Hockey Diaries

What a weekend!  We spent two full days at Washington Capitals’ training camp at their facility in Arlington VA, starting to record interviews and on-ice sound for the new season of Hockey Diaries. Hard to believe this will be our fourth season!  It’s always an exciting time, thinking about which players to approach, and plotting storylines and sound scenes for the season-long piece.

In the meantime, we can’t wait for the 2010-2011 season piece “Hockey Diaries: Change The Game” to premiere on NHL Home Ice tomorrow, 9/19, at 6-7pmET.  We’ve just uploaded a new audio out-take from the piece this evening, and we’ve updated the listening opportunities and added some new info about interviews.   We hope you get a chance to take a listen and tell us what you think.

Happy to let you know that this year’s Hockey Diaries documentary, “Change the Game”, will debut on NHL Home Ice on XM/Sirius on September 19 from 6-7pmET.  Coach Boudreau will be on at 5:45pmET, leading into the airing of the piece.  And earlier that day (around 8:40amET), we’ll be on the morning show for a chat with host Mike Ross about the making of the piece.  We hope you get a chance to listen in!  Watch this space, and follow us on twitter, for more updates about player interviews, repeat air times, and opportunities to listen to the piece online.  We’ll share that information as soon as we have it; it’s all in the works.  We’ve also been posting bonus audio, photographs and video from the project.   Take a look/listen, let us know what you think.  What would you like to see and hear more of, from Hockey Diaries?

This year’s Hockey Diaries documentary is finished! We’ve been making final tweaks through the week and weekend, and the piece is now (finally!) done. We’re giving it one last listen right now, then we’ll upload it to NHL Radio overnight. We can’t wait for you to hear it. It’s looking like September 19th *might* be the launch air date — but this isn’t finalized yet; we should know all the details by Tuesday. We’ll keep that info updated here, and on twitter.  We went to the first day of rookie camp for the Washington Capitals today; lots of hard work happening out there on the ice and behind the scenes.  And so it begins again…

It struck me today that we worked on this year’s Hockey Diaries project from a lot of different places during the season, spanning two continents.  Here’s the list: Arlington, VA; Washington, DC; Denver, CO; Anchorage, AK; Cape Town, South Africa (and for hours over the Atlantic, en route!); Pittsburgh, PA; Cleveland, OH; Louisville, KY; Seattle, WA; Leavenworth, WA; Chicago, IL; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Arusha, Tanzania (and for hours over the Atlantic, again!)

It felt strange, working on Hockey Diaries in Tanzania. We were there for an unrelated work project, but the documentary deadlines still had to be met. I worked on the script in the evenings, listening to tape from practices, games and locker room interviews. And it was unsettling (keep reading hockey diaries here)