In this episode of Puck Academy, host Jason Jacobs chats with Mike Snee, Vice President of Foundation and Community Relations at the Minnesota Wild. The discussion highlights Snee's extensive experience and dedication to growing hockey through community engagement. Mike shares insights into Minnesota's unique community-based hockey model, its impact on player development, and the importance of maintaining this model to keep hockey accessible and affordable. They cover NCAA program expansions, the relationships between high school and youth hockey programs, and the influence of public investment in ice facilities. The episode also explores the challenges posed by the privatization of youth sports and emphasizes the need to protect Minnesota's local, community-driven approach to ensure the sport's continued vibrancy and success.
In this episode of Puck Academy, host Jason Jacobs interviews Mike Snee, Vice President of Foundation and Community Relations for the Minnesota Wild. Mike speaks about his extensive career in hockey, including his tenure as Executive Director of College Hockey Inc. and Minnesota Hockey. He discusses the unique community-oriented model of hockey in Minnesota, emphasizing the importance of public ice facilities and local participation. The conversation also explores the challenges of maintaining this model amidst the privatization of youth sports, and why it is crucial to preserving and growing the sport in Minnesota. Additionally, Mike explains the new 'Skate It Forward' initiative aimed at making hockey more accessible and ensuring continuous player participation across the state.
00:00 Introduction to Puck Academy
00:15 Meet Mike Snee: A Hockey Visionary
01:34 Mike's Journey in Hockey
01:58 The Minnesota Hockey Model
02:06 Community vs. Privatized Youth Sports
06:20 Mike's Early Life and Hockey Passion
12:07 The State of Hockey: Minnesota's Unique Approach
23:05 The Role of Community Ice Facilities
30:38 Comparing Rink Ownership Models: Massachusetts vs. Minnesota
32:20 Philanthropy in Minnesota Hockey: The Skated Forward Initiative
33:52 Making Hockey Accessible: Overcoming Cost Barriers
36:35 The Big Wild Program: Introducing Kids to Hockey
38:14 The Minnesota Model: Community-Based Hockey Development
39:44 Historical Context: The Evolution of Hockey in Minnesota
43:16 Challenges and Opportunities: Privatized vs. Community Hockey
45:38 The Importance of Youth Participation in Hockey
47:48 Minnesota's Success: Producing Top-Level Hockey Players
56:38 Concluding Thoughts: The Future of Minnesota Hockey
[Jason Jacobs] (0:00 - 2:35)
Welcome to Puck Academy, a show about how hockey players grow on and off the ice. I'm Jason Jacobs, the host. And each week I talk with players, coaches, and experts shaping the future of player development.
Today's guest is Mike Snee. Mike is the Vice President of Foundation and Community Relations for the Minnesota Wild. Mike has achieved great success driving community engagement and collaboration at all levels of hockey, energized by a deep-rooted passion for growing the game.
During his 12-year tenure as Executive Director of College Hockey, Inc., the Minnesota native designed and implemented a strategic plan that resulted in several new hockey programs at NCAA schools, a Canadian Broadcasting Rights Agreement, and a significant increase in revenue. Prior to that, Mike was Executive Director of Minnesota Hockey, where he received the 2013 Minnesota Hockey President's Award for exemplary service to youth hockey in the state. He also accepted the 2019 Oscar Almquist Award for his contributions to the success of high school hockey in Minnesota.
Mike is a longtime member of the USA Hockey Congress, providing guidance and expertise to the national governing body for ice hockey in the United States. He is a University of St. Thomas graduate and also serves on the boards of the United States Hockey Hall of Fame and the Minneapolis Youth Hockey Association and has coached youth hockey and baseball for over 20 years. Now, I was excited for this one because Mike is a lifelong Minnesotan who is hugely passionate about Minnesota hockey, the state of hockey as it's called, and Mike's mission is to help grow the game in Minnesota and protect the community-oriented approach that makes it so special.
We have a great discussion in this episode about how that model came to be, why that model came to be, what's special about it, the best ways to protect it, and where the Minnesota Wilds fit in, and also where this initiative fits into the Minnesota Wilds organization and why. We also talk about the privatization of youth sports, including hockey, the increasing barriers to entry, and why Mike believes it's so important for the community model to survive and thrive. This one really gets you thinking, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Mike, welcome to the show.
