{"id":5640,"date":"2020-02-19T10:46:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T10:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/2020\/02\/19\/how-did-youth-hockey-become-so-expensive\/"},"modified":"2020-02-19T10:46:00","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T10:46:00","slug":"how-did-youth-hockey-become-so-expensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/how-did-youth-hockey-become-so-expensive\/","title":{"rendered":"How Did Youth Hockey Become So Expensive?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Original story posted ici<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The City of Toronto, like any large government, owns a massive variety of facilities, buildings, and properties. Many are essential. Millions of Torontonians would notice awfully quickly if the city\u2019s water-pumping stations were to suddenly vanish, for instance. But some exist to improve the quality of life, not simply to sustain life itself. In Toronto, that includes $1.2 billion worth of recreational assets. It\u2019s a huge portfolio and includes everything from city parks to large community-centre complexes. Managing these assets, and keeping them all in a state of good repair, is a constant challenge (one Toronto is currently unable to meet; $160 million in needed repairs are unfunded). In 2017, the city prepared a forward-looking report that forecast the city\u2019s needs out to the late 2030s and recommended how city resources should be invested. This report was followed last fall by another, focused on implementation.<\/p>\n

And it drew the public\u2019s attention because it came to a conclusion many found startling: Toronto has too many ice rinks.<\/p>\n

Canada\u2019s largest city has too many places to play hockey? The reports tell a fuller, more complicated story. Many of Toronto\u2019s rinks are in aging, obsolete facilities with single non-regulation ice surfaces, and the city plans to consolidate some of them into modern multi-use recreational hubs, each with multiple regulation-sized ice pads. Toronto feels that it can provide comparable service with fewer, newer rinks; it will operate more seasonal skating trails and outdoor rinks during the winter months. The 2019 report also notes that the city has a large private-sector supply of ice rinks and that much of the city\u2019s hockey life has migrated there.<\/p>\n

Still, there is another story below the surface. Participation in hockey is declining in Canada. Toronto\u2019s long-term facilities plan is simply adjusting to meet this declining demand.<\/p>\n

Sean Fitz-Gerald is a journalist and author. He\u2019s currently the senior national writer for\u00a0The Athletic, a sports-journalism enterprise. (He\u2019s also a friend; we worked together at the\u00a0National Post\u00a0for years.) His book\u00a0Before the Lights Go Out: A Season Inside a Game on the Brink, was published in the fall. It\u2019s partly the story of a tough season for the Peterborough Petes, a junior team in the Ontario Hockey League. But it\u2019s also a broader look at the state of the game \u2014 a game that\u2019s rapidly contracting, which is why Toronto has concluded it has too much indoor ice.<\/p>\n

In a recent interview, I told Fitz-Gerald that, early in his book, he perfectly describes the sense of shock I felt when I learned that hockey is struggling. Fitz-Gerald wrote that the hockey community in Canada is akin to a walled city. Inside the walls, it\u2019s business as usual. Hockey is thriving. It\u2019s the hub of community life. Parents spend a ton of their waking hours at rinks (Fitz-Gerald and I are both fathers of young sons who have fallen completely in love with the game). Lifelong friendships are formed among both players and their families.<\/p>\n

But outside the walls, as the number of Canadians actually participating in hockey stagnates or declines, the very concept of Canadian recreation is evolving. Although Toronto is set to grow by 500,000 people between now and 2041, it will need fewer rinks. It will need a lot more places to play soccer, basketball, and cricket.<\/p>\n

I decided to ask Fitz-Gerald the big question first: What the hell happened? How did we find ourselves here?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe core of this, the start, is the professionalization of youth hockey,\u201d he explained. \u201cThat has driven up the cost, which raises barriers to entry for new players. Any level above, say, house league, where you play every Saturday morning, an hour on the ice \u2014 four or five hours a month \u2014 and you start drinking from a firehose. You can be on the ice multiple hours each week. You can play for more than one team. You can play in more than one league, all year round. You can have skills-development coaches working with the kids. Our son is nine years old and plays at a competitive level. Wednesday is our skills-development practice day. And we have two paid development coaches. These aren\u2019t volunteers \u2014 they\u2019re paid. On top of that, there\u2019s hockey camps, and now new things like a skating treadmill. That\u2019s where a child goes and works with a professional skating coach in a controlled environment to study the nuances of their skating stride. That\u2019s $45 to $50 an hour.\u201d<\/p>\n

