With the new season just under a month away (preseason begins a week from tomorrow!), it’s getting to be that time of year. Time seems to slow down. It seems like the season will never arrive. You’ve suffered through an entire summer with nothing but trade rumors and the NHL Draft. But don’t despair!
For those of you as desperate for hockey as I am, the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL), Russia’s version of the NHL, started their season last week!
Now you’re thinking, “But. Liz. I don’t speak or understand Russian at all!”
The KHL actually did a complete re-haul of their website over the summer and the English version works extremely well now. You can also be adventurous like me and find live-streams of the games online. Yes, they will most likely be in Russian, but that doesn’t mean you won’t understand player names at the very least. I actually have found it’s improving my Russian just to listen to the announcers (I’m studying Russian in my free time). Or you can just mute it and watch the action. Either way, you still get that hockey fix you so desperately crave.
It doesn’t help that I got a Dynamo Moscow scarf last spring, so as the weather gets colder, I’ll definitely be sporting that along with all of my Capitals gear!
If you’re willing to wait a week for NHL hockey, then go ahead. The rest of us will be biding our time with Russian hockey and loving every minute.
They only come around once every 4 years. Some teams keep the same design every time, but often teams will make changes to help show off their country.
Earlier today, Team USA unveiled their new jerseys for this upcoming Winter Olympics in February (picture below). Overall they’re nice. I like the coloring and the subtleness of the stars on the shoulder. But the one glaringly obvious fault on these jerseys?
Fake. Laces.
A staple of a lot of hockey jerseys is the laces along the neckline. When looking at replica jerseys, some have laces and some just have the regular neckline. Not even replica jerseys have fake laces. Does it really cost that much more to have *real* laces? It almost seems like it’s mocking the laces on the hockey jersey by having fake ones. Either have them or don’t.
All in all, though, I do actually like the jerseys a lot. They’re simple, the coloring is fantastic, and they do an excellent job representing our country.
It’s getting to be that point in every hockey fan’s summer. It just seems like it’s going on and on and on and it’s never going to end. The Stanley Cup was over 2 months ago and everyone’s itching for more hockey.
But don’t despair!
There’s only 21 days until hockey’s back! Or at least until the pre-season. Regular season is still 46 days away. Why is it that a little over a month can seem so long?
Just keep your chin up, watch some highlights from last year, and get ready for a roller coaster ride of a season!
Looking back at all I’ve done this semester with my blog and ideas I’ve come up with, I’m proud of myself. I’m not the greatest blog writer in the world and often have trouble expressing myself. Looking at my posts from the beginning of the class compared to my most recent ones, I’m definitely starting to figure out what goes into making an interesting blog and ways to improve myself. I’m not just spouting facts anymore. I’m finding arguments and looking at both sides. Even if I feel strongly one way, I learned that playing devil’s advocate can make an argument that much stronger.
My persona’s gone from someone who just likes to ramble about nothing in particular to someone who cares deeply about the sport and issues within it. I had my good days and I had my bad days, but I’ve taken lessons from both and hope to only continue improving myself. This blog is actually something I’ve been thinking about starting for a while, so the class was an excellent way to get started and get some good feedback. My writing can only continue to improve and this will definitely help.
I also think that the start of a new NHL season will help greatly. The start of a new season, and one that will contain the Winter Olympics, is always cause for a lot of discussion topics. I’m planning on weighing in my opinion a few times a week and, as always, cheer for my Capitals. Since they’re my favorite team, the majority of my posts will be about them. That being said, I’m not going to *entirely* focus on them. There are important things worth mentioning that happen outside the Capitals organization so if it warrants enough attention, I’ll take a look at it.
The course seemed a little disorganized at times and I wasn’t always sure exactly where we were going with assignments, but overall I enjoyed writing and learning more a bit about myself and the sport that I love throughout this semester. Hopefully some of my classmates will stay on as readers. And to any new people that eventually find this: let me know ways to improve my writing!
I love interacting with fellow hockey fans so you can feel free to follow my personal Twitter (@ejsuess). I don’t plan on continuing the use of my class Twitter just because two accounts can get a little confusing. My personal twitter has always been open to the public, so I’m not afraid of people looking at it. No, it’s not always going to look at hockey, but that’s what the blog is for. I’ll work on promoting my posts, though, so expect tweets about them at the very least.
With that, I bid you adeiu for the semester. Say goodbye to the specific class posts, and hello to the new hockey season and everything that comes with it!
