JMS Hockey

If there's a goalie who wants to take my spot tonight, let me know as I am signed up in more a backup role. For all you skaters out there who were waiting for a second goalie...I took the leap, so now you should too!

JJ, you are awesome. JMS would not exist without people like you. Thank you for for taking this big step to help everyone have a good game.

Cool! Way to go JJ. Now that you're in, I signed up also. I'll see you there.

While I'm glad this skate has recovered, it's frustrating to see all the comments from people who wouldn't sign up unless we had a second goalie. The goalies have told us over and over that they won't sign up unless there are sufficient skaters. If skaters are waiting on goalies, and goalies are waiting on skaters, how can we move beyond an impasse?

Being short a goalie would never stop me from playing. Heck, I have not seen a goalie in 4 years, at the outdoor park rink. And we still have great games !

The issue for me is without goalies it becomes a buch of people just skating around taking practice shots. The speed of the game (if you call it that) slows way down and the entire dynamic changes. I wouldn't mind playing against the board or playing pipes if we had a full roster and we kept the game moving. I'm out there to skate and get a work out. When there are only six people there and we are just goofing around it may be fun in a different way but if I want to get a work out I may as well go for a run.

Hey Tony, I understand your feelings, but I'm looking for suggestions to help with this problem. Skaters won't sign up without a goalie, goalies won't sign up without skaters. So how then to make the game happen? Everyone wants to benefit from someone else jumping in and signing up first. Too often, that means everyone loses out and there is no game. Suggestions?

This may not be a good idea, but what if we had the goalies sign up "conditionally"? They could sign up with a minimum number of skates. They could say I'll show up if there are 16 skaters - or what ever their number is. Then the skaters can recruit other skaters. I tried to get people to skate the previous game and last night but nobody wanted to without a goalie. If we had known there *may* be a goalie if we can get enough skaters I think I could have had at least 1 other skater signed up yesterday morning. I don't know how to keep goalies from backing out. That is a tough problem. Keep up the good work. I think JMS is great!

Boy, I don't know if we want to open the door to conditional signups for anybody. I get why you suggest this, but from the admin side, I've had plenty of people say "maybe" and nothing comes of it. If the objective is to persuade skaters, I don’t know that they’ll see a “maybe” goalie as a reliable goalie? I just fail to see the difference between a conditional signup and a real signup (and I suspect skaters wouldn’t respond to a “maybe” goalie, either). If you want to play, sign up and then you get what you want. Simple. I can’t have respect for the position of wanting a game to happen but deliberately NOT doing an action that will help that game happen--and instead waiting on the sidelines for someone ELSE to take the move the player could and should make himself, to get the game HE wants to happen. I'll be honest: I'm tired of the stress and frustration and financial woes of trying to nag people into signing up for a game *they acknowledge* they want to play. It's incredibly frustrating--how much easier can we make it?? If you want to play, sign up. I have a real job and life and JMS is done when I can spare time from that. I have ten things to do in every minute I can spare for JMS, and ten places to put every JMS dollar... is this session really worth the angst and uncertainty every week? I'm being honest here. As a good program admin, I need to evaluate whether the time, stress and finances spent here might not bring a better return when applied elsewhere. These are the things that I’m thinking about. Thanks for your nice comment. I appreciate it very much. I'm being candid in an effort for more transparency, but sometimes the candid stuff is tough stuff to process.

Conditional options are a good thought, but I think it might be a flawed concept. If there were 10 skaters signed up in the morning before the skate, and you knew the conditional was 18, you are still only one skater with no guarantee that 7 will sign up after you. There are other issues that can come up as well, such as, if #18 were to signup an hour before the game, is that enough time for a goalie to realize that its game on. Skaters may decide not to show up even with 17 skaters signed up if they know that they fell short of the 18, severely degrading the level of play as well. As a goalie, I can't think of a good system to address this problem other than to implore people to sign when they want to play, and simply have faith that others will follow. I would think that if there was a statistic, goalies fill out something like 95% of the games out there.

Good points Barbra & JJ. I said it may not be a good idea and you have proved that. @ Barbra - as Clinton once said "I feel your pain." Of course I can't really feel your pain because I don't have to deal with the issues you have to but I sympathize. Just for the record, I did sign up with only 8 skaters and 1 goalie. But I also have other options. If I have a game that is full with 2 goalies and one that is 8 skaters because of 1 goalie I'm going with the game with 2 goalies. To your point - once JJ stepped in the game filled up. That proves your point that skaters are waiting for goalies. I can understand how that is frustrating. I don't know how to solve it. I'll keep thinking about it. If I have other ideas I'll share them, even if they aren't great. Maybe we can come up with something. Thanks again for all your work! I don't know what I would do for skating without JMS. Let me know if I can help.