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Bangor Metro >  November 2006 >  Put 'Em on Ice

Photo of the UMaine Black Bears at Alfond Arena by Michael York

It’s that time of year again—the season for sharp skates slicing across slick surfaces, slapshots and poke checks and scrambles for loose pucks in the corners. For the hundreds of hockey players, coaches, parents, and fans in eastern Maine, the cold can’t come soon enough.

The University of Maine Black Bears will play before sold-out houses in pursuit of their third national championship. High school teams will challenge more established programs in the southern part of the state. Youth hockey squads will travel to tournaments in neighboring states and Canada. Over-the-hill adults will take to the ice in pursuit of fun and exercise, and preschoolers will lace up their first pairs of skates. And who knows? Maybe one of those youngsters suiting up for the first time will one day play in the National Hockey League. It’s not as farfetched as you might think. Hockey has come a long way in this corner of New England.

The sport of ice hockey is older than baseball. It originated at King’s College in Nova Scotia around 1800, when students adapted the Irish field game of hurling to a frozen pond on campus. The game spread gradually westward throughout Canada and into cold-weather climates in New England and the upper Midwest. By the early years of the 20th century, Harvard, Dartmouth, and the Universities of Massachusetts and New Hampshire had teams on the ice; Colby College joined them in 1922.

Ice hockey is a game tailor-made for collegians, with just the right mixture of intelligence, speed, and mayhem. And it seems made for Maine, too, where long winters and cold Arctic air converge to create an environment ripe for frozen, fast-paced entertainment. But hockey is a latecomer to the greater Bangor area. Thirty years ago, it was hard to find a pickup game on any of the region’s frozen ponds or outdoor skating rinks. None of the area high schools had teams. Surrounded by historical hockey hotspots, eastern Maine virtually ignored the sport until the Alfond Arena opened and the University of Maine’s first team took to the ice in November 1977.

At that point, “it was barren,” recalls Stu Haskell, former athletic director at the University of Maine, and later commissioner of Hockey East, the intercollegiate league in which the Black Bears play. Haskell was assistant athletic director under Harold “Westy” Westerman, whom he credits as the driving force in bringing hockey to UMaine. “I told him, ‘Westy, there’s no hockey in Maine. I don’t know where we’re going to get the fans.’”

According to Larry Mahoney, who has covered the sport for the Bangor Daily News for more than 30 years, the fan base was waiting inside what he calls “pockets of hockey.” Mahoney and his high school friends were among them, playing at an outdoor rink on 13th Street in Bangor near the present-day location of Sawyer Arena. “A few of us played, and there were some fathers in the area who supported us. We’d travel to Houlton and Lewiston—we called ourselves the Bangor High team, but it was strictly on an informal basis.

“We spent half our practice time shoveling off the ice,” Mahoney recalls. “Some nights it was below zero, and you’d spend several minutes getting the feeling back in your toes. There were other times we’d be playing during the day, the sun would come out and it would get up to about 40°, and you’d literally wear the blue line home.”

Then came a welcomed piece of architecture called Alfond Arena at the University of Maine. The Black Bears’ first game at Alfond on November 18, 1977—a 7–5 victory over Acadia College of Wolfville, Nova Scotia—not only marked the beginning of a new era at the University of Maine; it brought an entire sport in from the cold.

“Surprisingly, a large number of people came out,” Haskell says. “Before long, season tickets became hard to get.” Within a few years, hockey games at the Alfond were easily the most popular sporting events on campus, and the only ones showing a profit. A report issued by Haskell in January 1985—in the midst of a losing season—revealed that the varsity hockey team generated 54.9% of all sports revenues at the university. And that was eight years before the first of the team’s two national championships.

The revenue came, and still comes, from healthy ticket prices times high attendance. The Alfond currently seats 5,600 for hockey, and the average attendance, according to UMaine athletic development director Joe Roberts, is around 5,500. Single-game tickets are $23 for games against Boston College, Boston University, and the University of New Hampshire, and $20 for other games. A season ticket costs $306.

Stu Haskell explains UMaine hockey’s long-term ability to attract a paying crowd. “Number one, it’s a great sport, especially at the college level, where there’s a lot of offense, a lot of shooting,” he says. “Number two, the coaches, Jack Semler and Shawn Walsh after him, were able to recruit some really good players. And number three, being in Division 1, you’re playing the best teams in the country.”

In the winter of 1992–’93, there was no better college men’s hockey team than the one that called Alfond Arena home. That season, the Black Bears compiled an astonishing record of 42 wins, one loss, and two ties, capped by a 5–4 victory over Lake Superior State College that brought the university its first national championship in any sport. Six years later, the Black Bears defeated arch-rival New Hampshire 3–2 in overtime to capture a second national crown. The program has remained at or near the pinnacle of American college hockey ever since.

Alfond Arena, made possible through a major gift from Waterville philanthropist Harold Alfond, changed the face of UMaine athletics. But the puck did not stop at the college level. The arena also provided a venue for the area’s nascent high school and youth hockey programs. Bangor, Brewer, and Old Town began varsity hockey in 1983. Stearns and Orono followed a year later, and Foxcroft Academy launched a team in 1985.

The sport’s surging popularity prompted efforts to build additional facilities in the area. The Penobscot Indians, using money from the Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, built the Sockalexis Ice Arena, named after baseball player Louis Sockalexis, on their reservation near Old Town. Former Boston Bruins star Wayne Cashman dropped the first puck at a dedication ceremony on November 25, 1984.

