The smell of the concession stand's popcorn as you walk past the lobby and into the locker room. The sound of blades on the ice and the echoing noise of a perfectly placed tape-to-tape passes. Seeing all your close friends, your teammates, and your coaches all gathered together in the locker room. The taste of our stick wax Gatorade as you fuel up before your big game. Nothing beats the feelings associated with playing or watching hockey. So naturally, as hockey players who live and breathe the game of hockey, it's no doubt that we're missing its familiarity. We're understandably a bit lost as to what our day-to-day looks, but we're keeping our heads up and making the best of these next few weeks at home.

As many of you are in similar situations and have presumably asked the question "what am I going to do all day?", we've compiled a shortlist of activities that you can do in the comfort of your home during this temporary hockey hiatus.

Work On Your Game

What better way to take your mind off hockey by playing more hockey? There are plenty of off-ice workouts that you can partake in to ensure that your hands stay silky. Focusing on the extracurriculars and honing your skill during this extended downtime could be the difference-maker come next season between those that stayed diligent and those that didn't. If you're looking for a surface to practice your stickhandling or need a patch of "ice-like" conditions to practice shooting at a net, a shooting pad and some pucks can be the perfect addition to your garage while you're stuck at home. This will guarantee that your stickhandling doesn't get rusty and that your wristers and clappers stay sharp until the season starts back up again.

Take A Virtual Tour Of Our HQ!

Over the summertime, we had our friends from over at EGD Goaltending come visit our headquarters and tour our facilities. They gave everyone the opportunity to get an in-depth view of what goes on here at Howies and what we do on an everyday basis. Unfortunately, HQ tours are currently shut down due to the current situation amidst us, but you can still take a virtual tour of our office and our warehouse in Grand Rapids, Michigan through this video! It shows our day-to-day operations, our offices, and most importantly, the giant warehouse filled with tape, laces, wax, and all of your favorite hockey accessories! If you ever wondered what Howies Hockey Tape looks like, this is your chance to check it out!

A Howies Hockey Tape Coloring Book!

For all of our parents out there, we've got something for the younger kids as well! I'm sure you're all scrambling to find activities for your kids to do - whether it be coloring books, puzzles, board games, or simply extending their video game time, we're here with our version of a coloring book. It's a short book, but we've created a color-able version of our logo and our bobblehead for your kid(s) (or you!) You can download the PDFs here and here. Once you or your hockey player is done coloring one of the pages, you can submit your masterpiece to us and we'll repost some of our favorite ones on our social media pages! You can submit your art here!

Work on Your TJ Tuesday Submissions

What's TJ Tuesday? It stands for "Tape Job Tuesday" and it's a mini-competition that we hold weekly on our Instagram page. If you're one of those people that gets fired up as soon as the word "competition" is brought up, we've got you covered. Here's how it works. Every Tuesday, we announce the winner of our TJ Tuesday competition at 6:00 PM Eastern Standard Time by posting the winner's submission on our Instagram page. In order to enter for a chance to win, all you have to do is tape your stick blade up, take a picture of it, and send it to us on Instagram via Direct Message! You don't even need to send it on Tuesday either - you can send it on a Friday or a Wednesday! Just know that submissions close every Tuesday at 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time and the winner gets selected an hour later. Any submissions that come in after that will simply just get entered into next week's competition and since its weekly, you have 52 chances to win EVERY YEAR. If you're looking to touch-up on stick taping best practices, we've got a handy video for you here and some past winners here, here, here, and here. What do you win? I guess you'll just have to win to find out! (hint: tape, stick wax, grip tape, scissors, water bottles, apparel, and other goodies have been included in past prizes)

Watch Us Stream on Twitch!

That's right! We're taking the e-sports realm by storm and if we can't play actual hockey and fight for a right in our men's league championship, you better believe that we're going to play hockey virtually. We stream on Twitch throughout the day and will be playing some Chel - with our viewers, online against random people, and potentially starting an exclusive EASHL team! Follow us on Twitch and turn on notifications for our page to be the first to join us when we go live! Stay tuned in the coming days for an announcement on a potential tournament where we'll put viewers' video game skills to the test for a chance to win a ton of prizes!