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ICE TIME
A Fierce Investment, in Skates and Family Time
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: January 16, 2005
 INGS PARK, N.Y., Jan. 11 - On the ice, helmeted,
swathed in pads and boosted up on skates, they look like little men,
though they were all born in 1996. That makes them, in the wry
lexicon of youth hockey, Mites. (A year ago they were mini-Mites;
next year they will be Squirts.) There are maybe 15 of them out on
the rink, doing a skating drill, speeding around in tight circles
with frantic purpose. They are impossibly fast.
If you have never seen a good team of 8-year-old hockey players
before, the fearless abandon and skill can be startling. But
everyone hanging around this practice session at the Superior Ice
Rink - home to a recreation league of 20 teams and 8 more
competitive teams that travel for games - is blasé. That's because
there is no one who hasn't been here many times before.
"It's our other family," said Karen Moore. She is at Superior,
she said, "four times a week, not counting weekends." She was
pushing Lauren, 1, in her stroller, while her husband, George, was
watching their son Thomas, 8, on the ice with the Mites. Their
6-year-old, Kevin, who was careering around the snack bar, plays on
a mini-Mite squad.
"We see these people a lot more than we see our other friends,"
Ms. Moore said. "We have to check the hockey calendar before we make
any plans. It's taken over our lives."
All of this, of course, makes Superior emblematic of the boom in
organized youth sports, a phenomenon that has ratcheted up the
competitive nature of both parents and children across America and,
for good or ill - probably both - has transformed the lives of
countless families. The days of ratty jerseys and haphazard practice
schedules are gone. The Mites, whose season stretches from September
to March, will play up to 50 games a year, practice at least that
many times, and will also take private lessons, attend clinics and
go to summer camps. Many, sons of police officers and stock brokers,
are decked out in $300 skates and carry $200 graphite and fiberglass
sticks that might seem more suited to National Hockey Leagues stars
than third graders.
Many young athletes, in yearlong pursuits of team sports, like
baseball, soccer, football, basketball and lacrosse, play more than
one. The number involved in ice hockey alone is striking. USA
Hockey, the governing body for the sport and the chief advocate for
the spread of the game among young people, had nearly 25,000
under-18 teams registered last year, a total of some 366,000
players, up from 166,000 in 1991. That includes more than 48,000
girls, a nearly eightfold increase in the same time period.
Whatever the precise dimensions of the boom, the world of the
Superior Ice Rink in this Long Island community, where about 400
young people play on its hockey teams, is a window into it. Some
families here are paying upwards of $10,000 a year for a child to
participate. Success - and there is a fair amount of it at Superior
- brings weekend tournaments in places like Ottawa and Detroit,
where 11-year-olds might play a half-dozen games in three days.
On game days, ferociously invested parents often betray, well,
ferocious investment.
"Yeah, I'm afraid so," said Ami Zaroba, whose son Zachary is a
Mite, when asked if she ever yelled at the referee. "When somebody's
hooking your kid and they're not calling it, I have to admit, it's
hard not to."
Richard McGuigan, who is 39 and whose family has owned Superior
for 30 years, is aware that to many outside observers, the world of
children's sports is out of control.
What most people hear, he said, are the stories of unhealthy,
overheated competition; the over-scheduling of young children to the
point of exhaustion; an increase in the number of stress injuries in
children that doctors say come from overtraining; the enormous
commitment of both money and time that a serious interest in sports
requires; and of course, parents who habitually run amok, the most
egregious case being the well-publicized fight between two parents
at a Massachusetts hockey game in July 2000, in which one father
pummeled another to death.
"Those things go on, I won't lie to you," said Mr. McGuigan, an
easygoing, trim and gracefully athletic man with a quick, mischievous
smile, graying hair and a few lines of weariness around his mirthful
eyes. He played travel hockey himself as a boy, still plays
recreationally on an adult team, and has four athletic children of his
own.
He's genuinely convinced of the good a child's devotion to sports can
achieve, and there's no question that Superior Ice Rink is, on the
whole, a happy, energetic place. The travel teams, he said, are the
most competitive, and produce the most intensity and stress. That is
why, he said, he so much prefers the house rec leagues, in which
everyone who tries out makes a team and gets to play.
