It’s fast, furious and secretly practiced by its inventors.

Bricin Lyons grabs his board, passes the can and then smashes into another player. He’s in a secret, underground location, where he and his team are practicing for the world’s only longboarding hockey league.

Longboarding, if you didn’t know, is like skateboarding, except the board is, well, longer. Hockey played while riding longboards is a fast, tough game. The unofficial season starts up again this weekend and Lyons, a 280-pound guy, can’t get enough.

“The hits can get pretty hard,” admits Lyons. So players choose their equipment carefully, including the puck. “We use a Sapporo beer can, it’s the toughest beer can on the market. I’ve seen it be run over by a car and not even dent.” You can watch a longboard hocket video here.

The teams compete in a weekly game in front of fans until March when they start the playoffs. It’s similar to the NHL, with a few exceptions. Longboarders play four a side, plus a goalie. Players have to keep at least one foot on the board to pass and two to score. And they play for whatever city they live in: no exceptions. If a player moves, he or she is traded.

And unlike the NHL, they draw their fans in secret. So far, no one’s offered up a venue for the infamous league, so they practice and play in the basement of a building whose location they won’t reveal. “We’ve been playing there five years and no one knows,” Lyons says. “We leave the place cleaner than when we arrive, and if people are causing problems, we get on it. It’s our home; we don’t want it to be wrecked.”

Longboard 411

They got the idea for longboard hockey from the Jaks, a West Coast skateboard hockey team and then adapted it to the longboard. The advantage of an oversized, elongated version of a skateboard is that it’s more stable and much faster to ride.

But it presents other challenges. “The way you stop is you slide to stop, so it takes talent to maneuver your board,” says Lyons. “A short board is easier: you just point the tail and shuffle around.”

It’s no surprise Vancouver spawned longboarding hockey, since the city is a world hotspot for longboarding.

There’s longboarding elsewhere. But only Vancouver has “massive numbers of people gathering,” explains Michael Brooke, editor of Concrete Wave, a skateboarding magazine based in Toronto. Like the annual rookie event where over 200 longboarders hit the seawall. Or like the “secret” race (no one will admit to attending) in which longboarders “bomb hills” — race down a six storey parking lot. Hill bombers hit speeds of over 50 kilometers an hour. And some strap plastic kitchen cutting boards onto work gloves for extra protection against the aspha