Hockey and small-town Canada

If you get fired up over snipes and cellys, are delighted by dirty dangles, or revel in the beauty of going bardownski, there’s a good chance that you’re from small town Canada.

If you’re ferda all the way and know that only a pigeon would crease crank his own tendy in warmies, there’s a good chance that you’re from small town Canada.

And if you’re wise enough to understand that rocking flame tape is dust because none of the kids who are going to the show rock flame tape . . . well, there’s a good chance that you’re from small town Canada.

If this is all sounding a bit ridiculous or impenetrable, then you’re probably not a hockey fan. But if you at least vaguely recognize the veritable yard sale of hockey slang above, there’s a good chance you’re from small town Canada.

While the game’s prominence and centrality have diminished amidst a flourishing of other cultural options and increasing diversity in Canada’s urban centres, hockey still looms disproportionately large in the nation’s small rural towns as an arena of social and cultural connection. The locus for this, of course, literally is the town’s arena facility and the frenzy of minor hockey programming that inhabits it all winter.

The beating heart

To be a hockey parent in a small Canadian town is to embark on a winter-long tour of other small towns in the region and sometimes further afield for tournaments. Throughout this odyssey, one thing becomes remarkably clear: that the local arena (or “barn” in hockey parlance) is the beating heart of these small rural communities, the place where – at least during the winter – people are most likely to meet their neighbours, experience community, and establish a sense of collective identity and local pride.

Pretty much every day between October and April the small-town rink is a buzzing hive of activity. Packs of kids in Bauer rinksuits with the local club’s logo drift around before their ice time, watching the current game wind down or taking shots against one of the back walls to warm up. Younger brothers and sisters find their friends and tear around before slinking back to their parents to beg for candy or fries. Adults wearing jackets, hoodies and toques with the local club logo mingle on their way to the stands, catching up on the prospects for tonight’s game or saying “hi” to friends whose kids have just finished the previous tilt. All these barns have pictures or banners paying tribute to local kids who made it to the National Hockey League (“the show”), and many still have portraits of the queen.

Our town’s barn has an extra dose of character, which is to say that it’s 51 years old and is kind of falling apart. But when the municipality proposed to tear it down a few years ago, the townspeople launched into one of the most unified and well-organized campaigns of grassroots political action that I’ve ever seen. Lawn signs supporting the arena popped up everywhere, letters were written, petitions signed, and phone-call campaigns bombarded local politicians with requests to save the rink. Eventually the municipality backed down, and – despite not really having the money for it – have found ways to keep the rink going until a new one can be built (they are currently exploring options for a public/private partnership).

Cheering for the same team

While hockey is still played in greater numbers in big Canadian cities, the experience and culture surrounding the urban game is more diffuse. The ratio of people who care about the game and actively participate in its culture has declined relative to those who don’t, which is to say that hockey no longer achieves the critical mass of interest and involvement required to make it a cultural juggernaut in Canada’s urban centres. The small-town experience of hockey, on the other hand, is typically concentrated into one or two rinks and one club. Literally everyone in town cheers for the same team.

Possibly because of this, hockey continues to command a disproportionate share of interest, involvement, time and attention in small-town Canada. For instance, my small town of approximately 2,600 people (as of the 2021 census) entered five teams from our minor hockey club at the U13 division level in which one of my sons plays, and this team alone consistently draws crowds of more than 200 people for home games. It isn’t quite this simple, but in sheer numbers that’s a little more than seven percent of the town consistently coming out to watch one of five teams of 12-year-olds! Project these numbers out for the 36 teams in total iced by our minor hockey club this year and you get a sense of what hockey means to our town.

The number of people in attendance at many of these minor hockey league games is significantly more than the number of people who congregate at our local Christian Reformed Church church most Sunday mornings, which, coincidentally, is right across the road from the arena. Without drawing any moral, existential or soteriological equivalence between these two institutions, it’s worth noting that the hockey club now operates community BBQs and charitable giving initiatives just like the church. I don’t think that there needs to be any serious antagonism between church and skate (so to speak), but the local arena seems to have taken over many roles and functions previously served by the local church. Those of us who congregate in both the church pews and arena benches need to legitimately ask ourselves if the latter is a form of idolatry. But the more interesting question is what hockey seems to be giving many people that church is not.