Sweden (Liam)

Now, all of you have heard the story of Amber and Michael being in Sweden; my story is a little different. It started off on Day 1 of Hockey camp. Not going to lie, the schedule was pretty similar from day to day.

We woke up around 6:00 A.M. and kind of got ready, changing, brushing our teeth, all the hygiene needed for 2 teenagers. We had some sort of breakfast before heading to the rink. When we got to the rink, we got straight to putting on our gear for the first ice time (skating) for 50 minutes. Skating normally included a warm up of different skating techniques to warm up our edges. We would then split into 4 groups for stations.

After skating, we would go to our first off-ice called Mind To Muscle (M2M). We would do all sorts of body-aching workouts, but it helped a lot with our second ice time (stick control) for another 50 minutes. We would warm up with a game called Chaos Puck. We would all stay in one zone and make sure lose our puck in all the chaos. We would go to 3 stations this time and work on quick decisions and controlling the puck.

After our second ice time, we all get undressed from our gear. We all went up to get a delicious lunch made by the cook at the restaurant at the rink. I normally ate rice, corn, and protein. After our quick lunch we headed back to the hotel for my sleepiest class of the day, Theory.

We talked all about how to be a good player, and what it means to be a talent at your sport. After Theory, we would go back to the rink and prepare for our third and final ice session (game) for 60 minutes. We would have a full ice game and it was pure fun.

For our last two blocks, we had dinner which was very similar to lunch. But after dinner, our final event of the day was to do a workout. We normally work on our hand eye coordination, which really helped on Thursday because on Thursday morning we found out the best/worst news possible. The generator that kept the ice cold had broken so ice looked like this.

We had to do floor Hockey instead, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but we played it all day long. So I was very tired by the end of the day. So on Friday, we went to a new rink near the airport. It was amazing. 100% one of my new favorite rinks (sorry MedStar); but I did get to meet a Defensive player on the Capitals, Rasmus Sandin, and a San Jose Shark player.