Body checking in youth hockey: No right answers?

I must acknowledge that I have been a passionate hockey fan all my life. I love the skill on skates, the vision that good players demonstrate, their ability to think ahead, the artistry and yes, the power that players can exhibit in making moves while making a play or a good, clean hit.
However, like many others, I’ve grown increasingly concerned about the state of the game, including at the youth levels.

The issue of “body checking” at the youth levels has been hotly debated now for many years across Canada. Some believe allowing it at the so-called ‘rep levels’ (very competitive) is a good idea, because it gets players to learn how to “take a check”, and makes it safer for them in the long run.

Others suggest that it takes some of the the skill out of the game (because small players may be fearful), causes unnecessary injuries and actually pushes a lot of talented kids into other sports.

It’s a difficult issue.

When I was a kid fifty years ago “hitting” was barely part of the discussion. I learned to play the game on frozen ponds in the dead (cold) of winter in the small town where I lived. The game was fun and it was largely about skating, competing with friends and staying out on the ice until your feet were so frozen you couldn’t bear it any longer.

Things have changed dramatically, of course, and in many ways for the better, I suppose. Organized competitive hockey has pretty much ended that bygone era. That organized aspect brings many good things for kids and families, but it, not surprisingly, has eventually led to a host of other issues.

I read recently where a young Canadian player was injured in an NCAA college game. A big hit that he took caused a broken neck, and it took some time for the young man’s injuries to stabilize in the hospital afterwards. It was a very sad event, and horribly frightening for any hockey parent to contemplate.

I didn’t see the play so I can’t comment on whether it was a “dirty” hit or not. (The offending player was given a major and a misconduct penalty.) But the point, for me, is that we have reached a stage in hockey, even at the pro levels, where hitting has become too pervasive a part of the game. The NHL, all the way down to youth hockey, is trying, they say, to crack down on “head shots”, for example. This follows a similar focus on “hits from behind”.

But the culture of the sport is a concern. The macho sense that a player must be “tough”—and I acknowledge I like a good clean hit at the pro level— seems to be permeating the sport to a worrisome degree.

This is not entirely new, of course. The actions of the “Broad Street Bullies” (the Philadelphia Flyers in the 1970s), set the game back for years. Young players copied their brawling, fighting style.

But in this day and age it’s about not just fighting, but hitting.

That pressure to “hit hard”, from management, coaches and fans alike, combined with the ever-increasing speed in the game, conspires to make a bad cocktail. Throw in the hard, large equipment that players wear and is it any wonder we have concerns about serious injuries— including life-altering concussions—right across the board in the sport of hockey?

The only way this really gets solved is if certain aspects of the sport are somehow de-emphasized, and that would take a major shift in attitude.

And I don’t think that is forthcoming.

Big Promises, No Support

Over the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to work as an advisor to a number of top Major Junior hockey players. Not as an agent, which I’m not, but as a professional who assists young athletes in terms of their off-ice development: attitude, work ethic, goal-setting, task completion, becoming a better team player and developing the qualities that will help them become more professional in their hockey life—and better people off the ice.

The work is stimulating, challenging, rewarding —and sometimes distressing.

I’m not sure if it is ironic or prophetic that, some 30 years ago when I was a young fellow breaking into the broadcast field, I hosted a cable television program in the growing community of Mississauga, Ontario. This is when ‘local cable television’ was truly local community programming.

Weekly, I brought in various guests to discuss sports issues of the day. (As an aside, only 2 individuals ever asked to be paid to appear. One was a legendary writer, the late Dick Beddoes, and the other a successful Canadian Olympic “amateur” athlete. Everyone else appeared without a fee.)

On this particular evening in, I believe, the winter of 1977, I invited guests from Canadian University hockey (Tom Watt), Major Junior Hockey (Dave Draper), Junior B hockey and others to discuss the choices young hockey players faced. My question was: What is the better route to go—Junior hockey, or accepting a scholarship to play in college in the United States?

