For a shorter form write-up of our time at the tournament, click here

Today marks the 8th season for our team headed up to St. Ignace, Michigan for the annual Labatt Blue Pond Hockey Championships. If you are unaware of the tournament, it is a three-day long even that celebrates pure hockey to the fullest extent. It is a weekend of puck, jabs, chirps, beers, boys, buds, cards, farts, smokes, toe-drags, and 4-team-teasers. It’s a 4 on 4 outdoor hockey tournament with teams from all over Michigan, Canada, and the United States. There are divisions based on age and skill level, and only finalist get to play on Sunday’s, where champions are awarded “The Stump” and usually a hoodie signifying them as champions. Here is how it is described on the Labatt website:

The 2019 Labatt Blue UP Pond Hockey Championship is set for February 14-17 2019. The first tournament in 2007 featured 27 teams and now features well over 200 teams. The pond hockey tournament is played on the frozen ice of Moran Bay, Lake Huron.

The Labatt Blue UP Pond Hockey Championship is one of the few tournaments where their ‘pond’ is actually one of the Great Lakes! Thirty 75′ x 150′ rinks are created and over 250 games are played during our fun-filled weekend!

I have been going to this tournament since I was legally allowed to attend, which was in 2012 when I turned 21. 2019 marks our teams 8th year making the trek, and let me tell you- this is one of my favorite weekends of the year. There is nothing more that I love in this world than playing hockey, and in this outdoor pond format which is sponsored by the greatest beer on earth is just the greatest celebration of pond hockey anyone could ever attend. You play two 20 minute running clock halves, there are no goalies and you try and score on wooden pond hockey nets. Check out this short video for an overview of the rinks’ setup.

7 men to a team. We go up there and we stay at the luxurious Kewadin Casino & Hotel where they barely have enough towels to outfit the joint, and you can play 3 dollar minimum blackjack whilst smoking an unfiltered Marlboro red where some very nice town lady named Maud with 6 teeth asks if you’d like your 18th $1.50 tall boy of Blue Light. And you will say yes. And you will ask the boys if they need one. You will tell them to fuck off no matter what their response is and proceed to buy all the boys beers.

Sprinkle in three to four games of pond hockey and 200 games of euchre and that pretty much gives you the Pure Michigan weekend I’m talm ’bout.

Like I said, this is our 8th year. Our team name is the Snakes (hsssssss), but it wasn’t always that way. Let me take you down memory lane here. We started going to the tournament in 2012, I was just a young buck running wild in East Lansing, a month into turning 21, a member of the team suggests we try out this tournament in the UP, I agree. The name of our team, which it would be for 6 years was Dangle Snipe Celly.

2012: Year one we did the trip like true rookies from start to finish. You are allowed to have 7 on a team, we brought up 5. You’re supposed to stay in the heart of St. Ignace, we stayed on the other side of the bridge. We didn’t get jerseys made, and we didn’t make it to the finals. About the only thing we did right year one was actually make it up there, and get into a pretttttttyyyyyy big fight on the ice with a townie team…called the Fighting Mullets, which was actually pretty hilarious. The tournament is laid out by division based on skill level, the highest division is platinum and goes all the way down to like lead or some shitty metal. Year one we played in Silver (3rd highest). We went 2-1 and did not make it out of our bracket into the finals on Sunday.

There we are. Year one. 2012. Clueless fucking idiot morons with 5 guys and suburban jerseys. What I can say about these 5 here is that all 5 of us still go. The other four in the picture besides me have never missed a year. I did miss one year which I’ll get into shortly here.

2013: Year two a lot change. We picked up two guys, brought our own jerseys, stayed in the city, and we kicked everyone’s ass. And by “kicked everyone’s ass” I mean we won like 3-one-goal-games cause we picked up a kid from Western Michigan’s D-1 team. But no matter how you do it, we went 4-0 and won our first St. Ignace championship in the Silver division.

Now enter the dark years. After winning the silver division whoever the nice lady is who puts the schedule together decided to move us up to gold, during these gold years we would lose in the finals almost every single year.

2014: Came up feeling cocky as all hell. Had a 7-man roster (sans WMU stud) and rolled through the first three games of division play. We had one of our more wilder Saturday Nights, and were set to play 5th Avenue in the finals. Yes, that 5th Avenue in Royal Oak. The place in which during that time of my life I had give the majority of my paycheck to and gotten kicked out of multiple times. It was also the place where my true hate for Joe Fauria began. I really wanted to beat these douches…but, we got absolutely smoked. Lost in the finals. Can’t find a team photo from this year.

2015: This is the year I missed. I was living in Chicago, I thought I was a bad ass career-man working on Michigan Avenue and let work get in the way of a weekend that is way more important to me than a successful career. I do regret not going, but I don’t regret missing what is unanimously considered the worst year they ever had up there. Hockey-wise they made it to the finals, and got smoked, again. But my one buddy got frost bite on his ear and another one shit his pants or something idk I forgot. But I did put together another badass jersey and I am bummed I missed out on this one.

2016: I come back into the fold and bring the roster closer to where it needs to be, but it’s still not perfect. The ice was too fucked to play on the bay so we had to play on and iced over parking lot near the community ice rink. Wasn’t a disaster, but also wasn’t ideal. We lost in the finals again…but this time only by 2 goals and we blew the lead in the second half. 

2017: Hot year. It was 50 degrees every single day and the ice was absolutely unplayable. If you did decide to play all of your games and make it to the finals, you got to play the ship in the community rink. Which is cool, but also kinda lame because you’re up there to play on the Bay. We barely played any hockey, it was hot as fuck, and we just absolutely pounded beers and whiskey until our faces melted. That was one of the most hungover I’ve ever come back from the trip. Guess it was fitting for the LA jerseys we had on.

Note that we’re not even wearing skates or gloves. It was just a hot fuckin year yanno.

2018: 2018 was a magical year. We got the roster sured up and we put all the pieces together. The first order of business after losing in the championship for what felt like 15 years in a row was a attitude change. We felt it was time for a rebrand. So naturally we went from Dangle Snipe Celly to Snakes. Obviously, the natural segway. We chose Snakes as our team name so we could hiss at people the entire weekend. Not kidding. Everywhere we go we hiss at everyone in sight. It’s ridiculous. I mean we really got into the rebrand. We had snake-skin fanny packs and we just hissed and pissed the entire weekend and no one was stopping us. It was this year where we got our mojo back, we found our roster moving forward and we once again went 4-0 en route to a championship. Our first in gold and our first as the Snakes hssssssssss. It also felt like all the boys walked away in the black from the casino which is almost an even bigger W.

2019: Against our will the tournament has officially placed us in the highest division- platinum. Which I was honestly furious about because we lost 6 years in row in gold and the year we one I swore I was having heart palpitations by the of it. But whatever, we’ll go up and compete to the best of our abilities. We leave today and who knows what we can expect. All I can be sure of is that we are still Snakes, and that we are going up as Vegas this year. We may die.

So there’s the history, thanks for following along. I’ll post updates on my Instagram story throughout the week. #hssss 🍾 🐍

– Frank