Welcome to Moving the Goalposts, a blog about hockey, life, and the in between! My name is Cameron and I fell in love with hockey when I was about sixteen years old. I never #PlayedTheGame — I was a competitive alpine ski racer from age ten onward, and training schedules that required being on the mountain from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM every weekend day (longer for actual race days) wasn’t really conducive to joining a hockey team or even hitting up a rink for free skate growing up. By the time I hit high school I was training five days a week at a minimum in the winters with dry-land conditioning sessions on the sixth day and equipment tuning dinners/strategy sessions on the seventh. In short: absolutely no time to try my hand at hockey.
Despite never playing and really never having that much exposure to hockey, I managed to fall into it hard and fast during my sophomore year of high school. The exact story of how I fell into it is worthy of a post of its own, but the main point is that within the span of one playoff round I was in love. I was locked in, and the blogosphere was essential to permanently pulling me into this world. I consumed articles, videos, and podcasts at a breakneck pace. Hockey became my escape from everything else in the years that followed. When I was overwhelmed by my assignments for school, or the sheer amount of time and energy I spent trying to move up the ranks in my ski racing career, I turned to hockey as an outlet. Not only was it a vital outlet, it was my own little dominion of which I took rule over very seriously. Soon enough I was muttering to myself (with complete authority and confidence, mind you) about the Bruins’ PK or which goalie really deserved the Vezina.
Despite this infatuation and no matter how confident I was talking hockey to my horse while I was cleaning the barn (or on the even more pathetic occasions, my skis as I tuned them for practice or a race), I never published anything or really contributed to the blogosphere I was so entranced by. My ex and I were a part of the internet fan community for a while but that endeavor imploded a few years down the road. Breakups will do that to you.
But, I hear college graduation is a great time to try new things! And given that I have… so much… time on my hands as I send job applications into the ether and try to manifest a livable salary into existence through the power of my mind, I figured it was time to finally publish some of the mutterings, if only to save my friends, family, and horses from the verbal onslaught.
I created Moving The Goalposts with the hope of providing a combination of content. As the tagline to the site suggests, I want this to be a space for pieces about hockey, life, and the in between. Hockey has impacted my life in a number of ways and has helped me to learn some important life lessons. I want to be able to showcase that aspect of the game alongside analytical, evidence based coverage and pieces. One of my favorite things about this recent playoffs (2019, for those of you reading later on) was being able to introduce hockey to friends of mine who had never given it a second thought or watched more than a minute or two while channel surfing. Making hockey both accessible and interesting to them was something I enjoyed and that I want to continue to do with a broader audience.
Full disclosure: Though conceived as entirely a hockey blog this website has taken on a life of its own and that life’s truth is that there will also be pieces about my personal journey working toward my goals, consolidating experiences and stories entirely devoid of any tangible connection to the sport. I can’t predict what my horrible magpie brain will latch on to and outsource to my coffee-fueled fingers and keyboard, but I hope that the content will be informative, relatable, and if nothing else, vaguely entertaining.
Sometimes you just need to shoot some words off into the void in a bid for catharsis and growth but I hope to make these as interesting and useful as possible — after all, it wouldn’t be “hockey, life, and the in between” without a good dash of ambiguous “life” and/or “in between” content in there.
So thank you for reading– let’s get weird friends!
–Cameron