http://www.strangewords.com/archive/solaris.html

if the equipment guys have it tough at home, it must be even more difficult to get all that stuff moved around and packed up when the team is on the road.

Keep those behind the scene features coming. I’ve always wondered what the deal was with players choosing equipment, brands, endorsement deals, etc. I thought in the past, e.g., Tyutin was a Bauer guy from his equipment, but he seems to have changed this year—what’s behind those choices and changes in general?? I guess I’ll have to wait for pt. 2 of your installment. Good work.

PS, for those 3rd jersey haters: no third jerseys for any team next season.

Yeah, I know and am glad…maybe it’s just me but it seems when they wear the 3rd jersey, they lose. I absolutely HATED the John Ferguson era jerseys and was glad when they stopped using those. I guess I’m a trationalist at heart…diagonal Ranger’s, no shield or Liberty Head, just plain Ranger’s.

PS: Can you imagine Ferguson changing the “Habs” jerseys? He would have been run out of town!!!!!!

PS, for those 3rd jersey haters: no third jerseys for any team next season.

I don’t know what’s in the boxes from memory, but I can tell you it isn’t skates. The locker area held strickty uniform stuff, so perhpas it’s boxes of different colored socks or something along those lines. In that picture, the skates would’ve been to the left of Beets and the sewing machine.

The tags you see attached to the chain link fence are, as you guessed, old name plates of Rangers past. Leetch, Esposito, Gartner, etc. One of the previous equipment managers, whose name escapes me, began hanging the name plates at Playland and the team decided to continue the tradition over in Greenburgh. It’s pretty amazing.

nice article. I love behind-the-scenes stuff like that. On two of the pix there’s a pile of something (maybe skate boxes) behind a cage, and on the boxes are some long-gone names: fedyk, popovic, mactavish. What are those things/boxes?

thanks.

1. I don’t know the equipment budget, but it must be incredible.
2. Getting the job – Oddly enough, Marques actually came to the job as the assistant before moving to top dog and did so in what seemed to me to be unusual fashion. He actually operated the equipment room at the Playland Ice Casino in Rye, and began doing some repair work for the team. They liked him and asked him to come in when a job opened up.
3. Not sure about the salary, but it should be decent with all the hours those guys work.