As the winter sports have just begun so have the amusing bus rides. The New Ulm Girls Hockey team has a total of 12 away games they will be traveling to which means 12 bus rides full of laughter, singing, and food.

Every game day, parents are scheduled to provide one of the team’s three items: sandwiches, drinks, or snacks. The go-to sandwiches for us are ham, turkey, or summer sausage; the go-to drinks are Body Armor, Gatorade, or Capri Sun; and lastly, the go-to snacks are grapes, goldfish, granola bars, cheez-it, go-go squeezes, or cuties.

Our parents provide these so that we can eliminate stopping on the way home because it can get late after our games. The minimum time we travel is 45 minutes; the maximum can be up to 2 hours and 15 minutes. These long bus rides can be considered boring, but in reality, it’s a super fun time with your teammates.

Our Junior goalie from Cathedral, Ava Brennan, described the bus rides as “quite entertaining. They usually involve lots of dancing, singing, deep convos about life, screaming, occasional homework, and endless laughing.”

There are certain times when it gets turned up a notch on the bus. One is when we get our phone taken away 30 minutes before arrival at the rink. This is so that we continue that team chemistry and bond off the ice, not just on the ice.

This pregame ritual is not just for the way there; it is also for the way back. We do not receive our phones back until we are halfway home to allow the girls to debrief on the game and continue making those lifetime memories before everyone is focused on their phones and homework.

Head Coach Jeremy Reed said, “When the girls don’t have their phones, they are filled with more joy, enthusiasm, lots of communication, and mostly goofiness.” Many of the girls can agree with this. We spend most of our time listening to our foreign exchange students talk about their lives back home or trying to teach them how to say our last names.

Or it is spent trying to teach Maddi Olson how to correctly pronounce words, for example, the word “remote,” she claims it’s “remount.”

As all winter sports continue, so will the bus rides, and so will the struggle in pronunciation.