Welcome to The 5 Hole with Chris Hansen

Hey Wild fans (and to those who arrived here by mistake or the otherwise morbidly curious)...Welcome to my new blog!

As the play-by-play voice of your Wenatchee Wild and a huge fan of everything connected with the pucks, this will be the new spot on WenatcheeWild.com for me to share my thoughts and insights with all of you about the team, hockey and just life in general, and for you to answer back and sound off your own.

Before we face off on our first ever subject, I feel it important to reveal a bit of my antiquity and let everyone know that "blogging" is, in it's most technical state, a relatively new concept for me.

During the portion of my life when there was no internet (which is a few more years than when there has been;-), this sort of thing would have been more familiar to me as an "editorial" and you would have needed a good friend in the newspaper biz to get the chance to gain an audience with such a forum.

So I consider it a real privilege to be given the opportunity to communicate with this many of you at once, and to so swiftly add such a large measure of much needed tech-savvy credibility to my otherwise hopelessly outdated nature and just plain lameness when it comes to the younger crowd too.

Who knows? Maybe this will actually lead to my purchasing a real cell phone and a way to hopefully text message in cursive.

I thought the most logical topic to start off this whole endeavor would be the current state of the team, with a bit of history to help us gain an accurate perspective, along with some conjecture about where they might be headed.

This is the Wenatchee Wild's third season of existence in the NAHL, and they currently have a record of 12-6-0 in 18 games for a total of 24 out of a possible 36 points. The club has the sixth best winning percentage in the league and are on top of the standings in the Western Division.

Still, despite all of these literal and theoretical positives, there seems to be a growing state of restlessness surrounding the team in many ways.

The expectations are high as always for this franchise that captured the hearts of fans everywhere with their Cinderella run to the Robertson Cup's final day in their inaugural season, and last year set the standard by which every team in the league was measured.

But the message I’d like to resound is “give it time”.

This is a group that is still learning the eccentricities of one another on and away from the ice, and I believe this is much of the reason why we have all seen such a roller coaster of efforts and variety of final scores to this point in the season.

It’s one thing to know that as a player, you are going 110%, but an entirely different feeling to trust that all of your teammates are as well.

Also, in order to start winning in every way, sometimes you have to learn how to lose in a lot of them too and Wenatchee certainly appears to be seasoning themselves to a wealth of different game situations thus far…and that’s a good thing!

Yes, the team has only two wins in their last five games, but in only two of those was the group’s collective effort called into question by the coaching staff. Plus, let’s not forget that the Wild ran into two of the best goaltenders in the entire league in four of those five games and lit one of them up like a Broadway Christmas tree (Andrew Walsh on November 4^th, allowed 4 goals on 40 shots in an 8-0 final).

Just the same, this very goaltender came back to stymie the Wild two nights later with 41 saves on 43 shots on goal while in front of him getting five more goals in support, several of which came courtesy of some poor netminding in the Wenatchee end.

So the lesson in this three-game microcosm of the schedule for this fledgling pack is if you live by the sword (or the goalie stick in this case), you’re going to lose by it sometimes as well.

We’ve seen what this bunch is capable of in 60 minutes of their best hockey, and the results should truly be scaring the daylights out of the other teams in the league who are taking note.

Think of this season’s installment of the Wenatchee Wild on the ice like a fine wine if you will.

Season one’s team was like an off brand cola that was actually better than the giants of the industry…a real surprise!

Last season’s was like an expensive bottle of champagne that someone left open for just a little too long before the party could get started and disappointingly went flat.

The 2010-2011 crop is still in the process of maturing in the barrel, but given time will undoubtedly be tasting more like the fruits of victory than ever before at season’s end. (by the way, this was a difficult analogy for me to pursue, as I’m not a big fan of wine! Sorry Jan ;-)

Before closing, I want to say thank you to all of the Wenatchee Wild fans out there for your continuing support of the team in so many ways.

I hope you enjoyed our first blog time together. I promise they will get better (and shorter!). To be a broadcaster you do need to write a little, but I am much more adept at running my mouth than clamoring the keyboard.

Let me know your thoughts on your 2010-2011 Wenatchee Wild so far and we’ll chat about something new in the next few days. I am anxious to see what you all have to say!

Chris Hansen