It’s Sunday night again with one hour until the next intramural hockey game. Everyone is busy filling up water bottles, taping up hockey sticks, and checking their bags. All that’s left to do is send out a third e-mail to the rest of the team captains. Two teams took the goalie equipment out on Thursday and neither one has bothered to return it. With 50 minutes to go it turns to panic mode. We start making phone calls to any friends who may have equipment in between frantic refreshes of webmail. With 45 minutes to go one of the people on our team gets a hold of someone’s equipment. We can finally go play some hockey.
Ice hockey is an expensive sport. A full set of pads, ice skates, and a hockey stick can easily set you back $300. Pricey? Yes, but it is nothing compared to what you can spend on goalie equipment. Astonishingly, there are few people willingly to pay $700-$1200 to stand in front of a net and be repeatedly hit by hard, fast-moving pucks. To encourage teams to play who don’t have a goalie, or the equipment needed, intramurals provides two sets of goalie equipment.
In theory, this is a great idea. Only two teams play at any given time, and having two sets of equipment ensures that even if both teams needed it, they could both play. To use the goalie equipment, teams have to sign it out from the ’87 Gym cage. Teams were told at the captains meeting that the equipment should be returned the day after the game. Therefore, teams playing the next day can borrow the equipment and every team has a goalie.
The problem is that borrowing goalie equipment from the ’87 Gym does not work in practice. With no penalties for returning the equipment late, some teams wait three or four days. With no way to contact these teams, we have to send multiple e-mails out to all of the team captains. Even with this barrage of e-mails there is no guarantee that anyone will respond. Perhaps the best plan would be to eject this one rogue team with no regard for the rules from the league. The problem is that it isn’t just one team, and that this wasn’t just one incident.
For three out of our six games we played there was no goalie equipment in the ’87 Gym, because two separate teams had not returned it for at least two days. For only one of those three incidents, a team responded that they had borrowed the equipment from another team, and I was able to drive there and get it; however, for the other two times, neither of the teams could be bothered to respond. It was only after calling everyone we could think of that our team managed to obtain some goalie equipment.
From talking with other people I know who play intramurals, this is not a problem isolated to our team. If something as simple as borrowing equipment for a game causes this many problems then it is time for a change. The best solution may be the simplest.
There is no reason to loan equipment out to various teams when it all ends up in the same place, the Houston Field House. Therefore, RPI should store the goalie equipment in some room or closet in the Field House and give the person overseeing intramurals for that day with the key. If a team needs goalie equipment, they can use it for their game and then leave it at the very place other teams would use it. Since the equipment will never leave the building, there will never be a problem with having it for a game, and we won’t have to send out any more e-mails.
