- WEEKLY POLL
After 25 years, Lake board cuts hockey program
By J. Patrick Eaken
Press Staff Writer
news@presspublications.com
Hockey has been sustained for over 25 years at Lake despite becoming the smallest school of 79 in the state to compete on the ice with a varsity program.
On Wednesday, the Lake school board voted unanimously to cut three varsity sports, including hockey. The other two are tennis and bowling.
“We honestly should be proud that we are one of the few schools left that play hockey,” said hockey booster president Brenda Cox in protest to the decision. “We have brothers, cousins, neighbors who have played hockey at Lake.”
“We have students who have moved in through open enrollment who have played hockey at Lake. How many schools can say that people are actually moving in to play a sport when other students are leaving because of our sports?”
The school board cited its plan they call the “SLL Issue” — meaning that the district is reverting to only sanctioning “traditional sports” that other Suburban Lakes League schools participate in.
Board president Eric Hirzel noted that when he graduated from Lake, there were approximately 200 students in his class. The 2007 senior class graduated 113, just over half compared to when his Flyer teams competed in the Northern Lakes League.
Lake joined the SLL 10 years ago, but board members say it is not only lower numbers and the recent financial crises at Lake that led them to make their decision — safety concerns and Title IX, a federal law mandating equality in amateur sports, also play a part.
In hockey’s case, board members said safety hazards result from students being transported for practice via school buses late at night to Fremont because of a lack of available ice time.
“There is no ice surface within the township. There is no ice surface within 30 to 45 minutes of the school. We don’t have the advantage that the Sylvania District has of having ice in our backyard,” said a board member.
Board members reasoned the strain of night practices were causing fatigue on bus drivers, who had to return to transport students to school the next morning. For student-athletes, the board cited studies that have concluded lack of sleep results in poor classroom performance.
School custodian Gary Brown, a former hockey parent, spoke in support of keeping hockey.
“I’ve seen both sides of it — the talented hockey player and the not so talented,” said Brown. “I know how tough it is to find a hockey program to play in once you get to the high school age. The only reason I see to halt the program is if you have a numbers problem, then you simply mothball it, as other schools have, and then you bring it back.”
Last season, the Lake hockey team had 23 players, but the Flyers play in a division with other schools that have only varsity teams and no junior varsity teams.
School board members estimate they provide $11,000 annually to support the hockey program — most of it for transportation and ice time. Cox said the boosters would be willing pay a higher portion of the costs of the board would reconsider.
“We want to work with you to find what a solution is for hockey, but we don’t want to see all this history wasted,” said Cox. “A couple years ago we had the number one player (Kyle Brown) in the state, and he has decided to stay on to help coach.”
“Kyle is one of the reasons why we are bringing kids back into the program. We want to be out there and we want to be Lake. We don’t want to be a club team. We don’t want to have kids from other schools,” said Cox.
“They go out there and they don’t give 100 percent, they give 200 percent. They go out there and the odds are they are going to get beat, but they give all they have,” Cox continued.
Another parent who spoke out was Brandy Schultz, a Toledo Public Schools teacher who moved into the Lake District from East Toledo in part so her children could play hockey, she said. Her husband, Bob, is a Waite graduate and the current Owens College head baseball coach.
“We had the option of going to Clay — which also has hockey,” said Brenda. “I stand here without any bias for the board, and I think it’s a good fit and we made the right decision. I am concerned and I think this will be a detriment for your boys, to your school, and to your community that you have pre-determined this.”
Joe Weissenberger, a 1987 graduate who would have returned to Lake for another season as hockey coach, was distraught as the board voted not to renew the sport and at the same time terminated his position.
“I’m still blown away by the idea that you won’t have hockey next year even though we doubled our numbers,” said Weissenberger. “We weren’t good, but we are getting better. If you let me coach, we’ll continue to get better.
“If you pull hockey, you’ll have problems around this whole area,” Weissenberger promised. “Give us an opportunity — we’ll be competitive. Lake will fly again.”
Board members say they looked at a cost analysis and current trends in making their decision. They also noted that those present at the meeting only represent a small sampling of the district population and “the board has a responsibility to its taxpayers.”
“The most important thing we looked at is how does it affect academics, how does it affect safety,” said Hirzel. “Another thing we looked at is how competitive are we within the SLL framework.
“This motion does not say we must fund or eliminate,” continued Hirzel. “In order to cut something, there are a lot more channels we have to go through. What we are proposing is putting hockey on hold and seeing what the trends are.”
Forlorn Lake hockey program defies opposition
By Scott Calhoun
Special to The Press
sports@presspublications.com
The Lake Flyers prep hockey program is facing the toughest opponent ever in its four-decade history.
It’s not state champion St. John’s Jesuit, the Bowling Green Falcons, or even the Detroit Red Wings.