Unfortunately, the arena soon ran into financial difficulties, and after several years of struggle, the Penobscots pulled the plug on hockey in 1993. Today the building is the home of Penobscot High Stakes Bingo.

“A hockey rink is a tough thing to make money on,” says Doug Damon, who, together with Bangor pediatrician Angela Gilladoga and entrepreneur Tom Sawyer, led the drive to build Sawyer Arena near the site of the old 13th Street outdoor rink. Unlike the Sockalexis Ice Arena, the hockey programs at Sawyer Arena are still going strong.

Damon, who grew up in Washington County “playing pond hockey in the gravel pits,” is a former president of Bangor Youth Hockey, coached the hockey team at John Bapst, and is the father of Derek Damon, a star player at the University of Maine who recently signed a tryout contract with the Florida Panthers of the NHL. Derek’s success, his father believes, “really broke the glass ceiling for players from around here.” For a long time, he says, “there was this perception that you had to be from Europe or western Canada to play big-time college hockey. But he’s a kid from Bangor, Maine, who grew up rooting for the Black Bears and wanting to play for them.”

Bangor’s Sawyer Arena is now the primary venue for Bangor Youth Hockey, and the home rink for teams from Bangor High School, John Bapst, and Foxcroft Academy; it’s the place where Derek Damon and countless others first sharpened their skills. “We built it one wall at a time,” his father says. “We put up the roof and the north wall first, because that’s where the wind comes from in the winter.” The building was fully enclosed in 1991, and has undergone several upgrades since.
“Sawyer Arena has the reputation for having some of the best ice in the state,” says current Bangor Youth Hockey president Rich Powell. “It’s a hard, fast surface. Shawn Walsh liked to bring his teams there to practice, because of the ice.”

A professor of political science at the University of Maine, Powell played his youth hockey in the Detroit area. “If you look at the places in the United States where youth hockey is the biggest, it’s where, traditionally, there’s been a strong pro or
college presence.”

Yet two of the region’s newest hockey venues defy that tradition. Due to its proximity to the Canadian border and television exposure to “Hockey Night in Canada,” Houlton has had a thriving youth hockey program for decades. “Our youth teams have played primarily in the Canadian leagues,” says Joel Trickey, coach of the combined hockey team from Houlton and Hodgdon High Schools. “We traveled through a pretty good little chunk of New Brunswick.” Yet the construction of a new indoor arena in 2001 (see sidebar) has brought ice hockey to a whole new level.

Likewise, though miles from any college or pro teams, the Midcoast Recreation Center in Rockport, also built in 2001, has spurred the creation of both youth and adult leagues. Camden-Rockport High School now has an ice hockey team which competes on the junior varsity level at the center. A second JV team called the Midcoast Ice Cats, made up of students from Medomak, Rockland, Belfast, Georges Valley, and Lincoln Academy, also uses the Rockport arena.

The interest in ice hockey has also flooded across gender lines. Many of the area’s high school teams are now co-ed, and an increasing number of girls participate in youth hockey, on either all-girl or co-ed teams. “Girls’ hockey is the fastest-growing segment of youth hockey,” Powell says, “not only in Maine, but throughout the United States.”

The University of Maine launched a women’s team back in 1997. But high school girls wishing to play hockey still usually have to compete directly with the boys—often successfully. Kelly Thorne, daughter of ESPN sportscaster Gary Thorne, played ice hockey for Old Town in the 1980s. And Kim Meagher, whom former John Bapst hockey coach Doug Damon calls “one of the smartest players I ever coached,” is now playing for the UMaine women’s team.
 
Hockey in eastern Maine may never achieve the widespread popularity of basketball, in which even the smallest schools have teams. “It’s an expensive sport, and we’re a poor state,” Mahoney says. Teams in Millinocket and Dover-Foxcroft must practice on outdoor ice and travel great distances, even for home games. Ice time can cost up to $200 per hour. And skates, pads, and equipment aren’t cheap.

Building an indoor facility for ice hockey is an expensive proposition. “It’s a three to four million dollar venture just to open the doors,” says Chris Bigelow, general manager of the Midcoast Recreation Center in Rockport. “It requires a critical mass of population in the area to be served.”

Refrigeration and the dasher boards that encircle the skating surface can run up to $700,000, Bigelow says. Throw in an additional $30,000 for a dehumidification unit, and $80,000 for a resurfacer (popularly called a Zamboni, which, like Xerox, is a trademarked company name and not a generic term), and you begin to appreciate the challenges faced by hockey enthusiasts in small, geographically isolated communities that make up most of Maine.

Still, the ongoing success of youth hockey in even remote areas testifies to continued interest in the sport. Numbers swelled in the 1990s and have remained fairly steady since, according to Powell. Perhaps the most important thing undergirding the sport’s popularity is not the ice, but the devoted cadre of “hockey moms and dads” who outfit their kids, cart them to camps, practices, and tournaments, shiver through games, and have mixed feelings about the onset
of spring.

“The thing parents like about hockey,” Damon says, “is that everybody gets to play. It’s not like other sports, where the top players get the bulk of the playing time. And it’s a natural for kids, because they get to go out and roughhouse. We have a saying: Kids on ice don’t get into hot water.”