With Sunday night’s 5-1 beatdown of the Providence Bruins the Hershey Bears managed to take three of four road games during their swing with New England last week. The Bears defeated Lowell, Manchester, and the Bruins, losing only to Portland. It had to have been a satisfying bus ride back to Hershey last night. Also, a well-wired one.
Once upon a time, not all that long ago, the hockey bus in minor pro hockey was an enclave of sedation, a wheeled whirlwind of zoned-out hockey hopefuls: a bit of card game playing, a bit of banter, a whole lot of boredom-induced napping. It was a culture somewhat accurately captured in the movie ‘Slapshot.’ But times have changed. The culture on the hockey bus has been revolutionized by technology.
Via wireless Internet Bears’ radio voice John Walton uses literally every minute of every bus ride to refresh content for the Bears’ official web page as well as his own, John Walton Hockey. (JW has fresh video of Gavin Morgan’s going serial killer on Portland’s Felix Schutz from Friday night.)
“The bus is my office,” he told me in Portland last week.
If you’ve visited Walton’s site this fall you’ve noticed how dramatically he’s broadened the multi-media content there. He’s updating the site almost constantly throughout the day, bringing virtual real-time happenings with Hershey hockey. And Walton’s commitment to the project is getting noticed: tens of thousands of puckheads — in both Hershey and D.C., Walton believes, but certainly elsewhere as well — are logging on to the site every day. There is that level of appetite for the quality content Walton is generating.
Additionally, every Bears’ player, he reported, is wired on the team bus with at least a laptop, and most are also plugged in to hand-helds and or iPods. They are engaged in social media on line, checking out hockey videos on YouTube, reading email, instant messaging, following Capitals’ games and news, and most especially engaged in online gaming. Former Bear Chris Bourque, Walton noted, was the first-tee e-starter for a wildly popular online game of golf that had foursomes of Bears e-swinging their drives and approaches for hours as the bus meandered across the American League’s interstates.
Once upon a time a hockey team had to decide on a movie title for bus-wide viewing. Now each player and coach can (and do) watch their own choice of flick on a high-resolution laptop screen in their laps.
“I used to nap in the afternoon and on buses,” Walton told me. “Those days are long gone.”
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