No matter how much anyone may say that they hate politics and never want to get involved, there’s bound to be some issue *somewhere* that they feel strongly about. Throughout my undergrad at Iowa State, I realized that my one issue is marriage equality. I feel very strongly that people should be able to marry, regardless of their sexual orientation. Why should one couple receive all the benefits and status of marriage while another couple can’t, simply because they are the same gender? Going along with that, everyone should be treated equally, regardless of their sexual orientation. That’s why I feel so strongly about the “You Can Play” program.
The “You Can Play” program was created in order to help get rid of problems among LGBTQ athletes within sports. They show that an athlete should only be judged based on his or her talent and that sexual orientation has nothing to do with it. Most of what they do is create videos to get the message out there. These videos contain famous players that are either homosexual themselves or allies to the cause. The campaign is also active on Twitter by tweeting about current issues as well as their new videos. Co-creator Patrick Burke is also extremely active on Twitter and isn’t afraid to answer questions about the cause or why he supports it so much.
I feel that they do an excellent job in creating videos and displaying them at games to show people that it doesn’t matter. The one thing that bothers me, though, is that the official “You Can Play” twitter account doesn’t really answer questions or interact with the fans all that much. Yes, Patrick Burke does, but not as many people follow his individual account. If they were to do something like that with the official account, I feel it would help to get the message out there even further. There’s also distinct other ways to get the message of athletic equality out to the world that they would be wise to try and utilize.
But don’t get me wrong, they are doing a ton of good in the athletic community. If an issue comes up involving homophobia or other LGBTQ issues within sports, the You Can Play team will send out a group of people to wherever is needed to sit down and have a chat with all parties involved. One excellent example I can think of is when Tyler Seguin, when he was still part of the Boston Bruins, posted some homophobic tweets on his account. The Bruins apologized for his folly, he apologized, and the tweets were deleted. Patrick Burke later went into detail about how he met with Seguin and had a nice one-on-one chat with him about why his tweets were hurtful and what he could do to prevent something like that from happening again. It’s things like that which really get the message to the athletes.
That being said, the lesson I learn from this about *my* online presence is that you must utilize all forms of social media effectively in order to do the best at promoting yourself and getting whatever message you support out there for the world to see. I still plan to mostly focus on this blog and my twitter account to promote my love of hockey so that others can unite with me in an awesome sport. I don’t feel that Facebook gets the message out there in the right way, and videos just don’t seem to be the right way for me to go personally. I don’t have the necessary editing equipment to put together quality videos and writing is easy enough to do even when you are busy.
I also feel like my writing has grown during this class. At the beginning, I was always struggling for topics and never sure exactly where I wanted to go with the blog. Now that I have a direction and have learned to show my passion by doing more than presenting facts, I feel like I have a better sense of purpose. I’m planning to continue my blog after this class and maybe even try my hand at developing the app I’ve been pitching for the last few weeks. It will be a long, hard road, but I think I will learn a lot from it.
And who knows, maybe some day I’ll have a readership and people will want to come to my blog to learn more about Capitals hockey!
During his tenure with the Washington Capitals, Alex Semin came to be known as a bit of an enigma. Some nights he would show up to games and put up an incredibly impressive performance. Other times he’d show up and it would seem he did nothing more than stand around and do nothing. Nobody ever knew which Semin was going to show up, and it made a lot of Capitals fans nervous. Now that he’s playing for Carolina, though, he seems much happier and is playing more consistently and better than he had in D.C.
But apparently the Capitals can’t get away from having some sort of enigma-type player on the team.
One of the biggest reasons teams are so hesitant to draft players from Russia is because of a continuing trend of them not willing to fulfill their contract and move to the United States. This apparently seems to be the case with Caps prospect Evgeny Kuznetsov. Drafted in the first round of the 2010 draft, Caps fans have eagerly been awaiting his arrival…which has yet to happen. Granted, very few players actually play their first year after they’ve been drafted, but he seems to be especially hesitant.
Last year there were a swirl of rumors that he wasn’t going to come over at all and that he would stay and continue playing with Traktor Chelyabinsk of the KHL in Russia for the length of his career. Ovechkin appeared to have talked some sense into them, though, as he changed his stance from “never coming to play for the NHL” to “waiting until after the Olympics in Sochi.” As those begin to draw near, though, another flurry of rumors are beginning to fly.
