The Story

About me

WCU 2003I have been playing roller hockey for a long time, going all the way back to the previous millennium, 1998 to be exact.  Although I have played both ice and roller hockey, majority of my most competitive years have been spent tending the net playing roller hockey.  I played in Eastern Collegiate Roller Hockey Association (ECRHA) during my college years.  Then I continued playing organized roller hockey in the leagues like Professional Inline Hockey Association (PIHA) and American Inline Hockey League (AIHL), and well as various well-known tournaments such as NARCh, Torhs.WCU 2006

Throughout this time, I was fortunate enough to be able to win the Pro championship in PIHA as well and Elite title in AIHL.  Although I never had the raw talent of some of the other players that I competed against, it was the hard work as well as the attention to even the tiniest of details in my game as well as my equipment that made it possible for me to reach the levels that I did. 

 Motivation for creating slide plates

It was this attention to details in the area of the equipment and the desire to get any edge, no matter how small, over the competition that has led me to years of tinkering with and improving my equipment.  My first sliding modifications started with pre-butterfly pads.  They were primitive, simple, and basically served the purpose of preventing the pad from sticking to the court surface during the old school kick save.  NJ Nightmare 2011As the game and equipment evolved, so did my pad slide designs.  Next designs covered the entire inside surface of the pad.  The material was polyester fabric that virtually prevented any sticking and aided with some small amount of sliding.  Few years ago, I decided to start experimenting with using harder plastic material over the flexible fabric.  This was not groundbreaking or new, because by that point, there were people already utilizing UHMW Polyethylene plastic in some form or another on their pads.  What I wanted to do, is to take existing ideas and improve upon them to help me advance my game.  Plastic slide plates also went through several evolutionary changes with the current version sporting slide bumps.Inferno NARCh 2013

Throughout my career I have had other goalies, my travel team teammates, or goalies that I coached, seeing my pad slides and expressing interest in getting them for their pads.  The problem was always that every pad slide design was one off piece of work, that was very specific to every brand, model and size of pad.  It was also incredibly labor and time intensive.  Although I have made several pad slides for some of my friend goalies, I never advertised it.

My early motivation was never to create a mass-produced product, that I can sell and get rich.  My motivation was 100% to improve my OWN game.  Hours and hours of work was worth it for me if that meant that I may stop one or two more pucks.  However, in the recent years, I started to think about incorporating some design elements that will enable me to reduce the amount of labor that it takes to produce and maintain one set of slide plates that would make it worthwhile for me to make them for other people.  I believe that I have achieved that with my latest version. 

Evolution of my pad slides