On Frozen Blog

On Tuesday a Washington Post staffer emailed me the link to Jeff Nelson’s wonderful profile of the Wilson High School hockey program, which started and took root in recent years under Head Coach Paul McKenzie. McKenzie succumbed to pneumonia last year, and in his absence the Wilson program is struggling to remain solvent and intact. If you haven’t read the piece, you really should. From the moment I finished it late Tuesday afternoon it got inside me and banged around inside my head and heart. At first I couldn’t quite figure out why — I had no personal connection with McKenzie or his players, none either with the school.

Agitated but unsure exactly why, but sure I’d been made aware of a story necessitating action, I emailed Ted Leonsis. At the time I had no idea that he was away at Sundance. In my email I said, “It’s the District’s first public high school hockey team. We can’t let it fail.” By “we” I meant Washingtonians.

One of the take-home points from Nelson’s profile is the uneven skating surface confronting many scholastic teams in the region — the District’s foremost among them. Wilson’s team stands as the only public school in the city playing hockey, and it’s barely surviving. Scholastic hockey in these parts is dominated by private schools mostly in Maryland — DeMatha, Mount St. Joe’s, Good Counsel — and one in the District, Gonzaga. There are as well relatively strong public high school teams in Montgomery and Howard Counties. Most Virginia schools have cash-strapped athletic budgets, and there’s a shortage of ice sheets there as well. Many schools in the state don’t have hockey programs at all.

But it’s the District that is the region’s true wasteland for youth hockey. In the District facilities offering a sheet of ice, boards, and goals number one: Ft. Dupont, which of course is Wilson High’s home. For hockey to take root in the city’s youths a not-so-small miracle has to occur. Paul McKenzie was that miracle.

From Tuesday’s Post:

“On the Thursday after his death, McKenzie’s hockey team took the ice for its final regular season game. The team that had lost 10 of its previous 13 games dedicated its final regular season contest to his memory and won, 6-0.

A few days later, the players were among more than 400 people to pack Cleveland Park Congregational Church for McKenzie’s funeral. They wore their home jerseys and were mentioned in eulogies. On the family’s way out of the church, the boys formed two lines by the doors and made a ceremonial arch with their hockey sticks.

Philip Castiel, the team captain, gave a speech during a service afterward: “During [the past four years], over 30 young high school hockey players, both boys and girls, were given a gift by Coach. That gift is the love of the game of hockey.”

In my email to Leonsis I told him that this story was a call to action for the region’s hockey lovers — most particularly, the team’s bloggers. Often we rally around a hot story and offer our respective takes in alternating hues of humor, wry reflection, and cleverness, but in this instance, my gut told me that we needed to rally around a cause. I also knew that if we in the blogging community were to try and do something of substance for Wilson’s program, we’d need the Caps’ help.

I sent my email and ran out to grab some dinner. I was home less than 30 minutes later and had waiting for me his reply: “We’re on it,” the owner wrote. Approximately 50 seconds later, I had email from Kurt Kehl, who heads up the Caps’ communications team. “Just let me know what I can do to help,” he wrote.

Next I sent a note to the bloggers, letting them know that if we’d coalesce around this cause we’d have extraordinary support from the Caps.

Late Tuesday night I couldn’t fall asleep, as I still had this sad story in my thoughts and ideas for responding distracting me. In my restlessness some time after midnight I realized my commonality with these kids from Wilson, and therein the source of my anxiety: I was more than double their age, a working stiff, a suburbanite, but like them I called Washington my home, and like them I’d fallen in love with hockey, against the odds, here. Back in my youth someone here had ignited hockey’s passion within me. Now, though, the flame at Wilson was flickering. Far from involving nameless, faceless youths across a city line, this story was personal for me.

On Wednesday the team’s treasurer, Tim Aluise, reached out to us here. He told me that Wilson’s long-term goals are to expand Coach McKenzie’s vision by reaching out to less economically advantaged kids and minorities in Washington. “We want to to foster skills and a love of hockey,” he said. “Most city kids do not have this opportunity. We hope to fill the void.

“To do this, we envision needing ice time, which is the most expensive line item in our proposed budget — to introduce the sport at the middle school level so kids in the city are prepared for playing high school hockey.”

Ft. Dupont, Aluise told me, is expected to expand to two sheets of ice, and when that happens, “we hope to draw players from across the city to fill out the future team and develop a full-fledged program. Money is an issue to get the ice time — we are desperate for ice time at any local rink.

“It is more costly to have idle teenagers,” he added.

Also on Wednesday I was sharing my I-wanna-help thoughts with the Post’s Dan Steinberg, who reacted by giving the idea a real big primary assist on his blog. I suspect that going forward Dan and his colleagues at the paper will help even more. They brought us this remarkable story, after all.

There are an innumerable number of worthy causes ever clamoring for our attention. But individually, I think, we respond to those that find a way of reaching us and disrupting us out of our comfort zones. That’s where I am with this Wilson hockey team. I don’t know yet what we’ll do on their behalf, but I’m excited that mere hours into my concern I had to send about three email messages to marshal the support of Washington’s hockey establishment. I hope you’ll join us in the endeavor.