Jia Mu Si Tournament - Day 2

Today, we awoke at 9:00 am for breakfast. Then the players did some warm up and stretching. We were given a room to place the exercise bikes we brought with us. It also has a couple of workout machines in the room. After the stretching… the players had time to relax all day until the pregame meal at 3:00.

But this being China, the coaches had to attend a banquet at noon with the people from JiaMuSi hockey. It was actually an excellent banquet, not too much food, and it was pretty good. We met with the head of sports in Jia Mu Si and the head of hockey in Jia Mu Si and one of our players parents (Ding Xiao Lin). About two thirds of the way through, Coach Li arrived with two of his friends from Korea and the minimal toasting picked up considerably as we added a third language to the table. We got out of the banquet around 2:30 and Tim and took a bit of a nap before the 5:00 team meeting.

Tonight, we played the host team, Jia Mu Si. They are very strong, and just may be the best team in the tournament. They beat QiQiHar 1-0 last night in the opening game. We played another good first period and again found ourselves down 3-0. We ended today’s game as a 10-0 losing team. We had only a couple chances to score, but played much better defense today.

In the earlier game, Harbin defeated QiQiHar 3-2, setting up a meeting of 2-0 teams tomorrow between Harbin and Jia Mu Si, while we will face QiQiHar.

There is one thing of interest that I forgot to mention yesterday. If you were not able to find the scoreboard in yesterday’s photo, that is because it is a 20 minute analog clock with numbers that are hung to indicate the score. The interesting part is that to end the period the scorer literally hits a GONG when the clock reaches zero. It is quite amusing, our own Chinese gong show.