South Carolina isn’t known as a hotbed for hockey.
The small, 12,000-person town of Irmo boasts the only full-time ice arena, Plex Indoor Sports, in the Columbia area. It’s where the diehard hockey players get their skate on.
The guys on the team Rosso look forward to hitting the ice every Wednesday night for league action.
“It’s everybody from every walk of life,” Rosso team member Steve Brochu said. “The Wednesday Night League, every team is made up of a really, really great bunch of guys. I look forward to going out every Wednesday night, playing hockey, sitting around and having a couple beers afterwards and just tell stories as always.”
There are still a number of original Rosso team members playing hockey. But because of job transfers of guys coming in and out of the area and having two military bases nearby, there is a steady stream of new players each season.
“The first thing we do when we move to the area, we have a culture shock and we get out the phonebook. OK, where’s the nearest rink? What do you mean there’s not six and only one?” said longtime Rosso team member Brads Edwards. “Every week we set aside our jobs or whatever we do — and it’s a wide variety of lawyers, doctors, I run an Internet business. But we all have one thing in common, and that’s we grew up playing hockey and we love to play hockey, so we get together once or twice a week and share a common bond.
“Most of us have been around long enough to have children playing in a youth league, so that gets us traveling to USA Hockey tournaments with the kids and the adults, too.”
Rosso is made up of players from ages 20 to 56. Brochu is the oldest player on the team, and he tries to keep pace with the younger guys.
“I can feel my age for sure,” he said. “My legs can’t move quite as quick as they used to.”
Competing with and against players who are 30 to 35 years younger than him, Brochu uses his on-ice experience to get by.
“If you can know where you’re supposed to be on the ice and cover a certain area of ice to defend it, you can keep up with them a little bit,” Brochu said.
Brochu, who has played hockey for nearly a half century, loves to get out on the ice with his teammates.
“It keeps me young, I can say that,” Brochu joked. “I was just talking to one of my teammates on the bench and he’s 55; we said the same thing. My wife asks me, ‘How long are you going to keep doing this?’ And I say, ‘As long as I can.’
“If I can be playing hockey when I’m 65, I’ll be a happy guy.”
Along with playing in the regular adult league each session, Brochu and Edwards and some other teammates love to get out and compete in tournaments. Rosso has had some success over the years, winning tournaments in Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina.
“It breaks up the routine, if you want to call it that, and it gives us a chance to get out and bond and it’s just fun,” Edwards said. “We’ve basically got a core group of guys that get together for various tournaments — depending what the ages are, if it’s an over-40 tournament or opening tournament.
“We have to stick together, because there isn’t a lot of hockey down [in South Carolina] and we’re friends off the ice.”
Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.