Behind the boards of the hockey rink rest wheelchairs and empty bags. A pair of prosthetic legs stuffed inside blue jeans lies on the floor.

On the ice, players glide gracefully, practicing skating and passing, their voices mingling with the clack and thud of sticks and pucks.

But this is no ordinary hockey practice. The players sit in bladed sleds, and they use their sticks like ski poles to propel them over the scarred white surface. Those same sticks slap pucks that rise to meet the goal or thump the boards and rattle the glass.

This is sled hockey, and many of the players are paraplegics or amputees. Off the ice, their mobility is limited. But on it, they can fly. And this ground-level version of the game can be just as physical as the traditional version of the sport.

Ed Clark of Windham felt adrenaline flow the first time he exchanged his wheelchair for a sled.

That was back in 1992 at the Holderness Arena, at a demonstration by players from the the U.S. National Sled Hockey team.

Several years later, Clark, a paraplegic, was on the team, competing on the international level at the paralympics in Nagano, Japan. These days he doesn't do much leveling, or checking. Instead, he gets a rush out of introducing young people to the sport.

And, yeah, he encourages them to hit him.

"Go ahead, bring it on," he said.

Bring it on. That's Clark in a nutshell..

Tell him he can't, and he'll prove to you that he can. The youngest of six kids, he grew up in working class Somersworth, N.H., where he loved watching the big bad Boston Bruins on television.

But the closest he got to playing the sport was the street variety, he said recently as he sat at his dining room table in the house he and wife Karen designed.

Clark, 42, said he's always been a little defiant.

"Really?" deadpanned his wife, stopping in the kitchen for something.

It was that defiance that led Clark to leave his former life behind.

A life changed

It was 1984. Clark had just graduated from Somersworth High School and was working from sunup to sundown with an inground pool installation crew.

He loved it: the physicality, the smell and taste of coffee and the sound of the radio when he arrived at the job site each day.

Late one night, he was visiting family in Nashua. They tried to convince him to sleep over because he looked tired..He said no..

He fell asleep driving his station wagon home to Chelmsford, Mass., on Route 101A and crashed. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital with a serious spinal injury.

During his rehabilitation, he met his wife, a nurse. He also met someone who helped him land a job with the IRS, where he still works as a computer specialist in Andover, Mass.

His wife introduced him to scuba diving. While Clark gave a scuba diving demonstration for Northeast Passage, a University of New Hampshire program that offers innovative therapeutic activities for people with physical disabilities, he was introduced to sled hockey.

Watching the players laugh while skating with aplomb made him want that as well.

Once he got on the sled, it was exhilaration. He compares it to getting his Harley-Davidson trike, and feeling the rush of wind in his face.

Each week and sometimes on the weekends, as a coach with the Northeast Passage Wildcats, he introduces adults and youth with physical disabilities to sled hockey, either showing them for the first time or coaching them on finer points.

Fellow coach Tom Carr, who is not disabled, said Clark's instruction "carries more weight because he played internationally and is coaching from a sled."

Clark learned by watching other players, so he strives to show newcomers how to stick handle and pass the puck.

He also tries, by example, to impart an attitude, a zest for mindful exploration and effort.

"I think that's good for the soul," Clark said.

Some of the players are quite accomplished.

Joe Howard of Kingston, Mass., a double amputee who lost his legs as a teenager in a train accident, accelerates with ease and turns with grace. He can blast a slapshot from the blue line that rocks the goalie or gently pass the puck to a newcomer learning to skate. He played for the national team and was a big part of the squad that won a surprise gold medal in 2002.

Another player on the Northeast Passage team, Taylor Chace of North Hampton, is on the current national team roster.

The bad cop

Clark no longer plays for the national team. He's getting older, he said, and it takes two or three days to heal after a game..

Besides, he's had his day, and he'd rather the kids get the spotlight. Clark was never a blazing fast skater, able to zoom from end line to end line in six seconds like some of his teammates. But he would stick his nose in the face of an opposing player, if needed. He always played smart, positional hockey, and he had good ice vision.

Now that outlook makes him a rock-steady coach for the New Hampshire team.

"Look for the puck," he hollered at a recent practice, urging one of the youngest players on the ice, 13-year-old Max Maurer, to keep his head up.

"There you go, Max," he said, passing the puck to him at the blue line.

Sometimes, Clark and Carr use a good cop/bad cop approach to coaching. Clark is the bad cop..

During a game a few weeks ago, team goalie Luis Aguinaldo of Methuen, Mass., was playing poorly and getting down on himself. Sensing the goalie's struggles, the team was losing confidence.

Between periods, Clark took Aguinaldo to the side, telling him he needed to get his head back in the game..

"You just have to stop it," he told the goalie..

Rinkside at the Tilton School in Tilton, N.H., where the team practices, parents Dottye and George Re of Pelham watched their daughter, Tatiana Re, a 13-year-old Pelham Memorial Middle School student.

Tatiana has been playing sled hockey only for a few months, but she skates deliberately, with a calm presence in front of the net.

'Everybody can play'

The Res adopted Tatiana at age 4 from a Russian orphanage. She has spina bifida, a birth defect that affects the spine.

The Re family is a hockey family. Tatiana's brother played, and her sister, Caitlin, 16, plays.

When Caitlin told her mother about this sport she had seen, sled hockey, Dottye called the USA Hockey governing board, and they put her in touch with Clark, who invited her to a demonstration.

On that first day, Clark asked Tatiana if she wanted to watch or participate.

"And you know what her answer was — 'I want to play," Dottye said, noting that Clark makes sure the players know what they are doing, and he encourages them.

"I think he has great passion," she said. "You can just tell."

Being able to glide about freely and be part of a team is especially important to the children.

"Everybody can play sled hockey," Tatiana said during a break in the action. "If you have bad legs, you can play; be part of a team."

Max Maurer's father, Rick, said his son can't wait for Thursday nights, the practice time for the Northeast Passage team.

"He absolutely loves it," he said of his son, whose kidneys are failing, making him unable to walk.

After practice, the boys and girls, men and women pack their gear.

Some climb into wheelchairs and head for the foyer, Max among them.

He said he dreams about being able to whiz around the ice someday like Howard, the Kingston, Mass., man who once played for the national team.

Max thinks he will get there.