It’s sunny and near 65 degrees, a little unusual for an early November Monday, and more reminiscent of early March.
That’s when hockey seasons in Livingston County have, in five of the last seven years, come to an end at hockey’s Valhalla — the state championships at USA Hockey (formerly Compuware) Arena.
Two of the state’s best high school teams reside here, and they were among those hitting the rinks for the first time in the 2015-16 season, ready to make the four-month trek that all hope will result in their raising a trophy cut into the shape of Michigan high above their heads in celebration.
The first official task is to find the 20 players who will begin the quest.
Hartland, which was skating at the Hartland Ice House, lost to Birmingham Brother Rice in four overtimes in a Division 2 quarterfinal last year after reaching the finals in that division the two years before that.
Twelve miles to the south, the Brighton team, which was ousted in the regional final after three consecutive trips to the finals (two of them resulting in championships), was beginning its season.
“It’s like opening presents,” Brighton coach Paul Moggach said. “You don’t know what’s in there, but we have kind of an idea. We put a list together before Christmas, sent it to Santa and hopefully got what we wanted.”
One item on the list, forward Joey Clifford, will be a delayed Christmas present, due to his current obligations to the Bulldogs football team, which is still in the playoffs.
“It’s nice to get them back, whenever that happens,” Moggach said of football players. “But we hope it’s a long run.”
At Hartland, coach Rick Gadwa admitted he had been itching to go.
“We all feel, as hockey coaches, that you’re a little out of sorts until the season starts,” he said, laughing.
It could have been, too, due to a busy summer that saw Gadwa get married and soon after find himself about to become a father for the second time.
“She’s going to come, ironically enough, right before playoffs,” Gadwa said of the child, a girl. “I told my wife, ‘Hopefully we don’t have a playoff game. Because I’m missing it.'”
The birth, or the game.
“I’m leaving it at that,” he said.
A game-time decision?
“That’s absolutely it,” Gadwa said, laughing some more.
The first two days teams can have team drills are used to pare rosters for both teams from about 40 to the 20 who will make the team.
In all, prospects and veterans alike have about three hours of ice time to show why they should be on the team.
If it sounds like short notice, it is and it isn’t.
Like most sports, there are offseason leagues and workouts, voluntary only if you aren’t trying to catch a coach’s eye. There are summer leagues and fall workouts, so while the actual tryouts are short, the evaluating process has been going on for some time now.
Tryouts are there for players who were under the radar or have a renewed sense of urgency in making the team to make their best case to put on their school’s colors for the start of the regular season, which starts in two weeks.
Gadwa put his players through two 30-minute scrimmages on Monday.
“The one thing we haven’t seen is them going against each other,” he said, “so when you’re judging each individual guy, it’s good to se them battle each other. Sometimes it answers a question for you, when guys are on the bubble. You go one on one a few times and it makdes sense. That’s the advantage of seeing them finally play against each other.
The end result, he said, is finding hockey players rather than just those who ace skill contests.
Gadwa sat with his assistants at the top row of the stands at the Hartland Sports Center, watching intently with an eye toward deciding who stays and who will take their hockey dreams elsewhere.
“Sometimes, it’s the end of the road,” he said. “They hang up their skates and move on to something else. That’s life. There’s also house teams and a lot of travel (team) options, even here in Livingston County. There are numerous teams that would love to have players that we’ll have to cut.”
The winter season is the longest of the high school seasons, and hockey is the longest of all.
It will be a long journey, both through the regular season and the winter to come, before the sunshine of early March.
“I hope we’re’ playing in this kind of weather,” Moggach said. “That’s what the goal will be.”
