Column: Pondering Pond Hockey

“I think we have too many AAA, Showcase and elite camps for the kids today, and as a result, we are creating a bunch of robots. We need to make it fun for the kids and let them learn to love the game the way we did.” – Herb Brooks, coach of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team in “Pond Hockey: A Documentary Film”

Just over half a million kids play organized hockey in the United States, as I did – but trust me, they’re missing out.

We’re deep in the dead of winter. And for most of us, there’s not a lot to do, and not much to look forward to for the next couple months. But if you’re a hockey player – scratch that, if you’re a pond hockey player – this is the best time of year.

When I was growing up – not that long ago – we’d come home from school, slip our skates onto our sticks and throw the sticks over our shoulders like hobos carrying their knapsacks, then trudge through the apple orchard behind our neighborhood to a pond in the middle of the woods. We’d lace ‘em up and play until it was too dark to see, then put our boots back on and head home for dinner.

On weekends, we’d spend all day down there. Friends of mine who lived near Burns Park and Thurston Pond would come home, eat dinner with their skates on, then go back to the ice for more.

We got more ice time in a single day on those ponds than we got in weeks of indoor practices and games. And it was more fun, too. No try-outs, no scoreboards, no whistles, no drills, no lines, no benches, no coaches, no refs – in fact, no adults at all – and no nets. Just a pair of boots at each end.

I don’t recall once coming back from the pond upset that we’d lost. That’s because we played about a dozen games a day, and whenever one team lost too many, we’d just change teams. I also can’t recall much about the hundreds of indoor practices I endured as a kid, but I can remember those long, happy days on the pond like they were yesterday.

But when you drive by those very same ponds today, you won’t see any kids. They’re all packed in vans, being dragged to some tournament two hours away. And when they get back, they’ll be inside playing video games.

So when my old high school teammate, Pete Read, put together his third annual Michigan Pond Hockey Classic at Whitmore Lake last weekend – one of the nation’s biggest – it was no surprise that almost all of the 500-some players were over thirty.

Read laid out 15 rinks, separated only by snow banks. We played four-on-four, with no goalies or fancy nets – just a flat box of two-by-sixes. Everyone got dressed in one big tent, and sat on hay bales. A hockey locker room is one of the few places on earth where the smell can be improved by fresh hay. The guys getting ready to play could see their breath, while the guys coming back in could watch the steam coming off their pads as they stuffed them back into their bags.

My team, consisting of a bunch of former high school teammates, got our butts kicked in the first two games by margins like 21-14 – football scores. In our last two games, however, we staged heroic rallies to lose by a little less.

But we had a blast all weekend. Until our last game, that is, when the volunteer score keeper – god bless ‘im – decided to play full-time ref, and rule on every out-of-bounds play and every goal. Before we realized what we were doing, we started sniping and hacking at each other, and the once friendly match quickly devolved into – well, a little league hockey game. Once we told the would-be ref we could handle the game ourselves, we got back to playing pond hockey – and that’s what we love.

One of my friends brought his son along, but he couldn’t play with us because his travel team had a game later that day.

Poor kid doesn’t know what he’s missing.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami of Ohio, Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.