The Capilano Coho Floorball Club were in fine form this past weekend at the PlayOn- Hockey Night in Canada sponsored street hockey event in Vancouver.
The weekend tournament featured 46 Teams in the Adult Elite Division, The Coho finished in the top ten and could have done better with a little practice. Half of the players played with Floorball sticks, and they held up surprisingly well. It was strange to stickhandle with Hockey sticks on pavement, Floorball sticks give you far better ball control and whip/snap shots in the 125-135mph range, The hockey stick slapshots were clocking speeds of 140mph plus, so in a game where taking big windup slappers is the main form of scoring, it’s probably better to have a longer hockey stick for poke checking and slapshots. If everyone had a Floorball stick, I believe the hockey plays would have been cleaner and more pure…the street hockey style has a lot of hacking and whacking, at least at the Elite level.
The scale of this years event was massive! Over 300 teams took part, and fence partitioned rinks were all over the place, starting at GM place and working their way over to Chinatown. The sponsor pavillion was buzzing all weekend, with interactive hockey booths and our own BC Floorball booth was hopping with young hockey players, and parents, who were seeing Floorball sticks for the very first time.
The guys and gals at Blackwool, Carlo, John, Chris, Zac, Erica… did an amazing job bringing it all together as the organizing team of the Vancouver edition of Playon. On Friday night, together we built the main showcase rink with our Floorball boards, and they were quite the hit during the whole weekend especially during the celebrity game featuring The mayor of Vancouver- Gregor Roberston, tons of local media celebs, and NHLer Eric Brewer.
On the Sunday, BC Floorball took to the main rink for a Floorball Demo, where we saw dozens of kids try out the Floorball sticks and hundreds more looked on as the movie Zorro Academy looped on the big Sony TV Screen. The interest level was very high and we look forward to the day when we can have outdoor floorball hockey festivals, like they have in Sweden, Switzerland, and Finland with the same levels of participation and competition as PlayOn, maybe we can even see a Floorball division for next years PlayOn events!
BC Floorball