The Flyers are in the midst of fighting what currently appears to be a losing battle with its own community.
Lake owns one of the area’s oldest prep hockey programs, steeped in local high school sports lore as a fixture on the ice for 37 years since its inception by pioneering students in 1971.
But scholastic budget cuts in the district claimed the program as one of its victims following the 2006-07 school year. Now the program, which was playing in the third smallest district among the 77 hockey programs registered with the OHSAA, is in danger of going defunct, as it scratches and claws to survive under an unprecedented club status.
First year head coach Craig Horvath is committed to ensuring that extinction never marks the final chapter for the Flyers.
“There’s really no reason to take away sports,” said Horvath. “Myself and the other players’ parents are doing whatever we can to keep the team running.”
That battle, being fought by the players on the ice, and their parents off of it, will not be an easy one to win.
“I just had one (player’s) mom tell me that she’s disappointed in the lack of support from the school’s teachers, kids or anything,” Horvath said. “I can’t believe they don’t even announce over the PA when games are scheduled. It’s hard to understand why.”
Perhaps it didn’t help that Lake hadn’t had a winning season since 2004-05, when the Flyers last captured the NHC Blue Division crown behind former standout Kyle Brown.
Since then the Flyers went a dismal 1-17-1 in the league’s lowest division through last season, and didn’t win a game last winter.
Making matters even more difficult – the program must somehow regain varsity status if it intends to remain a member of the greater area’s only official high school hockey league.
Horvath said he, along with the other parents working hard and sacrificing a lot of time and money running and fundraising for the team, were told by NHC commissioner Dave Fielding that they have one, maybe two seasons to get the program back under school oversight. NHC rules dictate that its league members must be recognized varsity programs.
“I asked (the NHC) if we could run with this program, and take the kids it had and keep it going,” Horvath explained, “and they said they’d let us do it for a year, or two possibly.”
Essentially, the Flyers are flying solo on a limited supply of fuel.
“They’re not going to let a club team go for the next 10 years. They want us to show the school that we’re not a farce or a joke, and to try and regain the school’s support,” Horvath said.
The program has so far weathered the adversity with great courage. Parents such as Brenda and Tom Cox, Diane Maize and Shawn Barteck are part of the fundraising process to pay for ice time that runs $215 an hour, with the players being transported to games and practices in a car pooling system.
Tough Decision
School board members realize it was a tough decision to eliminate varsity hockey, but the idea was to keep Lake athletics in line with other SLL schools, which share about the same enrollment.
Board vice president “pro-temp” Tim Krugh said, “We passed a resolution last summer that we would only support SLL-sanctioned sports, and that effectively eliminated three sports — hockey, boys and girls tennis, and bowling.
“That stemmed from during the last levy campaign — that before the levy was passed, the board members represented to the public, the taxpayers, that we would take a look at all our extra-curricular programs to see if it was appropriate to keep them all. We had more extra-curricular programs than any school our size in the region, and we were one of the smallest public schools, other than Ottawa Hills, to have a hockey team. We had low participation in tennis and hockey, and the programs were not competitive.”
Krugh gave The Press the following reasons for eliminating the hockey program from the school district and budget —
• In trying to determine which programs/clubs etc to eliminate from the budget, in order to accommodate a continually decreasing school population (07 graduating class 124…used to be around 200 per graduating class)…the board decided that it would only recognize SLL-sanctioned sports. Because Lake and Eastwood are the only SLL schools with hockey programs, the SLL does not sanction or have any near future hope of running an SLL hockey league. Therefore, the board could no longer fund or support the hockey team that is/was sanctioned by the NHC, not the SLL, through representation in the OHSAA. For this same reason, that’s why tennis and bowling were cut, as well.
• The poor management of the program in recent times, while still under district budget and oversight/sponsorship, weighed heavily into the decision to cut the program. Making it a permanent move was the fact that, with the dwindling school population year by year, there is little hope for the numbers needed to field a full hockey squad (Lake’s current team doesn’t even field three full lines, the standard on any team at any level) to increase. The program has progressively failed to have a full roster of participants — another key requirement for the district and the taxpayers to feel it necessary to fund a program, and with the dwindling school population, there is little reason to believe the trend will shift in a positive direction.
“The lack of bodies, because the school population kept going lower and lower, meant that the hockey participation kept dropping off. They were actually asking kids to come try out that could hardly even skate, just to field a team the last two years. They didn’t have enough lines to play a proper hockey match,” said Krugh.
• The results have been very little success on the ice since 04-05 and decreasing participation.
• The board felt that it was big concern that the program, using bus travel funded by the district, had to travel 45 minutes to an hour to Fremont’s rink facility to practice multiple times in a week. Often these kids were getting to practice at 10 p.m. at night, and not getting home from practice on school nights as late as 12:30-1:30 a.m. Obviously liability and academic issues regarding this were part of the concern. There are only a handful of facilities available to the area’s teams — Ice House in Toledo, Tam O’ Shanter in Sylvania, the two rinks in Findlay, and the one at Fremont. None were close to Lake.