[Mike Snee] (2:36 - 2:38)
Hi, Jason. Looking forward to the discussion.
[Jason Jacobs] (2:38 - 3:26)
Thanks for coming. So I published the timing of this recording, which isn't timed with one of the chips, but I just published a couple days ago with Sean Hogan, who is in the job that you used to have at College Hockey, Inc., and who introduced me to you. After talking with Sean, he heard the things I was pushing on and sorting through and the knots I was trying to unpack, and he said, you know who you really need to talk to?
And we talked, and I'm a little afraid to have this discussion because you seem like an awesome guy and really thoughtful and educated and you're armed with data and super passionate and a lifelong Minnesotan, and I'm not nearly as armed with data and educated and experienced, but I'm kind of in enemy territory here.
[Mike Snee] (3:27 - 4:07)
I don't look at it that way at all, not whatsoever. There's a lot there. Sean Hogan's great, former colleague of mine at College Hockey, Inc., and spent 12 years at College Hockey, Inc. That organization and college hockey really mean a lot to me, and especially here coming up in one week with the Spangler Cup team. I know this is being recorded right before Christmas, but was part of that project for a while and really cool to see that team college hockey will be playing in the Spangler Cup this year. But I'm happy to be here, and I certainly don't look at any part of the United States as the enemy by any means, especially in an Olympic year.
[Jason Jacobs] (4:08 - 4:19)
No, and I certainly didn't mean it that way. I meant more that we are full-fledged customers in the privatized New England club world, right?
[Mike Snee] (4:19 - 5:33)
I've never lived in Massachusetts, so I'm very hesitant to comment on anything, because none of it's a lived experience for me. But I have had a lot of conversations with wonderful people from Massachusetts, read a lot, listened to a lot. And an aspect of why I'm motivated to do what I do here in Minnesota is based on what has happened in Massachusetts with its wonderful hockey history and so many hockey characters, a lot of similarities to Minnesota.
And it is a place where you can, I think, learn from and observe the difference between hockey, and probably not just hockey, but youth sports, if it's delivered in a community way, versus if it's delivered in a commercial way in Massachusetts, and probably all in New England, but certainly Massachusetts. It's pretty interesting to learn about, because at one time it was one way, and now it is very different than that. And there's some outcomes that you can measure and some conclusions that you can draw, and we're doing that.
But I love Massachusetts, absolutely love Fenway Park, Matthews Arena. I know it's all done now, but that was my number one college hockey building.
[Jason Jacobs] (5:34 - 5:37)
It was just a big article about that. They had a big ceremony for the closing.
[Mike Snee] (5:37 - 5:57)
I know. I saw the photo with all the coaches and actually ran into Jim Madigan at the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame induction dinner and had a really nice visit with him. But, yeah, Matthews was my previous job.
I was able to go into about 40 different college hockey arenas, and Matthews, from the moment I went in there the first time, was my number one college hockey arena.
[Jason Jacobs] (5:58 - 6:19)
So a couple things, before we get into kind of the substance of the discussion, a couple things would be useful, I think, for me and listeners, for context. One is just your journey in the sport, how you found the sport and kind of how you've come up in the game. And then second, it'd be great to just kind of get a snapshot of your involvement with the game and your role with the Wild today.
[Mike Snee] (6:20 - 8:54)
Well, if anyone right now is checking Elite Prospects and can't find me, don't blame the Internet. Your Internet's not broken. You're not going to find a Mike Sneha Elite Prospects page.
So I want to be very upfront, like I've never accomplished anything on the ice playing hockey, other than really no major injuries. That's probably my biggest accomplishment as a player. But I was fortunate to grow up in Duluth in the 70s and 80s.
Duluth's a town most people probably know, but it's a town up on the north shore of Lake Superior in northern Minnesota. Mother Nature cooperates really well up there and tremendous outdoor ice still to this day. But, you know, when I was growing up, and maybe this is revisionist history in my head, but it felt like the ice was always ready to go by mid-November and last until March.
And I'm sure some of that's just me remembering the best parts. But we had great outdoor ice. I lived two and a half blocks from a park called Portman.
And in Duluth, a lot of kids, especially kids that played hockey, identified themselves by the outdoor hockey rink that they grew up closest to. And you can tell a lot about a kid. You know, were they working class?
