Underwater hockey making a splash
As it turns out, a good game of hockey doesn't require frozen water. More than a dozen Carolina students and community members gather each week to play the one-of-a-kind sport of underwater hockey.
If he showed up in uniform to a traditional hockey game, Danny Monroe would be woefully unprepared. With flippers instead of skates, a shorter-than-expected stick and only a few ounces of equipment, he prefers a pool to a rink — and the surface to be thawed, thank-you-very-much.
“We started playing underwater hockey in about 2004,” said Monroe, who helped found Carolina’s club underwater hockey team as a Ph.D. student and now serves as its coach. “It’s similar to ice hockey in that you have a puck and sticks, but the sticks are only about a foot long each. And you have 6-on-6, but there’s no goaltender,” he said.
On a recent Monday evening at Carolina’s Bowman Gray pool, the water was turbulent, as more than a dozen underwater hockey players with snorkels and swimsuits battled 10 feet below the surface for a lead-filled puck encased in pink plastic.
“You actually just slide it along the bottom of the pool,” said Emily Davidson, a senior at Carolina and a member of the team. The players identify each other by color of the curved, wooden sticks they use: one team wields black sticks and the other white.
“You just fight back and forth,” Davidson said. “You rotate with your team members so nobody runs out of breath. Someone’s on the bottom, someone’s on top and you just constantly rotate until someone scores a goal.”
Play begins with the puck in the center of the pool and 3-4 players on either side. After the command “Sticks Up, Go!,” each team descends to the bottom of the pool in full-tilt freestyle.
“A lot of people think that it’s all about breath-holding, but it really is a big teamwork sport,” said Monroe, who is now the head of the Department of Natural Sciences at Wake Tech. “You have to take your time, and there has to be timed drops where your teammates will drop at the proper time for passes.”
Goals made of thick gauge aluminum rest on the bottom of opposing sides of the pool. Successfully delivering the puck into them requires fast swimming, keen timing and an awareness that sets underwater hockey apart from other sports.
“It’s three-dimensional,” Davidson said. “You’re not just playing on a field, you have people above you, below you, all around you.”
Carolina is one of several universities that fields a club underwater hockey team, along with Michigan State, Florida, George Mason, Illinois and Georgia Tech. The teams — and others not affiliated with universities — compete regularly.
“We have a good reputation,” Davidson said. “We typically attend two or three tournaments a semester.”
Like other club teams, UNC’s underwater hockey team isn’t NCAA-sanctioned, but that does nothing to lower the players’ enthusiasm. Carolina’s squad is comprised primarily undergraduate students, as well as a few graduate students and community members.
The team is preparing for the Atlantic Coast Championships at George Mason University in the coming weeks, an event that draws underwater hockey clubs from around the country.
“It’s been a lot of fun,” Davidson said. “I love everybody on the team. I’ve had a lot of great memories, a lot of great fun going to tournaments, and it’s great exercise.”
