Real time!

By Jim den Hollander

Editor, Midwesthockey.info

Midwesthockey.info is the culmination of a lot of a certain amount of trial and error, but mostly, an idea that has undergone numerous detours.

There is one specific event that finally lit the match under my butt and finally gave me the staying power to get this thing to the start line.

The off-season is always a time when I think about getting this site off of the ground and I would say at least the last five summers have seen me digging in once again to get this thing started.

Ultimately, I want this to be the place to get informaton on everything related to hockey in the Midwest, but as this is still at the glorified hobby stage at this point, I have been forced to pull back my scope a bit. But this is the first time I am rolling into the regular season feeling somewhat ready to go.  I attempted to build a sort of archive over the summer months, getting as much off season stuff as I could built up. While I didn’t stay at it day in and day out — that’s always the biggest problem, I am not working on my second 100 stories and I feel like almost all of the teams I hope to cover have at least been mentioned here.

In the past, I get the urge to get things going, get overwhelmed early and find myself playing catch up to the point that I sort or lose interest.

Last spring, I went with a couple of friends to watch the local Junior hockey team — the Dells Ducks play a key playoff game at Forest Lake, MN. They wrapped up a two-game sweep of their conference semi-final series. My friends and I got video of them high fiving after the game, congratulated coach Zaniboni and then made tracks for Hudson, WI where a about 90 minutes later we were videoing the Rochester Ice Hawks go through the same celebration having clinched the other conference semi.

On the way home I thought to myself how great it would have been if I had a website where I could have put that kind of stuff and I have said so many times since then — “I would have killed it that night.”

So, that 90 minute stretch is so far responsible for my most determined and thought out effort to date. I built up an archive as best I could. It’s incomplete and a little inconsistent, but there are plenty of stories there.

I decided that Sept. 1 would be the day I would basically ‘go live,’ with the website — no more scouring and looking for information from the past month or so. I missed it by a few days as this is actually being written on Sept. 3, but this is it. No more looking back. The season is officially less than 72 hours away thanks to an early start by a few NA3HL teams and I am ready to roll.

Here is my plan — Regular written and video type updtates on what happened each weekend..or through the week in some cases, in particular pro games as well as regular previews leading up to the weekend.

Trent and I have done six videos so far and I want them to become a lot more regular in the weeks ahead.  I hope to have a facebook page up really soon and trust the Youtube-Facebook-Midwesthockey.info triangle will start to get hockey fans seeing the material that is being written here.

Thanks Trent and Tom for going with me on that hockey expedition in the spring. Hopefully we can make some trips like that in the spring of 2016 and get some more great footage.

Game On!