But he also knows that is not the whole story. Indeed, Superior does
not have a travel team of 12-year-olds this season because factions of
parents were so at odds that Mr. McGuigan told them all to go play
elsewhere.
"They got so mad at each other that half the group was going to leave
if the other half was staying," Mr. McGuigan said. "And it just got to
be too much trouble for me to make it worthwhile."
"It's the adults - the parents, the coaches - that have to get through
their heads that a lot of other life skills can be taught in and
around a sport," he said. "Things like conflict resolution. And they
really can teach their kids the proper way to deal with things that
aren't fair, that it isn't storming out of a rink or screaming at a
ref. Unfortunately there's a percentage that doesn't understand that."
Unlike some rink operators, who simply lease ice time to the teams and
leagues that play on their ice, Mr. McGuigan is also the operator of
the recreation leagues and travel teams at Superior. It is something
that his father, who used to run the rink and the travel teams, told
him not to do; it takes too much time. It brings too much aggravation.
Mr. McGuigan coaches the Mites himself, and helps out with the
11-year-old Peewees. He runs tryouts, schedules games and hires and
supervises the rest of the coaches.
"Finding qualified guys who have the hockey knowledge, the time and
personality to teach kids and to deal with the parental aspect -
patience, I guess, would be the best word, is really hard," he
said. He also pays the bills, between $900,000 and $1 million
annually, about 25 percent of which goes for electricity to keep the
ice frozen.
"Nobody is getting rich running ice rinks," he said, adding that the
travel teams are a separate, nonprofit enterprise and that he takes no
extra salary for the work he puts into it. When a coach is yelling too
much, when parents become too demanding, when referees are incompetent
or when they are abused by spectators, it is Mr. McGuigan's job to
handle it.
After a game not too long ago, he said, he witnessed a parent smacking
his 12-year-old son across the helmet, berating him for his
performance. In view of other people, children and parents,
Mr. McGuigan told the man that if he ever did that at Superior again,
he would no longer be welcome. The man, obviously chagrined, later
apologized.
"I think I embarrassed him, and I thought about that and decided it
was O.K. because he had embarrassed his kid," Mr. McGuigan
said. "Ninety percent of what goes on here is good, and 10 percent is
bad, and sometimes I handle that 10 percent well and sometimes I
don't."
Within the New York district, Superior is classified as a Tier 1
facility (out of three tiers), which means its travel teams, known
individually and collectively as the Long Island Royals, play at the
top level of competition. For that reason it tends to attract more
serious players (and parents), who come from as far away as Rockland
and Westchester Counties. (In addition to twice-weekly evening
practices, one 11-year-old from Suffern, N.Y., wakes up at 4 a.m. at
least once a week for an hour-and-a-half drive to a 6 a.m. clinic at
Superior. His father, a retired police officer, takes him.)
The Royals play other Tier 1 programs in two leagues, one of which
takes them to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Washington,
D.C. With so much effort put in, a lot of parents feel as though there
should be a tangible payoff, Mr. McGuigan said.
"Especially some of the nuttier ones who think they're in this to get
a college scholarship or get their kid into the N.H.L.," he said. "But
what I tell them is if through this whole period of time the kid finds
his identity, if it keeps him out of trouble and dedicated to
something and maybe helps him get into a college a notch better than
he would have otherwise - which is a realistic goal - the investment
in time and money was worth it."
There's another reason it's all worth it, which was illustrated after
Mites practice. In the lobby, their mothers help them undress,
unlacing skates with one hand and rocking infant strollers with the
other. Teen-agers order fries at the snack bar and horse around in the
pro shop. The fathers, just home from work, rehash games with their
children.
Chris Magee, a pixieish 8-year-old, is asked about his team's two
previous games. They lost the first, 12-1. They won the second, 15-0.
How do you feel after you lose, he is asked.
"Mad," he says.
For how long?
"Until I get changed," he says.
And how do you feel after you win
"Really, really happy," he says.
For how long?
"All day," he says.
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