom? Maybe just to myself. What am I trying to prove? Maybe I just want to show myself that I can write whatever I put my mind to. If other people enjoy the fruits of my labors, all the better. So far, it seems to be working.
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Zoe from Puck Huffers
Puck Huffers started not necessarily to prove our knowledge, but to prove our general quality as human beings. When we started getting involved in the Penguins online community, we didn't know of a lot of blogs. Clearly the biggest Penguins fan site on the Internet is Pensblog, which is run by two guys, Adam and Derek. While there are plenty of fellow females in their comments section, the only blog run by women with any significant following that we were aware of was Hockey for the Ladies.HftL tends to indulge seriously those female fantasies that they might actually become involved with professional athletes, and runs many features about the "hotness" of players with very little focus on the game at hand. The writing style, too, left a lot to be lacking, seeing as every sentence seems to end in two exclamation points (even when inside parentheses!!)!! Sure, we're women, we thought, and we're straight women, we like dudes. But. . .damn. We are also passionate sportsfans and creative people. HtfL's main writer, Stephanie, also maintains a more serious website called the Steel City Sports Fan, but this is generally purely news-oriented. We simply felt that we could run a better website. It's as easy as that.
Taken from Hockey for the Ladies ... oh dear.
Not only a better website, but a website that could appeal to both men and women, that dealt with actual sports in addition to, say, our natural interest in men (when we choose to publicly express it) and our sick, dirty, bizarre senses of humor. We tend to do our own thing and not worry about censoring our thoughts or taking things too seriously, and it's worked out well for us. What started out as a kind of WE CAN CLEARLY RUN A WEBSITE OKAY experiment quickly metastasized into a living, breathing project with its own mythology, folklore, and quite a lot of followers and readers, most of whom we'll never meet. We now enjoy the side-effects of running a website, which include, aside from general insanity, the rewarding feeling of "being a part of something."
Which may, actually go to the heart of why we started PH: we thought we could "be a part of" the Penguins community in a more effectual way than we were, and do it better than the women that were doing it at that time. And we've been pretty successful, and met a lot of good people. The community aspect makes it worth it, and the popularity provides the validation. It's win-win. And our inspiration is the team, hands-down. We write because we love our team--those goofy, absurd bastards, all of them. If we didn't, the success and popularity never would have come to pass.
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Vancity Canuck from Benched Whale and The Hockey Bay
I am a blogger because some people I knew suggested to me that I might want to start my own blog. So instead of starting just one, I started two. You can partially blame my existence as a blogger on The Pensblog or the Kurtenblog. Before I wrote a blog, I read blogs. I loved to talk hockey and in Vancouver, if you are out with friends to catch a game or out for a few drinks, you will spend at least a portion of the night discussing what is wrong with the Canucks and what you think needs to be done to fix the team. I guess my hockey knowledge started to get a little out of hand as I noticed that my friends would be overwhelmed at my enthusiasm with talking about the sport, so I took to the net instead.
The suggestion came one night from my flatmate while watching a Canuck game at home on the couch. After sitting through a whole game with me giving insight, opinion and plenty of hilarious commentary (I think I'm pretty funny some days), my flatmate suggested that maybe I would want to start my own blog. Perhaps this was a suggestion because he didn't want to listen to me talk about hockey as much, maybe, nevertheless this is how my Vancouver Canucks blog started.
My other blog, The Hockey Bay began because at that time, there was very little written about the Tampa Bay Lightning (shocking I know). I found myself constantly searching for news and a certain type of commentary (ridiculousness) that just wasn't offered about the Lightning by other blog writers (there were like 2). So I started to write it myself.
Horny female bloggers know this photo well. Sadly, so do I.
I don't write the blogs to prove anything to other fans. You either like to read my stuff or you don't. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a stats junkie, but I know my stuff. I started the blog
assuming that no one would read it and I wrote just because I enjoyed to write. At first, I didn't even tell any of my immediate friends in my day to day life that I even wrote a blog, let alone two blogs. I eventually had to have a blog 'coming out' e-mail sent to them revealing my hobby, and my friends think it's pretty awesome that I blog about hockey. These days what keeps me blogging is the hockey blogging community that I have met. There are so many creative, smart and hilarious people whose insightful work I have read or whose posts can have me in stitches laughing out loud.
I don't try to be a girl blogger, I'm just a blogger that happens to be a girl. Most days that doesn't change the way I write about either team and on the days that I happen to post a half naked photo of Victor Hedman on my blog for draft day, well my readers take it in stride.
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Talk Hockey to Me
As a child of the west coast, I got brought into hockey by a Ducks fan from Anaheim, and a Sabres fan from Bend, OR while we were at school in Tacoma Washington. I initially thought I was a Penguins fan (Colby Armstrong and getting into Penn State might have helped that), and in order to connect with other Penguins fans, I had to go to the internet to find people.
I’d been blogging my life (not well, mind you) for a few years at that point, and when I picked up the hockey thing, a mess of my friends whined about how much they didn’t *actually* care about any of it. My hockey blog was really a spinoff of my “normal” blog, and now my normal blog is the one that gets ignored for weeks and weeks on end. At first I was trying to make a connection between hockey and roller derby, as a new derby player, and the blog started with the name “Life in the Sin Bin,” with a nod to the goonery of hockey as well as my um… occasionally shady derby dealings.
Eventually though, it settled on “Talk Hockey To Me,” which I will fully admit came from the sticker that graces one of my nalgene bottles, “Talk Nerdy To Me.”
The blog title also forced that awful song in my head. Ugh.
I quit playing derby and went to grad school in PA, lived in Hershey and fell in love with the Bears (and out of love with the Penguins) and the connection between “female” and “hockey fan” became a big enough deal I wrote my entire masters thesis on it. (It lives at the blog.) At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m the only self-identified feminist hockey blog out there, and I’m usually the one at the forefront of picking the puckbunny fights, which has gotten me both exceedingly good friends and exceedingly vitriolic hate mail. While the feminist agenda isn’t the only thing that keeps me going, some of my best posts have come from the differing treatment of male and female fans (pink jerseys, anyone?) At this point I’m interested in yes, proving my knowledge, but at the same time, trying to break down the barriers that women still encounter just in fandom.
Right now, I’ve realized that while the Hershey Bears are and will forevermore be MY TEAM, their associated NHL team (that DC gang with the Russians) isn’t feeling like the NHL team that’ll stick for me and my posterity. Part of the blog now is an NHL-less Northwesterner (go PDX WINTERHAWKS!) seeking out *her* team, for better or for worse.
Essentially, I’m all about being a messed up, bruise friendly, counter-culture feminist sports blog that doesn’t shy away from pushing the boundaries and constantly evolves beyond even where I thought I’d wind up. And even if I could stop it at this point, I don’t think I’d want to!
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