Were they maybe upper income? What were they based on the park that they played their hockey at? And I played at Portman and a lot of my great childhood memories from the winter were at that park.
But I played all the sports, just like so many people back then. I played a ton of street hockey as well. I played basketball.
We did it all. Loved it all. Looking back on my life, I'm glad that's when I grew up because that's how it was done.
And then that was it. Never really pursued any organized hockey whatsoever. It was always done in a pickup pond hockey or street hockey type of way.
But while doing all that, I just fell in love with the North Stars, the UMD Bulldogs. At the time, they just had a tremendous team in the late 70s, early 80s. A lot of great players.
And then on my 11th birthday, February 24th, 1980, the U.S. beat Finland for a gold medal. And I think most people will agree that however life was when you were 11, we just idealize it and it's perfect. I still think the New York Islanders are a dynasty, but that's just because they were when I was 10, 11, 12, and 13.
So to have that gold medal team, the Miracle on Ice team happen at that point in my life and have a very strong Minnesota influence, and at that time in particular, a northern Minnesota influence because that's what my identity was at that time.
[Jason Jacobs] (8:54 - 8:58)
Quick aside, Mike, but Jack Ramsey actually came on the show, Mike Ramsey's son. Oh, really?
[Mike Snee] (8:59 - 13:59)
Good to know. Good to know. Former Mike Ramsey, former coach of the Minnesota Wild.
But I didn't fully appreciate all that that meant at that time, what it meant for our country, what it meant for Minnesota. I think I appreciated the Cold War, so I knew what it meant to beat the Soviet Union, but just exactly how special it was. But it really was magical.
It was magical at Portman and at my elementary school at the time, the pride that we had. So to have so many great things happen, and I didn't even mention the high school hockey tournament, but that was, I think back to that high school hockey tournament and they would have day games on Thursday and Friday and we wouldn't have class. We would watch on TV.
And I think anybody my age remembers the afternoons of Thursday and Friday during the state hockey tournament. Every room just got a TV and you just watched hockey. And that was, man, that was pretty special and all that.
So that's really my hockey background is more just like being a run-of-the-mill kid playing hockey amongst many other sports and falling in love with it. And then after high school, I moved out of the Twin Cities to go to college at St. Thomas. And then a really important thing happened right when I graduated there is I just a few things lined up and I got an internship at the Minnesota North Stars.
And then that really started my adult life in terms of like working in the sport and worked for the North Stars, worked for the Minnesota Moose, which was a minor league team that was kind of trying to fill the gap between the North Stars and the Wild. But working for those two hockey teams, the North Stars and the Moose, I was fortunate at a very young age to get to know a lot of the people in the hockey community in the Twin Cities who happened to be the people that would bring the NHL back in the form of the Minnesota Wild. So really lucky to be an early employee of the Minnesota Wild, actually hired two and a half years before they even played a game and had a wonderful experience in that whole creation of and the start of an NHL team and not realizing it then, but their owner at the time, Bob Nagley, Matt Maka, who was hired even before I was and now has been the longtime president and CEO of the team.
And then the current owner now, Craig Leopold, who bought the team from the Nagley family back in 2008. But one thing that they did right from the start, they did their research. They talked to a lot of Wild fans and found out that that how meaningful hockey was in Minnesota, certainly the NHL, but not just the NHL, all levels of hockey.
And so right from the start, they created the phrase, the state of hockey. And as Matt likes to say, they just created the phrase. They didn't create the state of hockey.
The state of hockey was always here and they just gave it a name. But but they've celebrated hockey at all levels in the state from college, high school, youth hockey. Participating in hockey, just all aspects of hockey they celebrate along with the Minnesota Wild.
And so I got an education that I didn't realize I was going to get about how special hockey was. Worked for the Wild for 10 years, left that, then had a really good opportunity, special opportunity to be the executive director of Minnesota Hockey, which is the governing body of hockey in Minnesota. And I did that for four years.
And that's where I really started to personally think about how hockey is delivered to a family in Minnesota and how that compares to elsewhere in the country. And that's when I think I first started like taking mental notes about that. It is more than just, hey, we have cold weather, you know, and that means we have ice rinks.
And therefore we play hockey and we love hockey. That's part of it. I mean, that's not even the biggest reason I would say it's just how we deliver it.
