Taipei Cup Tournament

Nick and I travelled up to Taipei for the Taipei cup this weekend. This a youth hockey tournament open only to residents of Taiwan and is essentially the national championship of youth hockey. Nick and Piper had to produce student ID's in order to prove they were going to school in Taiwan in order to be allowed to play. The tournament was really intense. There are only about half a dozen youth hockey organizations in the whole country and there aren't really enough kids to go around. Plus, with the exception of our team most of the coaches full time job is running their organization. Fewer kids means less income and fewer wins makes recruiting difficult. So, the coaches are constantly poaching players from each other and there seems to be a lot of bad blood between certain coaches. They really, really want to beat each other. As visitors only here for a semester we were outside most of the drama but you could tell how some coaches felt about each other.  In the end Nick and Piper's team won the tournament with a win against one of the teams most heated rivals. It was a pretty awesome end to our asian ice hockey experience

Nick in front of Taipei Arena

Pregame talk from our Canadian coach