Friends’ Pond-Hockey Video Turns Into Internet Sensation at BetLM

Friends’ Pond-Hockey Video Turns Into Internet Sensation

Each Feb­ru­ary, eight long-time friends aban­don the bus­tle of Vancouver’s down­town and head north on High­way 97 toward 100-Mile House, in the south Cari­boo region of the British Colum­bia wilder­ness. Their des­ti­na­tion is a rus­tic water­front cabin near Green Lake, B.C., best known as a trout-fishing and bird-watching haven for sum­mer travelers.

The friends use the lake for an entirely dif­fer­ent, but quin­tes­sen­tially Cana­dian, pur­pose: Pond hockey.

The good feel­ings that come from the annual pil­grim­age to play out­door hockey is hard for its par­tic­i­pants to describe. It’s a bond shared among friends, punc­tu­ated by the cama­raderie most eas­ily expressed in jokes and jabs through­out the week­end. And don’t for­get the healthy por­tion of gru­el­ing, day-long hockey marathons.

Shaun Finn, one of the orig­i­nal group who chris­tened the rough patch of ice close to shore back in 2006, grows nos­tal­gic for the sound of a skate blade crunch­ing the freshly fallen snow. Brian Ceci, another of the hockey-crazed group, recalls the first day’s ice, free of the skate marks and dents that rid­dle the aver­age pub­lic rink.

“It’s really inde­scrib­able,” Finn said. “You just feel good, light.”

It makes sense, then, that Finn and Ceci — both film­mak­ers when they’re not on the ice — decided to chron­i­cle the expe­ri­ence with a short documentary.

Make Hockey Hap­pen — a name, Ceci told NHL.com, that stems from the immense prepa­ra­tion and time invest­ment that goes into the annual event — has gone viral since being uploaded to YouTube on Oct. 2. It’s been viewed more than 13,000 times, and the major media requests are pil­ing up for this group of 20-somethings.

“We just cre­ated it because we love hockey and we’re artis­tic,” Finn said, call­ing the unex­pected recep­tion “mind-blowing.”

It started In 2006, when a group of four friends blazed a trail into the Cana­dian wilder­ness, with hockey bags and shov­els in tow. The des­ti­na­tion: Steve MacIntyre’s cabin over­look­ing Green Lake. The goal: Play as much hockey as pos­si­ble. The prob­lem: Bad ice.

“We prob­a­bly shov­eled out 30 square feet of ice, and it took us all day to do,” Finn said. “The ice was chewed up and gross. Basi­cally, we couldn’t skate.”

The next year, the prepa­ra­tion and num­ber of par­tic­i­pants increased. This past win­ter, a total of eight play­ers — a car­pen­ter, a cabinet-maker, a phone-company employee, a farmer and a stu­dent among them — made the trek, using advanced flood­ing tech­niques, plow-pulling ATVs and months-long prepa­ra­tion to take full advan­tage of the lake’s thick win­ter ice.

The team­work used to pre­pare the ice sur­face, though, dis­ap­pears when the puck finally drops on the first night as friend­ships cease and the guys rekin­dle old rival­ries. Despite a clear dif­fer­ence of play­ing lev­els, the game flows smoothly.

Ceci, for one, was raised on the sport, with a father who skated at Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity and a brother cur­rently play­ing at Simon Fraser Uni­ver­sity in Burn­aby, B.C. Mean­while, 2011 marked the first year Finn played any­thing more sophis­ti­cated than shinny. This past Feb­ru­ary, Dun­can Joseph, a friend who never had played hockey and had lit­tle skat­ing expe­ri­ence, joined the expe­di­tion. Accord­ing to Finn, Joseph didn’t miss a beat.

“We were ner­vous about how he would fit in, because we weren’t going to stop play­ing hockey,” Finn said, “but he fit in great. There was kind of this cool buzz for all of us because we got to see him enjoy the game we’re all stoked on.”

All the par­tic­i­pants are cer­ti­fied hockey nuts and Canucks fans; cheer­ing for any of Vancouver’s fel­low NHL teams would not be tol­er­ated, accord­ing to Finn. The expe­ri­ence, both film­mak­ers agree, is unmatched in hockey.

“I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend peo­ple try it. For us, it’s the most fun way to play hockey,” Finn said. “It’s not the best ice, but it’s just so much fun get­ting back to the roots.”

When Ceci joined the crew in 2010, he brought his cam­era along. Dur­ing the course of the trip, he and Finn tossed around the idea of doc­u­ment­ing the expe­ri­ence. There was no other way, they decided, to cap­ture the essence of their return to wilder­ness hockey.

Ceci said he pro­duced a “brief” video that trip, then hatched a plan for a full-fledged reflec­tion in 2011. The result is the 5:37, tightly edited trib­ute to friends, hockey and the roots of the game.

“The orig­i­nal plan was we wanted to show how much fun it is to go up there with your best friends who all love to play hockey together — it’s a good dynamic that way,” Ceci said. “There’s a lot more going on, but we wanted to keep it pretty fun and uplift­ing because that’s what it’s all about — being with your friends.”

The options almost are lim­it­less as for where the group goes from here, but Ceci and Finn have imme­di­ate plans to shoot and edit another video in 2012.

“We had orig­i­nal inten­tions to fol­low more of a sto­ry­line, so we’ve con­sid­ered the idea of going deeper with one or more of the guys,” Ceci said. “Since we’re all so pas­sion­ate about it, we want to show where that comes from.”

While the two have heard from many hockey fanat­ics in North Amer­ica about the emo­tional nature of the video, Ceci said he most is excited by the reac­tions from far-flung fans.

“We’ve got­ten one from Israel — a coun­try with, like, one rink in the entire coun­try,” he said. “We’ve heard from New Zealand, peo­ple telling us they want to start some­thing like this.”

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