He laughed. \u201cIt\u2019s not news that there\u2019s a big startup capital cost when your kid joins hockey. You need to register them in a league and get them a full set of equipment. That\u2019s not new. But this stuff is new. And there\u2019s also the soft costs. Maybe you can afford all this. The fees, the skates, the sticks, the coaches. But what about the soft costs? Do you want to spend hours of your life in rinks or stuck in traffic between rinks? Do you have the flexibility to take a day off work for a tournament? Do you have a car, because there\u2019s no way you\u2019re riding transit with a hockey bag 250 times a year? Are you willing to give up every weekend and miss out on other stuff, like visiting grandma and grandpa?\u201d<\/p>\n

Fitz-Gerald paused here to make a key point. This kind of commitment isn\u2019t unique to hockey. Youth sports, particularly at a competitive level, are a huge time suck and can be hideously expensive. Dancing, swimming, tennis \u2014 all can be as consuming. But, he said, \u201cWe only put one of these sports on the\u00a0back of our money.\u201d What makes hockey unique isn\u2019t the costs, hard or soft \u2014 it\u2019s the place it holds (held?) in our national consciousness.<\/p>\n

But the idealized version of hockey \u2014 happy kids passing a puck back and forth on a frozen snow-dusted pond \u2014 isn\u2019t remotely like how Canadian children are experiencing the game today. \u201cIt\u2019s regimented,\u201d Fitz-Gerald declared. \u201cIt\u2019s disciplined. It\u2019s expensive. And it\u2019s not fun anymore. Kids are dropping out faster than they\u2019re signing up.\u201d The stats back this up \u2014 even as girls\u2019 hockey has grown, overall youth participation in hockey is down by roughly half over the last generation. \u201cWe\u2019re making it too expensive to join and not enough fun to stay in if you do,\u201d Fitz-Gerald lamented, noting that, even in wealthy areas, hockey participation is stagnant or dropping.<\/p>\n

\u201cYouth sports overall are facing a challenge,\u201d he said. \u201cKids aren\u2019t playing any sport at the rates they once did. But for those who are going to play a sport, going to join a league, hockey has more competition. There\u2019s more options, and it\u2019s easier to join and stick with many of the other ones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another issue that looms large in this discussion is the demographic change underway in Canada. Many Canadians were either born in other countries or are the children of new Canadians. Not all that long ago, Fitz-Gerald says, the immigrant experience often meant a hard break from your old habits and customs. But with the ubiquity of instantaneous global communications, one link back to the old country that was once hard to maintain \u2014 sports \u2014 is enduring among new Canadian communities. They can follow their (ex-) hometown soccer team from thousands of kilometres away and pass that passion on to the next generation, while paying little heed to local sports. He recounted one anecdote, the story of a woman he got to know while writing his book. She is an immigrant, married to a small-town Ontario boy who grew up loving hockey. Their children now play, too, but she can still watch the nightly news from her home country online.<\/p>\n

\u201cImagine you\u2019re a new Canadian,\u201d Fitz-Gerald said, using this woman as a hypothetical example. \u201cYou\u2019ve moved from Budapest to Norwood, Ontario. You can still watch the nightly news in Hungarian, but you want to learn more about Canada. So you check out hockey, the local pastime. And the images are of the famous \u2018Bobby Clark smile\u2019 \u2014 young men with all their teeth knocked out. That\u2019s a celebrated part of Canadiana. But can you blame someone for looking at that and thinking, \u2018Jesus Christ, how many sets of teeth are my kids going to grow? No thanks.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is grace and beauty in hockey,\u201d Fitz-Gerald continued, \u201cbut the brand of hockey in Canada is stuck in the 1970s \u2014 it\u2019s a tough sport for tough men. Don Cherry kept \u2018the code\u2019 for hockey for generations, and that code didn\u2019t speak to a lot of people. When he talked about good Canadian boys, a lot of people knew who he wasn\u2019t talking about. And they never signed their kids up for hockey.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Original story posted here. The City of Toronto, like any large government, owns a massive variety of facilities, buildings, and properties. Many are essential. Millions of Torontonians would notice awfully quickly if the city\u2019s water-pumping stations were to suddenly vanish, for instance. But some exist to improve the quality of life, not simply to sustain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"segment":[],"class_list":["post-5640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5640"},{"taxonomy":"segment","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iplayhockey.ca\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/segment?post=5640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}