Jim Bob - Albanian fire

[jRuutu 2,426]

 

I was born in a small city called Korca. It´s in Albania and as you can maybe guess hockey is not the number one sport in the country. My dad was born in Colorado, Usa. He was a professional sledge rider who was competing in Albania. One day between races he met a lady at the hotel, it was love at first sight. From that moment on my mom and dad have been together, three years later I was born.  

 

My dad has played a huge part in my hockey career, one day my father brought in a pair of skates and a stick, that is how it all started, just skating around in our backyard. My dad spent hours every day teaching me and I loved it. Back then there were no hockey teams in Korca, winters were not the best either, but my father had always been a huge hockey fan and that is how I got into it. When I was around 10 years old we were seriously thinking about moving out of Albania, so I could get to play in a junior team somewhere, but at the time the finances were tight and my mom was not too excited about leaving her parents and everybody she knew behind. In the end, we decided to stay in Korca.

 

Years went by and I kept on honing my skills alone with my father who was working as my coach. I started to get bigger and stronger as I grew older. My father is a tall guy at 6´2, I hit that when I was 14, so it started to look clear I´m going to have everything you could need to be a professional hockey player when it comes down to size, but I had very little actual game experience, just fun games with the local kids who had very little knowledge on the game, most did not even have skates, I dominated those games. I needed a move away from Albania if I wanted to play hockey on a professional level.

 

 

 

One day a stranger saw me skating around the city center with the puck on my stick, just dangling around. I fired a cannon of a shot to a nearby kiosk wall, the puck went through the wooden wall. The stranger walked up to me introduced himself and said he was in the town on holiday. As we kept talking, it turns out he works as a scout for jR hockey agency. Apparently, he liked what he was seeing and asked if I would be interested in having a try out in front of the agency coaching team and scouts? I was over the moon and said yes right away!

 

Around a week or so later a car came in front of our house to drive me and my parents to the airport, we were going to fly to Finland and have the try out there. I was nervous as hell, tried to do my best in the tests, skating was the hardest part - I sucked, which was not a surprise. Managed to do well in puck skills though, starting from shooting. In the end, I got average results, the head of the scouts saw some hope in me and asked if I would be interested in signing a one year deal with the agency? He mentioned how signing would mean I get a chance to join VHLM teams practice shortly, if I did well there I had a decent chance to join the team and play in a junior team for the first time in my life! I had a quick chat with my parents and we all agreed - it was time to see if playing hockey could be a possibility.

 

From there my journey towards VHL started....