This community fashion then had a super cool opportunity in 2012 to be part of, which at the time was a very new organization called College Hockey, Inc. And I've always been a huge college hockey fan. And so I got that opportunity to work in college hockey.
That job really took me around all of North America. And it really gave me an understanding and an appreciation for how youth hockey here in the U.S. or minor hockey in Canada, how kids play their hockey, what families have to do so kids can play hockey, what matters to a kid, what's in their heart, and expanded my horizons beyond just Minnesota. And the more I learned, the more curious I got, and it just built on each other.
And it's become it being how a kid plays hockey. And really, I'm interested in how kids play youth sports in general, but really hockey. I don't want to quite say it's an obsession, but I pay a lot of attention.
I read a lot about it. I listen to a lot.
[Jason Jacobs] (13:59 - 14:00)
You can admit it, Mike. It's an obsession.
[Mike Snee] (14:01 - 15:07)
Maybe it's an obsession, but it's really interesting to me. I'll just leave it at that. So here I am.
I was at College Hockey, Inc. for 12 years. And then came back to the Minnesota Wild last year in a new role with Matt Maka, who's been a good friend for a long time.
Matt is a product of community hockey here as well. He played in it. He raised two kids that played in it.
He's a deep thinker and realizes that the state of hockey is only true, it's only real, because kids here connect hockey so much to their community and to their school. And if we lost that, we would really lose a significant part of the culture of the sport in our state. So I feel really fortunate that he, along with Craig Leopold and the leadership of the Wild, invited me to join the group and just try to figure out a way to make sure that we preserve what we have.
And while we're at it, maybe we can even help the leaders of hockey in Minnesota make it even a little bit better and then just be really loud about it, celebrate even more how cool it is.
[Jason Jacobs] (15:08 - 15:10)
So what is the charter of your role with the Wild?
[Mike Snee] (15:11 - 17:56)
My title maybe is a little interesting. It's vice president of our foundation, our community relations, our hockey partnerships, which means I get to work with a lot of really good people, a lot of people who have been here for a while and have built up our foundation or built up our community relations and built up our hockey partnerships. So I get to be part of that, which is neat and exciting.
I get to learn from them what they have built here. Over 25 years of Wild hockey has been pretty spectacular. So I would say for me, that's more like learning from them.
They're the experts contributing every now and again, but really adding what I would call is a new part of the Wild or maybe an enhanced part, an enhanced focus specifically on community hockey, specifically on participation in hockey. And we started a new initiative called Skate It Forward. It's fired by the Pay It Forward movement.
It's a philanthropic initiative that's part of the Minnesota Wild Foundation and part of the Minnesota Wild, which really is to do what I just said. The mission statement is to preserve, strengthen and celebrate community hockey here in Minnesota. And that's a nice mission statement written on a whiteboard in a conference room.
What it really means is we don't want to lose what we have. We don't want to have happen in Minnesota what's happened in Massachusetts. We don't want to lose hockey being connected to the community, hockey being very affordable, relatively speaking, hockey being accessible, hockey being local, hockey being inspirational, not just NHL inspirational.
That certainly is inspirational, but having the high school kids in your community still matter to the young players and just that kind of cycle, almost like football, you know, where we pay attention to our high school teams, we pay attention to our college teams, we pay attention to our pro team, obviously. So it's really get in and make sure that since the toothpaste is still in the tube, the genie is still in the bottle, whatever metaphor you want to use when it comes to youth hockey in Minnesota, we want to keep that toothpaste in the tube. And then while we're at it, how can we be part of the effort to make it even better than it already is?
So that's where I spend most of my time. That's what attracted me back to here. Quite frankly, my colleagues that are more involved in the day-to-day foundation operations, the day-to-day community relations, the day-to-day hockey partnerships, they were already doing 10 out of 10 work.
So the role really wasn't to come in and, like I said, turn that around. That's already headed in the right direction. Maybe add some ideas or something now and again, but really focus on this community hockey initiative.
[Jason Jacobs] (17:57 - 18:06)
What was the impetus for the role to come about and how does it tie back to business strategy and objectives for this for-profit entity?
[Mike Snee] (18:07 - 23:05)
It was probably maybe because Matt was sick of listening to me talk about it. He would ask so many questions about it, so he had it coming. But like I said, he's a thinker.
