2x Draft Media Bonus, 1548 Words, Ready for Grading

It’s the day after the draft. You wake up, still in disbelief at what happened - getting picked first overall by the Winnipeg Jets. Yes, they’re a team that didn’t do all that well this year, but you have a few seasons yet before you go up and join them, and judging from the prospect pool, they’ll be about ready to compete for the Challenge Cup by then. Being selected by any team first overall - in the first round, really - is still a great and amazing thing to happen. Never in your wildest dreams was this the reality of things.

You roll over to check your phone, which had been buzzing furiously before you turned it onto silent last night. Over 300 unread messages - you know you’re going to have your hands full replying to all your friends and family who were calling or messaging you to give their congratulations. At the top, however, is the one message that you were looking forward to the most: a text from your parents, saying how proud they are of you, and to let them know when your first SHL game will be so they can come. That won’t be for a while yet - you know, and the Jets know, that you’re not ready for that level of competition. There’s still a lot of development and training before you can be effective in the SHL.

Right below the message from your parents is another one that you’ve been looking for - the one from Saara - that incredibly cute, incredibly persistent, incredibly amazing woman who was probably your first supporter on this side of the pond. She was the first one to wear your jersey, the first one to sport a sign supporting you in the stands, and the first one to get under your shell, to really understand how you thought or felt after each game.

Once you got to talking to her, you found that you actually had quite a bit in common, and things just developed from there. She was born to 2nd generation Finnish parents, and her grandparents passed down a lot of traditions that are familiar to you, since Finland and Sweden aren’t really that far away from each other. For example, you both love salty liquorice - salmiakki to her, and saltlakrits to you - and lingonberry jam over other jams. Easter is a big deal to the both of you, Christmas is an even bigger deal, and midsommar was something that you both celebrated as well. Silence was golden, and you both were comfortable being quiet around each other - a comfortable silence, so to speak.

Congratulations on first overall - so happy for you! But Winnipeg is so far away :(, she wrote. How do you feel after the draft?

You smile seeing that text. She was a hockey fanatic, and she knew better than that - that it would take you a couple of years before you had to move to Canada.

Your fingers flew over the keyboard and sent back a reply to her.

Just woke up. Feels crazy still, but now I feel deflated after the draft. All the excitement has worn off and everything is sinking in. Just need to get back on track - get rid of the crazy feeling. Drafts always leave me like that. Also, you know Winnipeg is still a few years away. Don’t worry.

I gotta get to the rink and do some training this morning, but lunch after?

:-) was the only reply, but you knew what she meant.

Saara was a sophomore at the University of Michigan’s Nursing Program, and their usual hangout was the Avalon Cafe near campus. You could make it there after training at the rink in time for lunch, and join her there with her friends, who were quite the mixed bunch, for lunch. They were all hockey fanatics - must be something in the water in Michigan it seems - and they were all Detroit Falcons supporters, of course, so you joining them for lunch was always nice. They weren’t shy on giving you critiques on your on-ice performance if there had been a game the night before, and sometimes they were right about what you needed to work on.

You hit the shower, get into some training gear, and get into your car. You caress the steering wheel and smile - speed, agility, power. These are some of your favorite things in your Audi RS5 Sportback that you bought with your rookie bonus. Stupid? Probably. But you always liked driving and being able to afford a really nice car was the icing on the cake after signing that first contract with Detroit.

The first person you see at the rink is the trainer. You want to go over some of the plans for next season. You can feel the untapped potential slowly coming to light, and you want to make sure you develop it properly for the next season. There was a switch in the rules, and you need to make sure that you get ahead of the curve on what to do and where to concentrate your strengths. You knew you were going to hit that plateau on your sophomore season - you’ve been training so hard during the season that it was guaranteed - but there were still things you could do to optimize the impact that you had on the ice.

The second person, really, group of people that you see consisted of your fellow Falcon rookies - well, sophomores now - that also got drafted with you. You were especially happy to see that Reid Sutherland got picked by the Winnipeg Jets; it’s always really nice to have a familiar face in a brand new locker room. The fact that most of the group got picked up by the end of the second round was great! You knew that a lot of talent resided in the locker room, and you were glad that your opinion was shared by the SHL general managers. It was unfortunate that you couldn’t continue to be on the same team, but such was hockey life. Maybe in the future some of them could get traded to the Jets, and then you could go on to win the Challenge Cup together.

The third person you saw was Notorious Tig, your General Manager. You thanked him for the opportunity, and the guidance that he provided in your first year, and you told him how much you were looking forward to the second year, and your second try at the Four Star Cup.

The fourth group was the new rookies from the S54 draft. You could hardly believe how new and unsure of themselves they looked - did you ever look that way at the start? One of them was a familiar face in Joseph Fantobens, but the other two were new guys. Anders Svendsen looked like a mean bruiser of a guy, but he seemed to be smiling all the time. He was Norwegian, and Kaarlo would probably recruit him for the national team soon enough. The other guy, Wang Liqin, looked Chinese but spoke with a West Coast accent. Turns out he’s actually from Canada, and from Richmond, BC. His parents immigrated here when he was young, he fell in love with hockey, and bugged his parents to let him play. The rest was history, he said.

Today, you hit the machine circuit, and then did an hour of cardio at the end. You were trying to get your stamina up in time for SHL Training Camp. You heard it was a lot harder, and that the playing time was much tougher than before. Stamina was more important than ever if you expected to be playing tough minutes, especially during power play, penalty kill, and the end of the game. If not, you could be gasping for breath on the bench, useless to your team.

With Khabib gone, you and Jack Kanoff were probably going to be the second pairing defensemen on the team after the success that partnership had in the playoffs, and you were going to see hard minutes. The new veteran, Zbigniew Pokrywka (what a mouthful - he said to call him Big Z, or Zee), was likely to play with Guy O’Shea in a shutdown role against the top lines of the opposing team, and you were going to be the offensive engine with Jack-o (or Taco Butt, or Turd Sandwich, to some) on the 2nd pairing as they matched you up against softer competition. This meant you had to be ready to go whenever Coach wanted, and you couldn’t really tell him that you needed a minute to catch your breath.

That done, you hit the showers and headed out to lunch. Traffic was going to be bad, but you had time to spare, and you were looking forward to seeing Saara again. With the craziness the past few days, you two hadn’t had a single moment together.

Before you drive off, you check your phone once again and you see a new message from Rikard Hammarberg - another fellow Swede that got drafted last night too. He went to Hamilton, which you joked was a musical, not a city.

Hey, thought you should see this song about your new team ;-) ,he said, It’s one great city.