Icemen pick up juggling expertise

You're men's hockey head coach Guy Gadowsky, and you've just finished running another long, exhausting practice. All around and underneath the empty orange benches of Baker Rink, dozens of stray pucks, deflected over the glass during the workout, lie waiting to be collected before practice can be dismissed and everyone can go home. Nobody wants to do it, of course, so how do you decide who you send to pick them all up?

When you think about it, there's only one logical answer: have a juggle-off.

For those not worldly enough to know, a juggle-off is an ancient and widely respected form of conflict settlement in which two parties, known as "jugglers" or "juggle-offers," each try his hand at demonstrating what sweet juggling tricks he can pull off. The juggler with the more impressive repertoire and execution wins, and in this particular case, the loser and all of his teammates of the same class year must perform puck-retrieval duty.

Believe it or not, I am not making this scenario up. Last year Gadowsky emailed me, the co-president of the illustrious Princeton Juggling Club, and asked if anyone in the club might be interested in giving a little demonstration to the hockey team. His reasoning was that not only was juggling good for developing hand-eye coordination and peripheral vision, two obviously important skills in a fast-paced game like hockey, but also it would be fun.

I couldn't argue with him there, so I, along with co-president Lenny Shulgin '08, both of us big hockey fans, enthusiastically agreed and went down to the rink to give a short demo. It went over well enough that we were invited back again this year, so a couple of weeks ago Shulgin, Gus Tate '08, Josh Abbuhl '10 and I descended into the depths of Baker to check on the players' progress and show them "the next level" of juggling.

The first thing Gadowsky told us when we got there was his after-practice juggle-off puck retrieval system, noting (not without a hint of glee) that the freshmen had so far lost every single competition. We got the message: The juggle-off hopes of seven freshman now rested squarely on our shoulders.

Gadowsky team split the team into two groups, one to juggle with us first, the other to hit the bikes until it was time for the groups to switch. As you will have already guessed, the only appropriate way to decide which group did what first was to have a juggle-off, with the four of us "experienced jugglers" serving as honorary judges.

Senior forward Kyle Hagel stepped forward first and pulled out some pretty nice moves with only one drop at the very end of his routine. We were impressed and didn't think his performance could be topped, but Hagel's challenger, senior forward Keith Shattenkirk (alias Shatty) followed up with a slew of surprisingly well-executed, complicated tricks, albeit with a few more drops.

The judges conferred. It was a close call, but Shatty eventually prevailed, and chose to hit the bikes first.

Working with Hagel's group, we started going through the various tricks we knew, increasing their difficulty as we went along. One nice thing about juggling is that no matter how difficult or complicated a trick actually is, everything always looks pretty good as long as you can keep all the balls in the air, which is of course much easier said than done.

As the hockey guys watched intently, Josh and I, the least experienced of the four, started off by demonstrating some relatively simple ball, ring and club "bowling pin" tricks, eventually making way for Lenny and Gus to do some more complicated stuff.

Gus spent a few minutes destroying whatever juggling egos anyone in the room might have had to thunderous applause, and then we handed off our props to the hockey players and let them show us what they could do, helping them with whatever tricks they had seen that they wanted to learn.

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The overall skill level of the players in both groups wasn't bad at all. Lenny and I definitely saw tremendous improvement from the year before. Some guys looked a little less fluid in their motions than others, but most could pick up simple tricks quickly, and everyone could get the basic three-ball cascade going. A few guys, like Hagel, senior defenseman Mike Moore and junior goalie Tommy Sychterz were already good enough to try four balls and some other, more advanced stuff.

I asked who else on the team could bust out some moves and was directed to sophomore forward Mark Magnowski. Unfortunately, he had a separated shoulder, which he used as an excuse to get out of proving his reputation as a star juggler. I guess he hasn't heard of juggling through an injury — I've been juggling with a jammed left pinky for months now, and you don't see me complaining.

Actually, I do recall from last year that Magnowski was pretty slick, but Shatty showed himself to be the best natural juggler on the team. After five minutes with clubs, he looked like he'd been juggling them for years, and when it came to juggling balls, he had the kind of style you just can't teach.

Coach Gadowsky, for his part, was easily the most enthusiastic and eager learner of anyone in the room. I showed him a simple, neat three-ball tossup, and when he caught on after a couple tries he was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. He's getting pretty good.

Eventually it was time to hit the showers. The team thanked us and presented us with Princeton hockey T-shirts as a token of their appreciation, and in return I offered to suit up should they ever need a spare forward. They said they'd get back to me.

Hopefully those after-practice juggle-offs should now have a little more pizzazz to them. Gadowsky told me that the guys are really competitive about it, that they really try and outdo each other. That could be bad news for the less-experienced freshmen, though perhaps they picked up enough tips from us to win one here and there.

As a final note, it goes almost without saying that from now on, the only acceptable way to resolve disputes within the Juggling Club ranks will be by ... hockey-off.