By Eric Smith
It’s amusing to think that because Kansas City has an abundance of flat ground and frigid temperatures (for the last two winters, at least), hockey fits perfectly.
The exposure and mainstream exposure, or rather lack thereof, when compared to the NFL and NBA especially, frequently makes hockey a tangential, distant option for kids looking to get into an athletic endeavor.
That’s where Hickman Mills School District and Minding the Gap, a volunteer, youth-mentorship group, came together and took a shift on the ice with students to introduce them to the game.
Zack Nicholson, Founder and Executive Director of Minding the Gap, has been a hockey fan since he was eight years old.
“My grandmother randomly won free tickets to a game in Wichita, Kansas.” Nicholson said. “She took my brother and me to the game and we instantly fell in love with the sport.”
Nicholson said he didn’t get to play organized, competitive hockey when he was a kid. Hockey is an expensive sport where sticks, skates and helmets are just the very tip of a costly iceberg.
In the truest form of Wayne Gretzky’s famous idiom “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take,” Nicholson kept on shooting to be on the ice. Over the years he played across numerous recreational leagues and ultimately coached his own sons along their paths of high-level club hockey.
Coincidentally enough, someone else at Hickman Mills is a ravenous hockey fan with a desire to get kids on the ice– Superintendent Yaw Obeng.
Obeng, who lived in Canada, loves hockey. Nicholson loves hockey. It was time to drop the puck on what Nicholson called “an experiment.” Kansas City Ice Center Director Dean Nelson jumped at the opportunity to act as host.
“When I approached him about the idea, he immediately said that they were all in.” Nicholson said. They donated the ice time and provided all the hockey equipment. He also scheduled the camp to coincide with the beginning of their Learn to Play Hockey class. Learn to Play Hockey is an eight-week class designed for those with no hockey experience.
Helping the children get a feel for the game were volunteers from the KC Jets Hockey Club as well as the KC Storm Girls Hockey Club. While they went after introducing the game’s fundamental skills, Nicholson said many parents were inspired by the volunteers’ teamwork and their attentive, patient efforts.
“They teach you the value of hard work, goal setting, and perseverance,” Nicholson said of the benefits of athletics for kids. “Sports promote a healthy and active lifestyle as well as fostering an appreciation of teamwork and engagement with the world around you.”
The hockey focus was a beautiful, happy confluence of circumstance. Two molders of young people with a passion for the ice wanting to share that passion with those who otherwise may have never even contemplated lacing up skates.
More important than any individual game is getting different sports in front of kids. What starts as a willingness to get to know someone else’s game, later blooms into an enhanced willingness to simply get to know someone.
It’s a calling that Nicholson plans to keep moving forward
“The camp was such a success that we have officially named this new program ‘The Minding the Gap Experience.’ As we move forward, we hope to add more experiences for our students.”
Minding the Gap Experience plans to organize a sailing camp in July.