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Junior team turns fans into human hockey puck

Human Hockey Puck
Human Hockey Puck

James Upham of Moncton has invented something he hopes will catch on as between periods entertainment.

It’s called the “human hockey puck hovercraft” and it was used to delight fans at last Friday’s Moncton Wildcats season opener during intermission.

Upham is in charge of programming at Moncton’s Resurgo Place and the Wildcats asked him to come up with something for in-game entertainment for their first game of 2016-17.

CBC got the story behind the “human hockey puck hovercraft” and how it was created.

“The idea came up — why not a human hockey puck? So I sat and drew a thing up and it’s scaled to an actual hockey puck,” Upham said.

It took him two weeks to build the giant hockey puck, which measures 120 centimeters in diameter and 40 centimeters high and is large enough for hockey fans to ride.

“It’ll lift about 300 pounds. It’s got two, 40-volt lithium-ion battery-powered leaf blowers that’ll move about 600 cubic feet of air per minute,” he said.

Upham said the project took over his life for a couple of weeks but seeing it glide across the ice at the Moncton Coliseum in Friday’s opening game was “awesome.”

“The trick was making it big enough and scaling it and getting the two leaf blowers in there and keeping everything balanced. And also you’re going to have a person on it and making sure that it’s going to have enough lift … it was a bit of a process,” Upham laughed.

“I kind of had hovercraft on the brain.”

According to the story, you can’t steer the human hockey puck hovercraft, but you can control it with a joystick. At the game, young fans were blindfolded and put on the ice with fans guiding them to center ice. Apparently another human hockey puck will be built so they can race it during future intermissions.

The Milwaukee Admirals have tried something called the “Human Hockey Puck” in the past, but it was more a sling shot of a person on the ice.

In 2012, a Nashville radio personality sued the Nashville Predators when he was injured during a human hockey puck stunt.

Moncton ticket sales manager Sarah Nesbitt says this human hockey pick is the first of its kind.

Said Nesbitt in the piece. “Hopefully as things move forward this becomes sort of a thing to be like, ‘Hey you know, I went to a Wildcats game and I got to ride the human hockey puck.”

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Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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