Aaron Kiselbach

An "Orginal Six" member, and probably the most infamous of all TSHA players. The stories that could be told about Aaron are too numerous to go into here, but he's probably most famous for two incidents: One was giving Kyoko a head injury that we thought might be life threatening, if not career ending. It wasn't intentional, but the way this guy played, those sorts of things happened. The other fame inducing incident was when he came with one girlfriend to the park, and then his other girlfriend showed up to demand some money he owed her, which resulted in a screaming match that was comfortable for nobody. What was noteworthy about this incident was that neither woman was his wife at the time.

Adde "The Viking" Backstrom

Adde brought a welcome, if somewhat quirky, Scandinavian feel to the TSHA. With anime tattoos and a shaven head he had a unique Akihabara/Malmo combo thing going on that can only be described as "euro-otaki".

He was a skilled offensive player with soft hands and therefore usually welcome to join any side.

On the other hand it is likely that this warm welcome had as much to do with the hot Swedish woman he always seemed to be associated with as much as his deft touch and accurate wrist shot.

Aoi "Blue" Nakagawara

Blue, as far as we could tell, was a woman – at least when not playing ball hockey. When she was playing ball hockey she could hold her own with the toughest of the guys. She was good, and not “for a girl good” just “good” good. She was so good in fact that she quit the TSHA for a career in ice hockey and we have never seen her since. Blue was also the only TSHA regular that we know of to have an overseas (mostly male, it seems), fan club with inquiries to our website about proposals for marriage which Blue handled with her usual unflappable, if dismissive, form.

Bill Blackwell

The fatter (and some, but not all, would say better) half of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Defense” Bill could always be found stoically defending the net against all comers relying only on his strength of will, imposing rotund form, and serial partner in defensive crime, Ted. We miss him. Except the attackers, who are very glad he is gone so they can finally go back to putting some points on the board.

Bill is also noted for being one of the few sincerely nice guys to play with the TSHA. He was easy to get along with, even though his lack of cynicism made it hard for us to relate to him.

Sadly, Bill has been exiled to the farthest reaches of civilization, a place known as "Calgary", to suffer a cold featureless landscape where people wear cowboy hats and say "Yeehaw!" without any irony. Luckily he has his wife and children to keep him from going insane with cabin fever.

The Cardboard Blocker

The Cardboard Blocker had a short but illustrious TSHA career. Its birth was suddenly required when the TSHA decided to participate in the 2008 Yamato Cup and would therefore need a goalie, and that goalie would need goalie equipment. In a fit of resource insufficiency, Casey the TSHA goalie, used several sheets of cardboard, some packing tape and a length of plastic twine to rig together a workable goalie blocker and affix it to a standard ice hockey player’s glove. Thus the Cardboard Blocker was born. The Cardboard Blocker first established its viability in regular season TSHA practice, then showcased its effectiveness in the 2008 Yamato Cup with a respectable 2nd place finish, and finally demonstrated its dominance in a virtuoso 0.00 GAA championship victory in Nagoya at the Kariya City Championships in November 2008.

Sadly the glory of victory in Nagoya also contained the seeds of demise of the Cardboard Blocker. The heavy Nagoya rain seeped through the cardboard slowly and relentlessly finally reducing the Cardboard Blocker to a sad and soggy shell of its former greatness. Rarely has the TSHA seen such a triumphant career that started from such humble beginnings only to be cut short in the very achievement of the pinnacle of success.

The Cardboard Blocker is gone now, but serves as a reminder to all of us that the most humble among us can sometimes achieve greatness far exceeding everyone’s expectations, including our own.

Bruce Storms

Sometimes nicknamed "Robocop" because of all the protection and gear he would wear, Bruce was the healthiest guy to ever play in the TSHA. Between shifts he would eat raw corn and spinach, which was every bit as disturbing to witness as it is to describe. But, he had boundless energy and could keep playing for hours, bringing as much intensity to the later games as the first game of the day.

That approach of wearing down the defence is probably the same approach he used for meeting women. Bruce's mobile phone was often filled to the limit with names of women he had met within the last 10 days, and he was always on the move for more.

Sadly, he had to suddenly leave Tokyo under mysterious and unexplained circumstances. And when we say "sadly", we mean for Bruce, because there is no way the guy will ever find anywhere else an environment as target rich as Tokyo.

Casey Lambert

Todai student and rocket scientist going to work for NASA...Casey was clearly just a little smarter than your average TSHA player.

Plus, he was a real skater, snow boarder and all round cool counter culture dude.

Casey also happened to be the TSHA’s best ever goalie who lead the TSHA to their first ever tournament victory.

And, if that still isn’t enough for you, he was so good playing out that we were trying to get someone else to play goal so we could put him on left wing

In fact, about the only thing that was wrong with him is that he pretty much wanted to eat anything and everything after it came to the table, while emphatically insisting right up to the point it arrived, that he had absolutely no interest in ordering it let alone eating it.

Still, given all the above accomplishments and abilities we pretty much forgave him...except of course, at that exact moment when the pizza finally arrived at the door.

Dead Guy

The only two requirements for being TSHA Hall of Fame is that you make an impression on our group, and that you retire. So one day we come to play and discover a smashed up motorcycle, an outline of a body, and a big splotches of blood everywhere. That sure made and impression, and the guy is clearly retired. So into the TSHA Hall of Fame, never really known, but never to be forgotten.

Doug "The Glue" Waters

Know as “The Glue” because of his outstanding ability to connect the defense to the forwards to devastating effect on the opposing team’s morale and scoreline, he could often be found streaking by you up the wing with his strangely upright (and yet fast and effective) Michael Johnson like stride. One the sneakiest bastards to play in the TSHA, he was often trying to find new ways to work around people's expectations of how the game works, by doing things like taking the ball toward the net before people had realized that a time out was over.

"The Glue" is also known for coining one of our favourite quotes. One time as he was running up the middle, he lasered a pass ahead of him, but a defender blocked it with his foot. The pass was so hard though, that the ball bounced right back to The Glue, and the defender went down on his hands and knees in pain. As the Glue ran past the fallen defender, he simply advised "Learn from it", and continued on without even breaking stride. We're not really sure what the lesson was, but to this day, when someone finds themselves on the losing end of a play, others will often advise "learn from it".

Fumi

Fumi was by far the most clueless person ever encountered by the TSHA, and possibly by anyone anywhere. Fumi was blissfully unaware of even the most basic facts of life, and of any evidence of activity in her immediate surroundings. There was not a single time she didn't run onto the playing area and run in all the wrong directions until someone reminded her which team she was on. We often wondered if an orange pylon would have a greater statistical impact on the game.

Fumi had the most annoying habit of feeling obligated to say everything twice when speaking to non-Japanese, once in Japanese and then again in English, regardless of whether or not the person she was speaking to spoke Japanese or not. Worse, her self imposed translations were at best approximations of what she intended to say, which, in its original Japanese, was merely the disjointed non-sequitors of randomly firing neurons.

She was so clueless that to this day the TSHA uses her as our standard of cluelessness, which we measure in "centifumis". Zero centifumies is your standard self aware human being. 100 centifumis is complete abject cluelessness, as demonstrated by Fumi.

Not that we didn't enjoy having her around. Being in the presence of someone with such a fleeting grasp of the obvious was entertaining, baffling, and fascinating.