In an interview with Russian sports media, he reveals that he plans to come to the NHL for a few years but return to end his career with the KHL when he’s 30 years old. Granted, it was a bit of a loaded question, (for a transcript of the interview, go here) but that still makes me question his loyalty to the team.
When a player doesn’t get along with or isn’t confident in his team, it makes it really hard to go out there and play his best every night. If you’re not loyal to your team, it is definitely going to show through in your play, as made evident by the case of Alex Semin.
Nobody can say exactly what will happen with Kuznetsov, so for now we just wait and hope that he realizes what a fantastic opportunity playing for the NHL really is.
It’s a short commercial advertising the NHLTrades app I have been pitching the last few weeks. It took a while to come up with some inspiration, but I finally thought of a decent idea. Enjoy!
In keeping with my theme from last week’s blog post, the Olympics are making big news again this week.
Not long after I posted last week about how the NHL was debating even letting players attend the Olympics this coming February, the schedules for the next season were released. What did they contain? A two week break for the Winter Olympics! Hooray! So it’s official that NHL players are allowed to play for their home countries.
Coincidentally, countries have started arranging for the beginning stages of picking who will eventually make those teams. The Olympic training camps that have been occurring since the official announcement have caused a little bit of a stir with who was (or wasn’t) invited. Each team sends out invitations to players that they think would help make the best team.
For these particular games, Martin Brodeur was not asked to participate in training camp this year. Granted, he’s one of the oldest current players in the NHL, but there’s no doubting he’s one of the best. He’s one of an extremely small number of goalies who has managed to score a goal. An impressive feat. Hopefully the other goalie hopefuls for Team USA can take his place.
Another few invites that seemed a little strange were the three players invited to the Team USA training camp that have no NHL experience to their names. To give them some credit, John Gibson was the starting goalie for the 2013 IIHF World Championship. The other two players, though, have a lot to prove without a lot of professional experience.
A lot of people did meet expectations, though, and received invites. Alex Ovechkin and Alex Semin, my two favorite Russians, were invited to the Russian team camp and will most likely play. Ovechkin is actually an ambassador for the Olympic committee this year since it’s taking place in Sochi, Russia. So I’ll of course be a huge traitor and cheer for Russia to support Ovechkin and Semin.
Overall, I’m excited to see who the teams end up finalizing and to see who makes the Olympic teams. I’ve been in love with the Olympics since I was a kid, even more so this year since they’re taking place in one of my favorite countries. It’ll be really fun to follow and I can’t wait till February!
Until then, we’ll just have to keep an eye on the teams to see what happens.
I have taken my initial NHLTrades elevator pitch and turned it into an easy-to-understand presentation with visual aids.
One thing I forgot to mention within the presentation is that each of the listed trades on the app will be clickable and will lead to more detailed information about that trade.
Enjoy!
Feel free to ask questions in the comments! Also, to view just the presentation you can go here.
Also, here is a transcript of the presentation:
“NHLTrades is an idea I came up with for class and it is an app for your phone to alert you whenever a trade takes place in the NHL. I created it because my blog focuses on hockey and as a fan, I’m always interested in what teams have traded players.
The basics of this app are that it features updates whenever a trade occurs. Once a trade occurs, an update will be sent to the phone so the next time you open the app, you will automatically see the most recent trades first. By going into the settings, you will see options for push notifications so that you can get instant notification the minute any trade occurs. You can also have it set to only notify you when trades involving certain teams occur. For example, I am a big Washington Capitals fan, so I would set it to notify me every time the Washington Capitals were involved in a trade. So, say that the Capitals decide to trade Alex Ovechkin, for whatever reason, to the Minnesota Wild (another of my favorite teams). The minute that trade occurred, I would get a notification saying that the Washington Capitals have just traded Alex Ovechkin to the Minnesota Wild. By opening the app, I will instantly see that along with details of the trade, such as the salary he would be making, the salary that the Wild players will be making, and all of the other information that is involved in a trade. You can also have it set in the settings for how often it checks that there have been new trades. If you want to preserve battery life, you can set it to check for the trades every hour or so. If you don’t mind using a little more battery, you can set it to check constantly and that’s when you’ll get the most reliable, most up-to-date notifications of what’s going on. Hopefully it will be available on both iOS systems and Android.
