6 minute read
Ashley Caveda - No Legs Needed - A New Athlete's Intro to Adaptive Hockey
By Ashley Caveda
The first time I was on the ice, I could still walk. I was 6 years old and though I tried gliding my skates over the surface of the frozen water, they moved only in stutter stops. My friend Allison sailed past me and waved, but I couldn’t communicate that same easy motion to my own feet. Now, I am 35 years old — 29 years into a spinal cord injury after a car accident left me paralyzed as a child. My injury is high and my balance is negligible. Most of the time, I cheat by counterbalancing with my head if I have to reach for something.
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Apart from a brief tenure as a wheelchair soccer player when I was 12 and occasionally arm-wrestling the boys in my seventh-grade drama class, I never really took to sports. For the past couple of years, however, I’ve participated in various sports clinics offered through the Rehabilitation Hospital of Indiana (RHI). With subsidized costs and often world-class athletes and coaches to show us the ropes, I felt comfortable trying new things. I tried scuba diving, boccia ball, hand-cycling, archery, bowling, adaptive sailing, table tennis, fencing, and, most recently, sled hockey.
In his youth, my father, a native of Cuba, was a semi-pro hockey player — the Ice Cuban, as his friends called him. Later, he took up coaching my older, able-bodied brother’s hockey team. They were diehard Chicago Blackhawk fans and, by blood, I suppose I was, too. But I never actually touched the ice again until this past summer.
An enthusiastic man — Coach Duane Weber — introduced himself when I arrived and assured me it was okay that I had no previous experience. Looking around the Indy Fuel Tank, I saw two little girls — 10, maybe 12 years old — playing sled hockey. They were dynamos in the rink, racing around, light on the ice, their legs strapped tight in their sleds. They each held a stick in their right hand and another in their left hand; the curved part meant for hitting the puck was pointed toward the ceiling rather than touching the ice. The bottom ends of their sticks had four spikes. The girls thrust both sticks forward, spikes down, digging them into the ice and propelling their bodies on the skated sleds forward, over and over, faster than seemed possible. When one came upon a puck, she flipped the stick, hit the puck underneath her own sled, passing it to the stick in her other hand, and then she slammed it into the net. I was in awe of the skill contained in their tiny bodies. I knew there was no chance I would be able to keep up.
Getting fitted for my own gear was, in a word, comical. Adaptive hockey volunteers pulled too-large chest and shoulder padding over my head and strapped on too-small elbow pads and helped
me twist Velcro around my calves to secure my shin and knee guards. We skipped the hockey pants and just pulled what looked like leg warmers over the padding on my legs. I then chose an enormous neon green jersey with the possibly overzealous words “HIGH OCTANE” emblazoned on the chest.
Helmet and gloves on, my friend Adam and another volunteer lowered me into a sled. The sides were tight around my hips and thighs. They strapped my legs to the metal bar extending from the sled, handed me my own two spiky hockey sticks, and shoved me onto the ice like I was a bird being ejected from the nest. I tried to emulate what I’d seen, using the sticks to pull myself forward, but instead of the graceful action I’d witnessed from the two girls, I felt heavy and slow, like I was attempting to pull my body up a rope ladder and gravity was winning. My shoulders and triceps, unaccustomed to this repeated effort, started to burn, and I had to take frequent breaks to pant for air. Initially freezing when I got on the ice, I could feel the heat rising in my cheeks with the exertion. Sweaty hair fell into my eyes and tickled my forehead.
I watched the other newbies on the ice while I caught my breath. There was an assortment of men and women and children wearing an array of non-matching jerseys. On the ice, it was harder to tell what everyone’s disability was. I watched one young man tip over as he turned corners, but he was quick to right himself with his arms and keep moving. Even if he was a novice, he was strong. I tried taking my own corner and tipped over as well. Even through my gloves, the closeness of the ice made my fingers go numb. I pushed my fists into its frigid surface, trying to get myself upright. I didn’t have much leverage, but could feel how close I was to getting the sled’s skate back up again, if I could just push past the last half inch. I tried a few more times and finally succeeded. I couldn’t stop grinning.
Towards the end of the clinic, our coach had us face off in a short game. I was sitting near the goal when someone from the other team lost the puck and it flew toward the board behind the net. One of the other team’s players raced towards the puck and I moved as fast as I could in her direction. I didn’t think I could reach it before her, so I settled for crashing into her sled instead. I flipped over on top of her, and we both started laughing. It took us at least 45 seconds to extricate ourselves from each other. By the time we did, one of my other teammates had picked up the puck and moved it to the other side of the rink.
When we got back off the ice at the end of the game, I took off my helmet. My hair was a rat’s nest and my face was shining. Coach Duane told me I did a great job and said he was glad I’d come. The woman I’d crashed into, my new friend, who goes by the nickname Tiny, asked, “So ... are you going to join the team?” At the start of the day, I never thought I would consider such a thing. How could I? I had no experience and certainly wasn’t an athlete. I’d seen other people with disabilities play sports, and I knew I didn’t measure up. But over the course of that four hours, I was so physical, crashing into walls and people and the ice, pulling myself harder than I thought I could, gliding across the frozen surface like I’d tried to do on that pond as a child. Only this time, I succeeded. Inches from the ground, I picked myself back up every time I fell that day — and I loved it. “Yes, I will join,” I told my friend. And with those words, absurdly, I was suddenly an athlete with a team and a coach. Now, when people react with surprise that I’m on a hockey team, I smile with a shrug and say, “I’m a jock now.”