He's a curious guy. And he was witnessing it too. He was seeing, in spite of community hockey performing so well, and it does perform so well in every single measurement, whether it's just the number of kids that play, how many move on to the highest levels, whether that's professional or college or whatever.
Yet, in spite of that, there were families that were choosing to not be involved in community hockey, to have their kids move away at a young age and play non-community hockey elsewhere. So I think the impetus for it, why it happened, was a lot of those conversations. And then, not to put words in Matt's mouth, he's not here, but the Minnesota Wild.
I'm biased and I've only lived here, but we have a very loyal following. Very deep. We've never won a Stanley Cup.
We haven't won a playoff series since 2015. We've always been good, but we haven't had that moment of even making a run to a cup, much less winning a cup. Yet, our fans are great.
They buy tickets, they show up, they talk about it, they wear jerseys. You can tell Minnesota Wild hockey is an important part of Minnesota. It's an important part of the hockey culture of the state of Minnesota.
And when you do research, you find out, or even when you just have conversations, you find out that a big part of that is how the Wild, I think, are perceived within the hockey community. How people talk about the Wild at the local community rink, whether in St. Paul, whether in a suburb of the Twin Cities, whether up in northern Minnesota. And I think that they feel like that our organization does go the extra mile, because we do, to celebrate all that happens in the community rink.
And I think Matt and others realize if we lost that, if we lost the meaningfulness of community hockey in our state, it would be felt by the Wild. Maybe not next year, maybe not even in two years, but eventually it would be felt by the Wild. So to answer your question about why is this for-profit entity interested and how would we benefit, the benefit would be long-term, and it would just be the meaningfulness of the Wild and the meaningfulness of the sport as a whole in our state.
And one thing I want to emphasize, and I live in the Twin Cities metro area now, but as I mentioned, I grew up in northern Minnesota. The sport is wonderful in the Twin Cities, but the soul of the state of hockey is when you get outside of the Twin Cities. We have spectacular small-town hockey.
And I'm talking like towns with 4,000 or 5,000 people that have hockey programs. They have a facility, they have teams. And that only happens because we have community hockey.
So what I want to point out, and I think it's just not appreciated enough, is that hockey in Minnesota is statewide. It's in small towns. And as excited as I am about the growth of hockey in the rest of the country, because it is dependent upon a business owner building arena, and thankfully they exist because otherwise we might not have hockey if it weren't for somebody willing to build a rink, but it's hard to make a business model of hockey work in a town of 12,000 people.
Those rinks aren't meant to make money for anybody. Those rinks serve the community. So because of that, all of these wonderful small towns, Warroad, Roseau, Grand Rapids, Hermantown, Thief River Falls, and newer communities like Laverne.
I don't want to say Delano is a newer community, but Delano and Dodge County and La Crescent, these towns across our state, have hockey. They have vibrant hockey. They might not all win the state championship, but you have plenty of kids in those communities that have hockey as part of their life growing up.
And the Roseau and the Laverne and the La Crescent of Texas and California and Arizona and even Missouri and so on probably will never have hockey because you won't be able to make money owning a rink in those cities. And so when you dig deep into what we're trying to do here is not just preserve the community hockey here in the Twin Cities. We're trying to make sure that kids throughout the state as much as possible will always have the opportunity to play the sport because for the most part, I know Wisconsin, North Dakota, maybe upstate New York, for the most part, kids growing up in towns of 8,000 people far away from urban centers have zero chance to play hockey in our country.
And that's important to me as a kid who grew up in northern Minnesota.
[Jason Jacobs] (23:06 - 23:20)
So when you come in with that kind of charter, how do you figure out levers you're trying to move and how do you figure out what initiatives will best move those levers?
[Mike Snee] (23:20 - 28:54)
I first started thinking about this when I started at Minnesota Hockey in 2008. And that's where I learned a lot about Minnesota. And then when I went to College Hockey, that's when I learned a lot about elsewhere.
And this didn't dawn on me until it took a long time for this to dawn on me. And it didn't dawn on me until maybe a decade ago. But when it finally did occur to me that the most important thing about hockey in Minnesota, about the way our hockey in Minnesota works, it's the statewide public investment in our ice facilities.
