Longwood’s newest intramural sport, floor hockey, has seen a good turnout, even with the late notice and shortened season, but it wouldn’t have officially happened this year if a handful of students hadn’t approached Marissa Musumeci, the assistant director of Campus Recreation, about reserving a space and time to just shoot around.
“We do evaluations with our student employees and our officials and there had been a few requests of ‘hey, let’s do floor hockey,’ but we hadn’t really put it into place,” said Musumeci. “I think way back before I was here, there was some floor hockey once in a while, but there really weren’t any intramurals for floor hockey, and these guys really made a push to talk to me about it.”
Three Longwood students - seniors Ryan Quigley, Ryan Rice and Forrest Bennett - really got the ball rolling after running into trouble finding space to play for an hour once a week.
“Thursday nights last semester, that was our day to come in and play hockey,” said Quigley.
“We just started doing that and it was fun, like a lot of fun, and it just developed into pretty much asking Marissa (Musumeci), ‘hey, can we turn this into a thing?’ said Quigley. “We were having a hard time finding time to play because all of a sudden on Thursday nights we found that we would go in and the club soccer team’s in there and they’re playing around.”
Since the three students weren’t part of a club team on campus and they hadn’t started a floor hockey team, they were forced to use the open hours of the Multi-Purpose (Mac) Gym. Only club sports can reserve that space for specific dates and times, so the three had to vacate the area once a club team showed up for practice.
“This semester we were fighting volleyball, we were fighting soccer, we were fighting everybody,” said Rice. “This kind of started as us talking to (Musumeci) and reserving it to get more time in there; she was like, ‘well we really can’t do that, what would you guys think about starting up an intramural league?’
Rice added, “We talked to her a little bit last semester and then Quigley was emailing her over the break to get that going, and then we came back this semester and things started to get set into motion.”
Musumeci decided to start a shortened season of intramural floor hockey to try and gauge the popularity of the sport on campus and whether or not they would bring it back next year for a full season.
“We ended up having ten (teams), which for a very short season and short sign up period wasn’t bad,” said Musumeci. “I think we’d be able to extend it in the future.”
The floor hockey games are played at the Health and Wellness Center inside the Mac Gym, which is a smaller and enclosed space. The area had typically been used for club and intramural sports such as volleyball and soccer since the building opened in 2007, but Rice believed it carried the prime design to host a hockey game.
"It has hockey boards, the floor is painted for it; it’s a hockey rink,” said Rice.
In order to sign up for the league, a minimum of six players are needed, but there is no limit to how many you can have on a roster. Just like in ice hockey, players can substitute on and off the floor throughout the game, but the rules have been slightly changed for safety precautions.
No helmets are needed to play floor hockey, but players can wear one if they want. Instead of a puck, a plastic ball is used and there is no physical contact such as ‘boarding,’ as well as no sliding.
“We ended up doing a safer version where the goalies have some stuff on but it’s more of a softer, plastic ball instead of a puck and you can’t have slap shots and things like that,” said Musumeci. “We didn’t have to go out and purchase that equipment, so (that) made it a little bit easier to implement.”
“Just doing this encouraged me to go back out and get back involved into hockey, and now I’m trying to play ice (hockey) this summer,” said Quigley. “It’s wild how this whole thing has turned into kind of a thing that I really, really enjoy and that I’m focusing a lot of my time onto now.”
Quigley added, “The fact that we have intramurals now is really, really awesome and I think that’s a really good start at least for maybe a club floor hockey team or something.”
