The Falcons will have only nine overnight trips in the course of their AHL season.
Springfield Falcons wing Ryan Craig chases the puck Oct. 14 at the MassMutual Center. Craig and his teammates are on their first extended road trip of the season.
By JIM HODGES
NORFOLK, Va. – It begins at lunch and continues at dinner.
“You don’t eat by yourself,“ Springfield Falcons forward Ryan Craig said of the value of extended time on the road. “You have roommates. You meet in the lobby, sometimes maybe 10 guys, and go out.“
It’s called team bonding, and it’s something coaches say can be an important byproduct of overnight trips to games. The players aren’t going home to families and other aspects of a workaday world. It’s hockey, food, rest in a hotel room, hockey and rest on a bus to another hotel.
Occasionally there are video games, often involving – you guessed it – hockey.
It’s a routine foreign to the Falcons, who will get only nine overnights all season because geography makes trips to games against Connecticut, Providence, Manchester, Bridgeport, Worcester and most other AHL Eastern Conference cities so short that players are home in time for SportsCenter.
“The players enjoy it,” Springfield coach Brad Larsen said Saturday, in the midst of a five-day trip. The Falcons boarded a bus for Wilkes-Barre on Tuesday for a Wednesday game, then traveled on to Norfolk for games Friday and Saturday before returning home in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
“We actually look forward to getting out together. It hasn’t happened a lot this year,” Larsen said.
Tuesday night was the first this season in which the Falcons didn’t sleep in their own beds.
Compare that to teams such as Norfolk, geographic orphans in an otherwise close-knit conference. The Admirals will spend more than 50 nights on the road before the season is complete.
That disparity is a key reason Tampa Bay moved its affiliation from Norfolk to Syracuse, where General Manager Julien BriseBois said the players could get more practice time and less wear and tear.
Still, even with the rigors of extended travel, Norfolk won last season’s Calder Cup and fashioned a record 28-game winning streak.
But nobody in Springfield would trade schedules with the Admirals.
“You try to make up for it,” Craig said of less time on the road. He has seen both ends of the continuum, having spent two seasons with the Admirals, sandwiched between terms in Springfield.
“We get together at each other’s houses, have dinner with each other when we’re at home,” he said.
He also figures there is a price to pay for getting more time with the family.
“We end up playing a lot of three-in-threes (three games in as many nights) because of the short distances to the games,” Craig said. “The Admirals, when they’re at home, play two games in a row against the same team.”
That happened Friday and Saturday with the Falcons.
And after all, winning is the best bonding experience of all. The Falcons did that Friday to even their trip at 1-1 after the loss at Wilkes-Barre/Scranton. And they played Saturday with an understanding that another win would make the overnight trip back home a lot more pleasant.