Blog Post 9: June 16


KELOWNA, BC --- Hey everybody, me again! I’m up bright and early this Sunday morning, down at my favorite coffee shop here in Kelowna, and our preseason schedule is out! I know I was pretty angsty or whatever last time I wrote, because we’d just gotten eliminated and I wasn’t ready to stop playing yet. But now it really feels like we’re here at the beginning of a fresh new season, and all of that is behind us. We’ve got another shot at this, and I’m ready to get started. I’m a little nervous, too, which is funny, because I’m not usually nervous at the start of the season, just excited. But this is probably my last season with the Knights, and I don’t even really have words for how badly I want to be able to bring a cup home for this city before I head to Tampa. I owe Kelowna so much; I’ve learned so much about myself here, I’ve built so many relationships that I know are going to last beyond just my time living here.

I spent my offseason split between a lot of places. I played in both world championships (juniors and the big one) - we didn’t medal, but I think our juniors team surprised a lot of people with how well we turned it around after the exhibition round. I’m pretty excited to see how things shape up next year. I’m not as nervous about that, I guess, because I probably only have one year left with Kelowna but I’ll be playing for Sweden as long as they’ll let me and I can still skate.

I also did a bunch of outdoors stuff over the summer. I took Maxim (he’s my little dog, and he loves the outdoors) out hiking a lot here in BC. My dad also came over from Sweden and we went out camping for a while together, and it was really cool to get to spend some time with him. He’s usually pretty busy back at home with coaching so the times we’re both free don’t come along that often, and I’m really grateful for them. It’s Father’s Day here in Canada and the US (we don’t have it until November in Sweden) so I guess I can get a little mushy about my dad for a minute.

It’s not really a secret that my actual father died when I was too young to remember him. My sisters all remember him, but I’m the youngest, and I was only two at the time, so I don’t have any memory of any of that at all. That’s sort of bittersweet, I guess, because sometimes I wish I remembered him because it feels sad to not know him, but my mom and sisters always sound sad when they talk about that whole time in our lives, so it might not be bad that I don’t have the sad parts.

I do have a lot of good memories, though, from when I got a little older. My dad, Karl, the one I think of as my dad, came around when I was about seven. He coached my team at first, and that was how he met my mom, and I didn’t really know what was going on at the time because I was seven years old and all I cared about was hockey, but eventually he started coming over to our house a lot more than just for hockey stuff. He drove me and my sisters to games and stuff, cooked for us, helped my mom out with so many things, and somewhere along the way the two of them fell in love. They got married a couple of years later, when I was nine, but he kind of felt like part of the family even before that. My sisters still just call him Karl, because they were all older by then (I’m closest in age to my sister Astrid and she’s still seven years older than me, so she was sixteen when they got married), but ten years later, he’s really just Dad to me.

The older I get, I think, the more grateful I am. I can’t even imagine stepping in and becoming part of a family as big as ours with as much patience and grace as he did. There are seven of us kids - and my oldest sister Liv already had two kids of her own at that point, so he was taking on a whole pack of kids and a couple of grandkids too. And he did it so well. My sisters have always talked about how it never felt like he was trying to replace our dad; he took care of us when we needed taking care of, and he gave us space when we needed it. Somehow he’s always managed to be just the right thing to all of us, even though that’s been something different for each of us.

Anyway, that’s a brief history of the Söderberg-Eklund-Norberg family that you never really asked for, but I think it’s pretty cool. I think family in general is a really cool thing. You find family in all sorts of different places, whether you marry into a giant one, or you make your own, or you just find a group of people who make you feel love and belonging. That’s one of my favorite things about hockey, too, because when you spend as much time around a group of people as you do when you’re on a team with them, they start to feel less like just friends, and more like family.

That includes the good bits and the bad bits - it really does feel like a lot of the people you play with are more like brothers or sisters, so you would kill for each other, but sometimes you also want to kill each other. I’m really lucky to have a team like the one I do, and I’m lucky they all seem to like me too. They made me captain again this year, which means a whole lot to me because it means they don’t think they made a mistake doing it last year. And I don’t want to let them down. I want to get it right this year, I want us to go all the way and I want to leave the team and this city something to remember me by.

Today, though, I’m going to finish drinking this giant frozen tea drink and I’m going to work on planning a date (I haven’t been on an actual date, I don’t think, since I was like…seventeen? I just haven’t had time, or anybody interested enough to nudge me into making time, so this should be fun). We don’t have a whole lot of time for a bunch of extended social stuff during the season, so I try to make the most of it when I do.

That’s what I want to do this season - make the absolute most of it that I can. I hope everybody has their jerseys and shields and giant inflatable swords out here in Kelowna, because I know we’re all ready to get things started. I have a good feeling about S48 - everybody get your best chivalrous noises ready- let’s do this!


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