Ice Lions general manager and coach Tim Colby said the IIHF membership proves that Kenya isn’t a hockey anomaly.
“We’re not some outlier. It’s not like when ‘Cool Runnings’ came on and everyone jumped up and said, ‘Wow, look at that, Jamaican bobsled,’” Colby said of the 1993 Disney comedy loosely based on the Jamaican bobsled team debuting at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. “The same thing happened to us — they compared us to ‘Cool Runnings.’ We’re in it for the long haul and this (IIHF membership) legitimizes that long haul aspect.”
Players and coaches in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, have been preparing to take on their African neighbors and the world for some time.
Limited to three-on-three games because their rink inside Nairobi’s Panari Hotel is square and about one-third of the size of an NHL rink, several Ice Lions players trained in Cape Town in August and participated in full ice games for the first time in a tournament sponsored by the Friendship League, a sports tourism group.
“We did kind of a mini development camp that was tied into a tournament,” said Pete Kamman, a coach from Montana who is founder/director of Elevated Hockey and ran the training sessions with the Kenyans. “Every day was a different theme, and we worked on different skills, from skating to shooting to gameplay and body contact.
“They struggled with that a little bit, but they made some adjustments, and then they ended up winning all the rest of the following games and won the trophy at the end of the week,” Kamman said.
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