Men’s hockey team will bond on their European Tour
The Concordia Stingers men’s hockey team played its final league games of the semester last weekend, but the squad will be far from inactive over the holiday break, with a European tour scheduled for Dec. 28 to Jan. 7.
“It’s going to be a fun trip,” Stinger captain Joey D’Amico predicts. “It’s going to permit all of us to get away, and we’re going to bond.”
Concordia will play games against five professional teams — three of them in Germany, one in Belgium, and the last in Amsterdam, Holland.
“It’s extremely competitive,” said Stingers men’s hockey head coach Kevin Figsby.
This is his second trip over to Europe with the team. Concordia travels to Europe every three years, and one of the big benefits of the trip is that it allows players to get exposure to pro teams across the ocean.
“Over the course of the last six years, we’ve put at least 12 to 14 players in Europe who graduated from Concordia and have gone on to play professional hockey,” Figsby said. “It shows that Canadian university hockey isn’t the end of the line for players who have professional aspirations.”
The European Tour is an idea that conference rivals McGill and Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières have copied in the past two years, and has been a tradition at Concordia for over a decade.
The team raised the approximately $40,000 needed for the trip through an auction for U2 tickets, selling food, beer or 50-50 tickets at the football games, advertising proceeds, and a spaghetti dinner that is in the works for mid-December.
“When a goal was scored, the lights went off and there were fireworks”
The European Tour is an experience the players treasure. Figsby said many of the participants in previous years used camcorders to film the atmosphere in the buildings during the pre-game warm-up.
“It’s a great experience for a European team to play against Canada,” Figsby said. During the last tour, crowds as big as 3,000 would jam into the rinks for the games. When a goal was scored, the lights would be turned off and there would be fireworks. “It’s incredible,” Figsby said.
Only three of the players on this year’s team have been to Europe before, and those three were all with Figsby last time.
“We’ve got a couple guys whose furthest trip has been Plattsburgh,” Fisgby joked. He hopes to take in the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam.
D’Amico has been to Europe before, and enjoyed the elements that distinguish Europe from North America.
“You get to see a different mentality, a different way of living [and] it’s just fun to be away with 25 different guys,” he said. “It’s a hell of an experience and I can’t wait to leave again this year.”
Team bonding is another big benefit, as the team will be together for the entire 12 days of the tour, travelling by bus.
“The only family we’re going to have is each other, and hopefully it’ll help us for the second half of the season,” D’Amico said.
The Stingers sport a respectable 4-7-3 record going into the break, but that’s still below the team’s high expectations for this season; they’ve been plagued by injuries throughout the roster. For Figsby, the trip is an opportunity to get his lineup back together.
“It’s just been a tough start to the season with all the injuries we’ve been through,” he said. “We’ll get the guys away, do some team-building, and re-generate and re-energize.”