Having played beer league hockey (adult recreational hockey, for those of you wondering) for the past seven years, I believe I’ve discovered the key to having fun and feeling like your skills are growing as a team. It’s not something that you might expect, but I think the logic is foolproof.

Wanna hear it?

Here it is: Have a crappy goalie.

I say this because for the past seven years, I’ve played on a mediocre (at best) team, with an exceptionally good goaltender. We’ve had a couple of different starting goalies in this time, but they’ve been pretty consistently good. Better, in fact, than any of our competition.

But here’s the thing. In any sport where there are a lot of teams, they get divided up into divisions based on skill so that the competition can be kept fairly even. The only real way for the league to determine the quality of a given team is to look at their record, particularly wins vs. losses, and goals for vs. goals against.

In hockey, the position of goaltender is key to a team’s success - at least as much so as a quarterback is key to a football team’s success. So if you happen to have a very good goalie, as we have had, you will find yourself in close games with teams that should be beating you handily. This means that you end up playing against teams that have better speed, puck handling, and positional play compared to your team, but you (at least sometimes) have a chance of winning those games when your goalie is able to stop all of their chances, and you capitalize on one of your few chances against their much weaker goalie.

This sounds fine, but the reality of it is that your team ends up controlling the puck much less than the other team, and therefore your offensive hockey skills as a team don’t grow nearly as quickly as they otherwise could. Keep in mind that beer league hockey teams don’t hold practices (at least ours doesn’t).

Now consider the same team, but with a particularly weak goalie. You’d end up in a lower division, playing against teams with much less overall skill, since they’d still be able to get enough goals on your weak goaltender to stay in the games. But overall, your team would control the play far more, get more offensive opportunities, and likely grow offensively much more as a team. You’d probably get better defensively as well, since you’d be compensating for a terrible goalie.

It’s taken me seven years to figure it out, but I think the way to consistently have fun in beer league hockey is to have a relatively poor goalie. Which sucks, since besides being very good, our goalie is also a great guy.

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