The University of Utah hockey team received a mention on a local sports radio broadcast recently. This was an event in and of itself.
But a comment that followed, made by a veteran Utah sportscaster, said even more about hockey's status in the Beehive State. The man said he didn't know the U. had a hockey team.
The Utes, Utah State Aggies, Weber State Wildcats and Provo (BYU) Icecats are, in fact, members of the five-team Rocky Mountain Collegiate Hockey Association. Officially, however, collegiate hockey in Utah is a club sport without funding from the schools.
It's the same at the high school level, where 30 Utah schools have organized hockey programs with nearly 1,000 participants. Another 350 players — boys and girls from kindergarten through high school — play in the Salt Lake Amateur Hockey Association. And about 550 men and women play in the Utah Summer Hockey League.
The International Hockey League's Utah Grizzlies may be the poster boys for local hockey. But the picture is much wider than that. There is, in fact, a thriving amateur hockey community along the Wasatch Front.
And thanks in part to the upcoming 2002 Winter Games, Utah hockey is slowly moving out of the shadows and into the limelight.
Perhaps the most significant contribution the Games will make to amateur hockey in Utah is a dramatic escalation of available ice space — and, consequently, ice time.
For years, local hockey players battled for ice time at the Cottonwood Heights and Bountiful ice rinks, suffering through games and practices at odd hours — such as 5 a.m. and midnight.
But in the near future, the Wasatch Front will have no fewer than 11 full-size ice sheets open and accessible to amateur hockey players, and that doesn't include the E Center where the Grizzlies play.
The Acord Ice Center in West Valley City, the Salt Lake County Ice Center in Murray and the Peaks Ice Arena in Provo are recent additions.
Two ice sheets are being built at the Steiner Aquatic Center in Salt Lake City, with completion scheduled for this fall. And the Utah Olympic Oval, now under construction in Kearns, will include two hockey rinks when it is finished in the fall of 2001.
"Heck, it took 10 years just to get the Acord Arena, and all of the sudden rinks are popping up a lot quicker now," said Paul Skidmore, an NHL veteran and former Salt Lake Golden Eagles goaltender (1980-85) who now owns Skate With Skiddy Hockey Supply in Cottonwood Heights.
If Cache County is included, 12 rinks could soon be available. A nonprofit group in the Logan area hopes to begin construction of an ice arena within the next two years.
While not all of the new rinks are springing up specifically because of the Winter Games, those decisions clearly were influenced by the coming of the Olympics and the increased focus on hockey, figure skating and other ice sports that has ensued.
"We might've seen one more rink if the Olympics hadn't come in," said Mike Holmes, the Bountiful High School hockey coach and president of Utah Hockey, the local USA Hockey affiliate.
Local amateur hockey officials say there is no question participation in the sport will increase as the Games approach and more ice sheets become available.
"We've got more kids in high school hockey than youth hockey because their parents didn't get them involved as children," said Tim Mouser, president of the Utah Grizzlies and the Salt Lake Amateur Hockey Association.
"The pyramid is upside down. We don't have as many kids at bottom as the top, and our goal is to kind of turn things around, have more of an even flow all the way through."
But Holmes worries there may not be enough youngsters to fill up all that ice time as it presents itself. If that happens, he fears, the ice could be consumed by competing interests, such as figure skating.
"As soon as the Olympics are over, particularly if they're good and the U.S. is winning, you'll get kids who'll decide 'I want to do that' for a couple years. You'll see a spike and then you'll see it taper down," Holmes predicted. "The question is, how do we maintain that (interest)?"
In any case, if hockey players expect an abundance of ice time when all the new surfaces are complete, they could be mistaken.
Matt Brickley, USA Hockey's chief referee for the state of Utah and director of the Utah Summer Hockey League, said he's heard talk like that before.
"People said that when Ogden opened and when Acord opened," he said. "But rather than alleviate the problem, it just seemed to exacerbate it because the growth and the demand and the population of hockey players just seemed to grow faster than the availability of ice.
"We're still playing at 5 a.m. and 11 p.m."
Even with the Olympics, Utah is not likely to become a hotbed for top-caliber hockey players any time soon. Even the most optimistic ice-bred souls don't imagine Utah can compete with the Upper Midwest or Northeast as hockey breeding grounds.
In fact, Holmes' best advice for parents of young hockey players with emerging talent is to leave Utah — if the youngster desires an upper-level collegiate or professional career in the sport.
"If you're 16 and you decide you have talent, it's probably too late" to leave Utah for further development, Holmes said.
"If you're 10 and you have talent, you need to go to Minnesota or Massachusetts or Canada or somewhere where you're going to get a tremendous amount of play and practice, and all against very competitive players. And that's one drawback we have here."
That's what Steve Konowalchuk's parents did.
Konowalchuk, in his ninth season with the National Hockey League's Washington Capitols, was born in Salt Lake City in 1972 and is the only Utah native in the NHL.
But, according to the friends they left behind, Konowalchuk's folks recognized by the time the boys were preteens that their sons needed a higher level of competition in order to improve their skills. So they moved to Canada.
"As far as growing up in Utah and signing an NHL contract, that's a rarity," said Steve Levy, a former Highland High School star who was on the U.S. Olympic team during its 1994 pre-Olympic tour.
Levy is one who beat the odds. He signed a three-year contract (1992-95) with Dallas of the NHL and played against the Salt Lake Golden Eagles as a member of the Kalamazoo K-Wings, Dallas' minor-league affiliate.
Levy left Utah after his junior year of high school to play junior hockey.
"I just accepted the fact that I was from Utah and needed to work hard in practice to improve and catch up," Levy said of that experience, adding there are a few other Utah prep standouts who have gone on to play at the next level.
"We'll never compete with the Upper Midwest. But chances are good that we will turn out more players that will make it to play Division I college hockey and/or professional hockey."
And to that end, hosting the Winter Games should not hurt one bit.