City League Hockey

The Grand Rapids City League is almost a century old, but its days are numbered. Next season, the City League will disband and its teams will enter the Ottawa Kent (OK) Conference. The CL's five hockey teams will no doubt end up spread across the OK's three tiers, and probably won't play each other regularly in the future.

With that in mind, I decided to run over to Griff's tonight to see the matchup between GR Christian High and the Ottawa-Union team. These games are always kind of lopsided in favor the private schools, and tonight was no exception. Christian has a young team, but has some speedy, skilled players upfront so it was no surprise they lead 4 zip after one, and then scored a couple of quick ones in the second. The O-U kids kept fighting, especially their goalie who was sprawling, diving and doing everything he could to keep the puck out of the net. Halfway into the second, O-U scored on a scrum in front of the Christian net. The celebration (pictured above) was brief and, as my son said, "It looks like they've done that before."

A few minutes later, one of O-U's top players went down hard and had to be helped off the ice. I was standing by the O-U bench, and could hear one of the players, who was kind of pissed, say: "No one gets near our goalie for the rest of the game."

Christian scored a couple more in the second and ended the game a few minutes into the third period with a goal that took a funny bounce. It wasn't a great game in terms of skill or flash, but honestly, I was sorry to see it end.