House League Hockey Keeps Costs and Time Commitments Down While Raising the Fun Factor

By Harry Thompson

As Tom Farrey crisscrosses the country talking about the good, the bad and the ugly of youth sports in America, he often holds up USA Hockey as the gold standard of what can happen when a national organization and grassroots volunteers work together.

“Other sports need an example of an NGB [national governing body] and people at the community level who are embracing reforms that make the sport a better experience for kids,” the executive director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society program told a packed house at USA Hockey’s Annual Congress.

In the next breath, Farrey challenged those in the room to think about the next stage of the game’s growth and development. And the answer he proposed was a return to the game’s roots by bringing the hockey experience closer to home with a renewed emphasis on creating and supporting house league programs.

Farrey called house leagues a “treasured American institution” that many have forgotten due to a common misconception in all youth sports that equates opportunity to money paid and miles traveled even at a young age.

“As a parent, it could be tough because you don’t want to deny your child opportunities,” Farrey said. “But we have to think about what we really want sports to do for our children.”

An ardent supporter of USA Hockey’s American Development Model, Farrey said that starts with finding out what’s important to a kid.

“If you listen to kids, they would prefer to play with classmates in an experience where fun is the priority,” he said in reference to studies conducted by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative. “Certainly, at the 12-and-under level, kids need that social experience, and house leagues are great at fostering that.”

These ideals have not gone unnoticed at the NHL level where the league and its member clubs see the virtues of house league programs for keeping more kids in the game, which ultimately translates into more fans in the stands.

“You’re already seeing some of our teams create this path because these teams are realizing that this is their future, and these are their future fans,” said Matt Herr, the senior director of Youth Hockey and Industry Growth for the NHL.

“There’s nothing wrong with recreation hockey, but like anything else it has to be marketed and promoted the right way.”

Part of the process comes with changing the stigma that house league hockey somehow provides less of a true hockey experience or is only for those players who lack the skills and commitment to play the game.

According to the State of Play report put out by the Aspen Institute in 2016, “house leagues can be stigmatized as inferior, a casualty of tryout-based, early forming travel teams that cater to the “best” child athletes.”

“House leagues or rec leagues have gotten sort of ‘ghettoized’ over the years. We need to flip that around,” Farrey said. “We need to embrace those kids and those experiences as real hockey experiences, and then try to make them real quality experiences through better coaching and a more equitable allocation of ice time.”

Changing the perception starts with tearing down the walls between house and travel hockey that pigeonhole players into one side of the game or the other.

“If you want to play house league hockey, that doesn’t mean you should be out of the elite hockey system when you’re 12 or 13 years old,” said Herr, who grew up playing recreational hockey in Bear Mountain, New York, before earning a scholarship to play at the University of Michigan and then in the NHL.

Stemming that tide is where the partnership between all the stakeholders of the game comes into play. At the end of the day, the experiences gained at any level of the game have lasting benefits on players and parents alike.

“It’s the competition, it’s the camaraderie with your teammates, it’s the locker room experience. For 99 percent of people who play the game, they talk about the friendships they’ve made and the experiences they had,” Herr said.

“I compare recreational programs to adult leagues. Most of them aren’t traveling from Boston to California to play. You drive to the local rink, you throw your skates on and you play.”