So What Now?

With another edition of the U SPORTS National Women's Hockey Championships in the book and me back in familiar spaces of HBIC Headquarters, you may recall that I had mentioned back on January 10 that I was going to walk away from HBIC after having posted 6000 articles. Well, I didn't walk away then as I had stated that "I'm going to keep writing and covering the game through to the end of the U SPORTS National Women's Hockey Championship taking place in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on March 17," and that day has come and gone. Being that I'm a man of my word, though, I fully intend to change the direction of HBIC moving forward. That starts now.

I've had a few people reach out about my coverage of Canada West women's hockey, and I'll speak on that in a moment. What I can tell you is that writing the recaps after spending the days volunteering in Saskatoon wasn't something I was particularly excited to do. I committed to doing it, though, and they got done. One night was fairly difficult since I was craving sleep, but those recaps and articles were posted. My hope is that you read through them as we brought the 2023-24 U SPORTS season to a close.

Moving forward, I don't know how often I'll post about hockey on here. I might start working more personal articles into the mix where I've gone adventuring or learned a new skill. There will be posts about hockey, but their frequency might be less frequent. Or infrequent depending on what I'm doing. Hearing about the losses of Chris Simon and Konstantin Koltsov today brought that "life is short" perspective back to me again, and I don't want to wish I had more time to experience more of life when my time comes.

There are some guarantees I can deliver in this soliloquay, however, and one of those is that The Hockey Show will continue, so previews will still be posted on Thursdays prior to the show airing. Our annual NHL Playoff Pool known as Survivor: NHL Playoffs will run again this April, and that's always a fun time of the year. If you want to win prizes, you'll need to stay tuned for that because being the last person standing at the end of the Survivor: NHL Playoffs contest means you'll go home with some awesome new gear compliments of The Hockey Show.

I also want to draw everyone's attention to UMFM's annual, week-long telethon that, for pandemic reasons, was on hiatus for the last couple of years. Pledge-O-Rama returns this year at the end of April, and I would ask that if you want to show support for HBIC's continuing efforts, please donate to UMFM. All donations will get you either a UMFM prize package or you can opt for the tax receipt to help you on next year's taxes, but the money you donate goes towards a lot of great stuff like the remote radio gear I hauled to Saskatoon where I chatted with Robin Ulrich last week. In short, UMFM uses the money to make the station and its shows better, and we're always grateful for your support and listenership. Give a little money, get some great shwag, and help UMFM produce more amazing programming. It's a win-win-win!

Ok, so if you're still reading because I haven't addressed The Rundown yet, let's jump into that. The first thing you should know is that depending on how far in advance I start writing each edition of The Rundown, it takes anywhere from four to eight hours to produce. Because I can't write recaps until the games are over, anything played on the west coast means I don't usually start those recaps until next day. In short, they eat up a lot of my time on the weekend.

If you read The Rundown all season this year, you know I was snarky about teams not posting highlights. By not showing off their athletes, I feel they're doing a disservice to those athletes, but I want to selfishly give you another reason when it comes to posting highlights: I want to do a video recap of all the games just like The Score television network used to do with highlights accompanied by a voiceover. In case you forgot what that looks like, here's an example.


Knowing how to clip the highlight reels together and add various graphics and audio would elevate the highlight reels that are produced by the schools. Imagine having a "SportsCentre"-style video to watch on Sunday with all the same news, notes, stories, and recaps that are featured on The Rundown. It would be awesome! I've had this planned for the last two years, but it seems that Canada West decided to pull the requirement for highlight reels from the schools' responsibilities, so here's where you come in, readers.

If you truly are a fan of The Rundown, talk to your local team and athletics department. Ask them to produce these highlight reels or, at the very least, post a ton of clips on Twitter where I can weave them together. I neither have the time nor the resources to fast-forward through hours of video to pull all the goals from all eight games featured every weekend, so I need some help. Not to mention that having the schools post the highlights on YouTube like they used to do would also benefit the athletes and their programs immensely when it comes to exposure. I can honestly tell you that the PWHL general managers aren't subscribing to Canada West TV to watch games.

At the very worst, I'll continue with the written form of The Rundown while posting snarky GIFs in place of where highlights are supposed to be. If all nine schools get onboard with the idea of making highlight reels and uploading them to YouTube, I'll do the video recaps and have some fun with it. Yes, that includes Trinity Western posting goals scored by both teams. This is an all-or-nothing offer to the nine schools in Canada West, and all it takes is a little effort since most of the schools are posting clips of goals on social media.

If you want to see a recap video each week, contact your local university and make them turn their give-a-damn meter up. If they make the effort to show off their athletes' skills and abilities, I'll make the effort to take it one step further with a full highlight show. I'm not The Score network, but it seems like I'm the only person trying to get more exposure for these amazing hockey players to hopefully take one more step towards their hockey-playing dreams.

Will there be something published here tomorrow? I can't say for certain, but if something catches my eye and compels me to write, I'll hammer something out on the ol' laptop. What I do know is that The Hockey Show preview and The Rundown will exist in some form as long as I'm still feeling in good spirits about it. If you can urge your university's athletics department to help me out, I'll start getting video recaps going in October when the season starts again.

These women do an amazing job every weekend in playing two games at the highest level of amateur hockey this country has to offer while putting their universities on the map, so let's give them their very own version of The Score every Sunday. That'd be pretty awesome.

Until next time, keep your sticks on the ice!