Underwater workout At MDI YMCA, hockey finds its real bottom line

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Since hockey is played on frozen water, it’s not a huge leap to take the game itself underwater. That’s what a small group of players do each Thursday night in the pool at the Mount Desert Island YMCA in Bar Harbor.

From 8 to 9 p.m., a group of six to 10 males and females play underwater hockey, often switching teams in the hope of finding competitive balance.

Even before play begins, players pull on gloves or tape up their fingers, to protect them from the rough pool floor. They wear diving masks or goggles, and some add swim fins and snorkels too.

The players use a short stick with a forked end to move the puck from one side of the pool to the other. The plastic puck, which has a three-pound lead weight inside, has wood inlays on top and bottom, to help it slide better along the pool bottom.

The puck can be moved only with the stick, by pushing or passing. The players attempt to push or shoot the puck over a rope goal on either side. After a goal, the two teams retreat to their side of the pool. The puck is placed in the center of the playing area, and the game starts again.

Players can’t be grabbed. Only the person with the puck can be checked, although swimming into other players is often unavoidable.

On this recent night, six players turn out: league organizer Eddie Monet, Jen Litteral and Patrick White, his wife Angela and their daughters Chelsea and Eleni.

Underwater hockey isn’t much of a spectator sport, as what it most resembles from poolside is a school of bluefish going after chum. Half the fun is finding the puck beneath all the twisting bodies.

Still, the players insist there is strategy involved.

“We try to plan a strategy between each game,” said Litteral, who’s been playing at the Y since 1997. “We know who’s playing on the other team, and we work around them, to set up a plan of attack.”

“It gets more strategic with more people,” Monet said. “Play is circular. You battle for the puck, then swim back to defense, to catch your breath.”

Both Litteral and Monet are scuba divers, but those skills aren’t necessarily what matter in underwater hockey.

“It’s lung power that’s the most important resource in this,” Litteral said.

Patrick White, also a diver, thinks diving skills are more important in the game.

“There’s the comfortableness of being on the bottom,” he said. “But others would say swimming is more important. My daughter Chelsea is a fast swimmer, and it helps her quite a bit.”

Litteral first played underwater hockey while taking scuba-diving lessons in 1991.

“I like to cross the boundaries, to try sports women typically don’t play,” she said. “It’s good exercise, and I do sort of stay fit from it. I also like the challenge of it.”

Monet added, “It’s good exercise for us, and we get to see each other.”

White and his wife Angela have been playing for three years, while daughters Chelsea, 14, and Eleni, 10, started this year.

“It gets me in the water once a week,” he said. “I like the people who play, we’re good friends. It’s good cardiac work. There’s a lot of holding breath, which gets your lung stamina pretty good.”

The teams most often play in the shallow end, as some players are battling sinus infections. They try one game in the deep end, but that was enough.

“It’s like having a plastic bag over your head and having to run 100 miles,” said Monet, of Bar Harbor.

Major injuries are rare, although bruises and swallowing water are more common.

“I have the same abrasion on my knee for the whole season,” Litteral joked.

Monet has played in a real underwater-hockey pool, in Palm Beach, Fla., which had a tiled bottom, and pucks flying through the water. The Maine players, thought to be the only ones in the state, have been invited to go on the road to play, but so far they haven’t.

Any deep-end swimmers are invited to join in the fun on Thursday nights January through April.

However, Monet cautioned, “We’re used to being on the edge of death. This isn’t a wussy sport.”

For more information on underwater hockey, call Eddie Monet at 288-3483.