For a California girl, Nate Thompson’s wife is turning into one tough hockey player.
Sportsnet’s Eric Engels wrote a fun story that was published Thursday about a group of Canadiens players’ wives and girlfriends who are getting together once a week to play hockey at a rink in La Prairie. On Wednesday, a group of them hit the ice for their sixth session, including Angela Price, Bailey Weber, Julie Petry, Sarah Byron, Sydney Thompson, Courtney Petrachek (Victor Mete’s girlfriend) and Jaclyn Phillips (Keith Kinkaid’s girlfriend).
Engels reported that they call themselves the Hab Nots.
It turns out Sydney Thompson fractured her tailbone after taking a hard fall in one of the early sessions this year.
“At first I was very apprehensive,” Nate Thompson said about his wife learning to play hockey after the Canadiens practised Thursday in Brossard. “But you know how that goes … you can’t really control your wife at all, so she’s going to do what she’s going to do.
“It’s a fun thing for them to get together,” Thompson added. “That way they can kind of have their own camaraderie as well and have their own things. She’s a girl from Beverly Hills, Calif., who knows nothing about hockey, so she loves it. It’s fun for her. She said she had skated maybe a handful of times in her life, so that’s what she’s doing right now. She’s learning how to skate.”
When asked about his wife’s fractured tailbone, Thompson smiled and said: “She’s playing through it right now.”
His wife’s injury could have been worse.
“She fought me at the beginning to not wear any gear and I told her: ‘You got to wear full gear just in case you fall,'” he said.
Sydney was wearing equipment when she fell.
Weber’s wife told Engels she had played ringette before, but never hockey until the group of wives and girlfriends started getting together. Interestingly, when Weber was asked Thursday about the story on the wives and girlfriends playing hockey, he said: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Engels wrote that the group of wives and girlfriends will get together to watch games when the Canadiens are on the road, like they will be Friday night when they play the Capitals in Washington (7 p.m., TSN2, RDS, TSN 690 Radio).
Thompson is in his 13th NHL season and the Canadiens are his seventh team after stints with the Boston Bruins, New York Islanders, Tampa Bay Lightning, Anaheim Ducks, Ottawa Senators and Los Angeles Kings. Thompson met his wife when he was playing in Anaheim and they celebrated their first wedding anniversary in August.
“I guess it’s maybe a little different with certain teams,” Thompson said about the bond between the players’ wives and girlfriends. The dynamic of some wives and girlfriends having more kids, so some will be around each other more than others. But I think the wives here are a pretty tight-knit group.”
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