Youth hockey's remarkable rise in the Triangle
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The Triangle has long been a hotbed for youth sports, but these days it's not just soccer fields and basketball gyms filling up with kids on Saturday mornings.
- Nearly 30 years after the Carolina Hurricanes moved to North Carolina, more children than ever are opting for the ice.
Why it matters: Since 1990, the number of people playing hockey in the Southeast has grown seven times faster than the country as a whole, according to USA Hockey data.
- Most of those players are children, and the growth coincides with a period where the NHL expanded to several southern cities — including Raleigh — and people began trading northern states for the Sun Belt in growing numbers.
State of play: The Triangle is now home to a growing competitive youth hockey culture, featuring teams like the Junior Hurricanes, North Carolina Golden Bears and Raptors Hockey Club.
- Raleigh has produced stars like Mary Derrenbacher, a 17-year-old now attending an elite prep school in Minnesota. Last year, Mary won a gold medal playing for the U.S. on its under-18 team. She just committed to play for Wisconsin when she starts college next year.
- And Raleigh native Skyler Brind'Amour — son of Hurricanes head coach Rod Brind'Amour and a former Junior Hurricanes player — made his debut for the Canes last year.
Fun fact: There's even a Triangle High School Hockey League, run by students, with 12 Wake County schools fielding teams.
Zoom in: Shane Willis, a former Canes player managing youth hockey for the team, says the 2006 Stanley Cup win provided "an automatic boost of kids who want to play the sport."
- And the team's recent success has inspired a new generation of kids. Seven consecutive playoff appearances? Regular TV broadcasts? All of it "makes our job much easier," Willis says.
By the numbers: Willis says they push 650 new kids a summer into the sport.
- And the First Goal Program has subsidized equipment for more than 6,000 kids in the past decade.
What they're saying: Joe Ovies, co-host of the Ovies & Giglio sports podcast and a manager of his son's Junior Canes team, said he believes locally, it comes down to the success of the Hurricanes, as well as the area's growing population of transplants.
- "You have a combination of kids like mine, who you take to a hockey game, and they become obsessed with the idea of playing the sport," Ovies said of his 14-year-old son Jacob.
- "The other part of it," he added, "is the amount of transplants that are coming in. These are families with parents that grew up playing hockey, wanting their kids to play hockey."
Between the lines: While the sport is growing, however, there are still serious barriers to the youth game in the South.
- The game is expensive to play. There's often a lot of competition for time on the Triangle's few rinks, raising costs for practice and games. And competitive tournaments are often held out of state, adding the cost of travel for elite players.
- "You're not getting in a car to drive somewhere, you're getting in airplanes," Willis emphasizes, saying that's why building out the local coaching and playing networks is so important.
The bottom line: Youth hockey is intertwined with the Hurricanes' growing fanbase.
- "When I was coming through, it was still, 'Oh, hockey in the South. Is it really gonna work?'" recalls Willis, a Canadian, of the late 1990s. "The South is fine with the sport of hockey."