“We were concerned about safety, the lack of competitiveness and the cost. But the access to ice — we had to go to Fremont or Tam O’ Shanter, and either way you’re looking at 45 minutes to an hour each way, during bad driving conditions, typically, with really late night hours. It was an impact on academics. We were concerned because these kids were getting home a lot of times between 12 (AM) and 1-1:30 for hockey practices. The access to ice was very difficult, and that’s a primary factor,” Krugh said.
“The access, and the transportation and the late nights, and then you look at all the other factors, and those were all things that were involved with hockey being cut.”
• The program, in and of itself, was the third smallest of the 77 OHSSA-recognized hockey programs in Ohio. That is a direct example of the evidence that the district is simply not big enough to field, fund and support a strong hockey program on a consistent basis.
• Because of the decision by the board to recognize only SLL-sanctioned sports, even if the team’s parents can generate all the funding and management needed to maintain and operate the program without the district spending a dime on the expenses, it still fails to fall in line with the updated requirement of being an SLL-sanctioned sport. Therefore, the program is permanently on its own. The board has told the remaining constituents of the program that it is more than welcome to continue operating as a private club using “ Lake Flyers” as its team moniker. The downside for the program, is that it will not be able to regain varsity status because of a lack of SLL sanction, and will ultimately be removed from the NHC, unless the NHC
• Lake, despite its financial crisis in recent times, had more extra-curricular programs its size than any school in Northwest Ohio. Not a good combination. Certain programs had to be cut to fit the budget, even after the levy was passed. The reason there are only 77 varsity hockey programs in a hockey state like Ohio is because of the extreme cost of running one at full strength.
• Another reason the board and school district will not recognize the program as a varsity sport, even if funded and maintained separately by private entities, is that the same agreement was proposed back when Lake had cut the budget from all the extra-curriculars during the financial crisis, and while the attempt worked for awhile, eventually it became a strained situation, one reflected by the poor mismanagement of the team experienced last season.
“The cost of hockey was the highest of any extra-curricular activity we had at Lake,” Krugh said.
“To represent the taxpayers, we told them that we would look into the programs that we had, and make sure that the ones we kept would have good participation, and we would do what we could to make them as competitive as possible.
“We felt we had too many extra-curricular programs for the number of students to fully participate in all of them, and then we looked at what made sense. That’s when we arrived at the decision to only sponsor Suburban Lakes League-sanctioned athletic programs.”
On the ice
On the ice, Horvath has already taken a collection of 13 young and (or) first-time hockey players, and led them to a pair of victories in 2007-08.
First, the Flyers knocked off Blue Division foe Springfield in a non-conference Thanksgiving holiday tournament.
Then Lake made a statement to the NHC, and the district school board, by claiming a 3-0 shutout win over Ottawa Hills for its first league triumph since 2005-06. In that victory, Horvath’s freshman son, Tony, garnered the shutout. Coach Horvath counted 102 Lake fans attending the game.
“It’s kind of nice to be able to say, ‘hey look we got ourselves some wins’,” said Horvath.
While certainly nowhere close to the win column, the Flyers still forced two-time defending Blue Division champ Anthony Wayne to its only full regulation game to date in the division this season, losing 8-1. The Generals have enjoyed mercy-rule victories over its other three division opponents.
In that game, the frosh Horvath stopped 56 of 64 shots.
Pretty good results, and progress, for a team that didn’t win a game last year, has no seniors, can’t rotate three full lines and starts a right winger who never laced up a pair of skates before this season in Greg Schaffer.
Junior center Taylor Barteck, freshman defenseman and team scoring leader R.J. Schultz, sophomore defenseman Gabe Pinciotti, junior defenseman Jon Cox, freshman forward Duncan Vail and junior leftwing Keith Miller, along with Horvath, have formed the nucleus of the Flyers.
“They’re a lot better than I thought we’d be at this point,” Horvath said. “I’d say they’re ahead of schedule, considering some of these kids have never even played before.”
“I wouldn’t trade this group for anything.”
The Flyers now reside at 1-4 in the NHC Blue, and 2-8 overall. And Horvath doesn’t believe the final total in the victory column has been tallied yet.
“I think they could win two, maybe three more games before the end of the season,” he said.
That would mean a near-.500 record in the NHC Blue, and assure the Flyers of not finishing in last place in the division.
What Horvath and the isolated Lake hockey collective are hoping is that such a stepping stone will rekindle consideration from the school board.
“Somehow, we’ve got to figure out how to bridge that gap,” Horvath said.
Otherwise, a four-decade long story could sadly be in its final chapter, something Horvath and the other parents on the team cannot fathom.
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