The Two-Line Pass

Dr. Carolyn Emery at the University of Calgary has been doing some important research on youth hockey in Alberta and Quebec. In just year one of a three-year study, the team has already found significant evidence to back up their theory.

That theory, of course, is that more kids get hurt in checking leagues than in no-contact leagues. Shock and horror surely abounded when the preliminary results of the study were released yesterday.

In Alberta, you see, they introduce checking at the peewee level (ages 11 and 12), whereas Quebec has checking only at the bantam level (13 and 14) and only at the highest levels of bantam competition.

What they found was that peewee players in Alberta were 2.5 times more likely to get hurt and 3.5 times more likely to suffer a concussion than the peewee players they tracked in Quebec. Albertans playing peewee hockey were also three times more likely to sustain injuries that kept them off the ice for more than a week.

You don’t say! Checking leads to injuries. The news didn’t come as a shock to Hockey Calgary president Perry Cavanagh, nor to anyone else that has ever watched any contact sport in the history of athletic competition.

“That’s the expectation we would have seen — there’s nothing shocking or revealing in the outcome,” he said. “The reality is, you put a bunch of kids together in a playing area, odds are the group that [hits] is going to have a higher injury rate.”

But doesn’t this kind of draw a basis of comparison for why hockey fans tend to view Albertan hockey players as tough sons of bitches and Quebecois players as sissies? Maybe it’s because the big boys out of the prairie towns are learning to keep their heads up and absorb hits at an earlier age, where these parlezin’ pretty boys aren’t getting steamrolled until they’re almost ready for junior.

This groundbreaking study, in its final two years, intends to prove that ice is cold, pucks are black, and Sean Avery is kind of a dick.

(Just for fun, here is a peewee hockey player getting drilled for not paying attention to the play.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 1:11 pm and is filed under Newz You Can Uze. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.