Here is a little mock-up that I did. This is for the iPhone, but the app would virtually look the same for an Android phone, but the screen would be a little bigger so it might display more trades. As you can see, the most recent trades are at the top of the app and the ones that have taken place a little further back are down towards the bottom. There are three different pages you can select. There’s “Recent Trades,” which is what you’re seeing right now. There’s also “Your Team,” which you set up within the settings menu. For example, when I click that it would show trades only involving the Washington Capitals. And then you can click settings to see the various settings for the app that I discussed before.Here I just took a little sample of what you would see when you open the app. It displays both trades that take place between two teams as well as when a team takes free agent or a player that they currently have and signs them to either an initial contract or an extension. You can see the other day the Kings signed a contract with Nolan for a 2 year extension. The Penguins actually just signed Quinnipiac’s goalie, Eric Hartzel, to a 2 year contract now that he’s graduated and done with his 4 years of hockey here at Quinnipiac. This is really exciting that Quinnipiac has produced an NHL-caliber goalie.
If we keep going, you can see this is a little thing I found on kinvey.com. It’s a little map of approximately how long it takes to build an app. You can see all the back-door stuff takes about 10 weeks. That’s figuring out data storage, user management, data integration, how to push the notifications, and making versions live without breaking previous versions. That’s all of the back end stuff and that takes about 10 weeks. You can actually hire companies or purchase packages that do all of that for you. You can see the front end ( actual app development, figuring out what it looks like, actually getting it to send to the phone) only takes about 8 weeks instead of the initial 18 that I predicted. But it’s nicer if you do all of it yourself because then you are in control of everything and you know how everything works. I would go with building the whole thing from scratch and doing roughly the 18 week estimation for development.
Some fundraising ideas would be to contact the NHL head office because they would be very interested in this and getting it out to the fans. If they charged $1 for the app, which is a pretty typical price, they could make a lot of money. Even if it was free, they could add some advertising which could bring in some revenue dollars. For them it would be very beneficial if they were to help raise funds. You could also go to the individual teams for some possible money because they know the fans want to know what’s going on. Everyone’s always curious as to trades so the individual teams benefit from this too if they help raise funds. You could also go to the media. Newspaper and television definitely want to know what’s going on and they want to know as soon as possible. This would be a use for them and they could go ahead and help raise money to help get them more information so they can be on the ball, bring breaking trade updates as soon as they happen and give a little bit more detail. This goes the same for bloggers for the teams or various hockey blogs. For example, if my blog had a bigger viewership, I would be interested in this app because it would help me write blog posts about these trades as soon as they happen. There’s very little delay this way in getting the information to people that want it. All of these various people would be a good starting point for fundraising.
With that, now you know a little bit more about NHLTrades. If you have any questions or comments, you can contact me on Twitter at @quinncapsfan or you can send me an e-mail at Elizabeth.Suess@quinnipiac.edu or go ahead and head to my WordPress blog and leave a comment on some of the posts. Thanks for listening!”
A staple to basically any sport is either the winter or summer Olympics. Athletes work extremely hard to be the best of the best and get gold medals in their respective events. Sometimes they’re even good enough to get gold in multiple events. But what happens when some of the best athletes in the world aren’t allowed to participate?
Right now the NHL is currently debating with the Olympic comittee over whether or not the players will be allowed to go play for their country’s hockey teams during the Winter Games in Sochi this coming February.
My immediate reaction is to be angry that the NHL should even have to think about this. It’s almost every young hockey player’s dream to play in the NHL. They’re widely known as the best league in the world containing some of the top players in the world. Why wouldn’t you allow them to play for their country in the Olympics?
Looking at it from the perspective of the NHL, though, I can sort of see why they’re so hesitant. The biggest concern is that there’s an increased chance of the star players getting hurt during the 2 week period that is the winter Olympics. The other problem is that the Olympics are 2 weeks. That’s 2 weeks that has to be taken out of the hockey schedule. Two weeks where the majority of players are sitting around waiting. Two long weeks of the NHL not making money.
But money shouldn’t be an issue. The NHL already makes a hefty amount of cash. They could even partner with the Olympics somehow to keep up their earnings for that 2 week period. The Olympics were created so that the best of the best can battle it out to see who really is the best. The best players should be allowed to play. And think of it this way. Those players that are resting and not participating…some of them could have a little break to get back on their game. Players with injuries could have a little more time to heal without missing games. Players going through a bit of a rough patch could get it together and turn their playing around by just taking a break and training a little.
There are definitely pros and cons to letting NHL players participate in the Olympics. The two week time period where there is no NHL is the biggest problem, but I see a bright side to that two week break. These players want to play for their home countries. They want to show everyone who really is the best. They want to win that gold medal.
QuinnCapsFan 