Keep in mind in those days, the prevailing “Canadian” attitude was still very much that hockey was our game, and that the Americans were well behind us. Junior hockey was seen as the best way, by far, to earn your way to the NHL.

Canadian university hockey was even less likely to see you end up in the pro ranks, but I knew that Tom Watt, the Head Coach of the University of Toronto Varsity Blues at the time, was a passionate hockey guy and would bring a thoughtful dimension to the program.

My interest in the subject was largely spurred by a growing awareness on my part that junior hockey was not always what it was cracked up to be.

This was based to a certain extent on a situation I became aware of in the early 1970’s, when I was attending the University of Toronto. A friend’s younger brother was a rising “star” in junior “A” hockey. He was playing for his hometown team in what was then the Ontario Hockey Association. Life was good for him. At least, it was for a short while.

It’s not hard to imagine a young man, playing a game he loves and is really good at, thinking he will play for his first junior team for his entire 3-4 year pre-professional career. He believes, naturally so, what adults tell him about his potential, his future and his importance to the team.

Suddenly, he was traded at the beginning of his second junior season, at the tender age of 17. Never having been away from home, with no agent or advisor or trusted mentor to guide him (and a family with no experience at all in such matters), his world was turned upside down overnight. He refused to report to the team he was traded to. He sat at home, afraid, confused.

Threatened with what was essentially league banishment by the powers that be, he eventually reported.

He was, in his estimation, treated terribly by his new club. Soon, his confidence was shattered—a particularly tough circumstance for a young goaltender. He was eventually traded again, and played out his junior days as a back-up goalie, an unhappy young man, disillusioned, downcast, hating the game that only two years ago he had loved.

He had no education to speak of, and the league had no interest in helping him out. He had put everything he had into hockey, and only hockey. He was told, and had believed, that it would be his future.

As it turned out, he was just another casualty of the junior hockey world.

Through the years, this troubled me a lot. I argued when I interviewed junior hockey folks in my various radio life incarnations that education was not being taken seriously enough for these young hockey players; that most didn’t make the NHL, that too many were essentially used and abused.

I was always assured things were getting better and better.

Today, I’m told that there are wonderful education packages for virtually all players who give up their opportunity to go to the U.S. on scholarship, to stay and play in what is nowadays called the Ontario Hockey League (or the Western junior or Quebec loops).

Unfortunately, other issues still exist, I’m afraid.

Too often, the young athletes I work with still face the reality that they are chattel; paid a nominal gratuity every week to subsist while they travel daily to games and practices. They can be traded at a moments notice (how being traded in mid-season—and usually mid-semester in high school—is beneficial to them is still a puzzle to me after all these years.)

They are basically playing in a professional, for-profit league, but not receiving any of the benefits—other than a select few who are drafted and may some day earn a very handsome income in professional hockey. Statistically, the vast majority of elite young players at age, say, 15, never make it to the pro ranks, and even fewer for any length of time.

The bigger issue, for me, though, is that these young players—yes, sometimes too coddled and very immature in some ways—are the victims of terrible communication methods still utilized by their coaches and team management.

The adults often act like children, it seems, and the young player is left confused, uncertain and, again, disillusioned.

They are not sure how they should approach their coach. They wonder, “if I speak with him, will I end up benched, or with a one-way ticket out of town….?”

Almost weekly in junior hockey, we see players leave their teams, go home to sit and await a trade they have requested, or sit and stew on the bench as they see their burgeoning careers spiral seemingly downward.

Thankfully, more than ever, these young athletes nowadays have the benefit of more education in most instances, and access to information and off-ice support that simply wasn’t available when some of these issues were first brought to my attention back in 1972, when I myself was a university student.

I’d like to think junior hockey has the interests of its young athletes at heart. Too often, I find it very hard to believe.

I would imagine many parents, and many current and former young players could share a story or two with me about how things went off the rails for them.