So we could talk about this topic for over an hour. But to try to make it brief, in the psyche of many Minnesotans, we place ice arenas in the same psychological bucket as bike paths, playgrounds, community pools, high school football fields. Every community worth its salt needs to have one.
The point of the facility is not to turn a profit, not to maximize profit. The point of the facility is to serve the people that live in the community. Because we have that approach to our ice facilities, and because it's statewide, what that means is a lot more places are going to build ice facilities, which means the sport will be a lot more accessible.
And think of every community. That could literally be a community, it could be a county, it could be a school, it could even be a foundation. They're all somewhat investors in the game of hockey.
They're all partners in growing the game of hockey. We don't need to convince a business owner, build this facility, take a risk, invest all of your money, you'll make a worthwhile profit. We just need to convince the community, well, you got a football field and you got a playground, why don't you have an ice rink, right?
So we have that. It's probably more challenging today to maintain that, just because there's more scrutiny on what public dollars are used for. But we still have it.
We had a number of ice projects that have either just completed or are in the process of happening. So we're still adding ice to our pile of ice that we have across the state. And it's not all happening just in kind of the more affluent suburbs.
It's happening in the urban core. It's happening in smaller legacy hockey towns. It's happening in newer hockey towns.
And we have this new kind of trend, unintentional trend, of covered refrigerated outdoor rinks. The first one was in St. Louis Park, which is a suburb of Minneapolis, about a decade ago. They opened this beautiful, think of it, it's an indoor sheet of ice, indoor caliber boards, glass, everything.
It's an indoor sheet of ice, no walls, with this beautiful canopy over it. It almost looks like public art. It's stunning just to look at.
And you can have ice in there from October through March. And the best time to play hockey is when, you know, when it's snowing, because none of the snow gets on the ice, but you see the snow. Or when it's 48 degrees in November, because it's super comfortable, but the ice is great, right?
So because we have just that culture and we still have it, I would say the biggest thing we need to ensure and accomplish is that we don't lose that. That we don't start to look at ice facilities. And I use this analogy a lot.
The way that in Minnesota, we look at dance studios. So if you have an eight-year-old child, and let's say she wants to play hockey, there is this kind of belief, like, well, we're going to help make that happen by ensuring that there's an ice facility close by. And it's, you know, the cost of it is as affordable as it possibly can be, because it's a community building.
And then we're going to also have the high school will likely sponsor a team. And so, therefore, we're going to make it just as affordable and accessible as possible. If that eight-year-old wanted to dance, which is a wonderful activity, we have entrusted that into the business world.
Not wrong, not illegal, okay? But now you're requiring people to take a risk, use their own money to build a dance studio. And then the motive, and I'm not saying that the dance instructor, they're probably great dance instructors, they love dance, all of that.
But they've got bills to pay. They've got loans they've taken out. They want to make their living at it.
So what happens is, in that activity, it frequently is year-round. It's very expensive, relatively speaking. There's other aspects that enter into it.
Whereas for hockey, you know, hockey is a sport with a lot of built-in barriers. It's not running-based. It requires equipment.
It requires a very unique playing surface. So many built-in barriers that you cannot explain away. I think we should be even more diligent about not putting any unnecessary barriers on the sport, like travel.
However, it feels like in some places, it's just like, well, it's already expensive, so let's just, it's already going to cost $3,000, so let's just make it $30,000, right? So I'm entering the rambling phase now. I'm going to answer your question.
The main thing is we have to ensure that we have this continued outlook, that ice facilities across the state are somehow delivered in a not-for-profit way.
[Jason Jacobs] (28:54 - 29:02)
Is a core metric that you track to know how you're doing, how many not-for-profit ice facilities are operational?
[Mike Snee] (29:03 - 31:59)
Yeah, I would say yes, and we know how many that is. It's about 275 spread across the state. What I say is a core metric is the wild aren't doing that.
These communities are doing that. Volunteers are doing that. Voters are doing that.
People are making it happen in their communities. And so we think, okay, well, that's a real hard story to tell. I think I'm almost having a hard time telling it just to you right now, right?
That's a hard story to tell in a 30-second TV spot or in a one-minute conversation, right? So the way to accomplish that is to get even more kids playing hockey because every kid is connected to voters. Every kid has a parent or parents, aunts and uncles, neighbors, okay?
So if we can grow hockey even more than it already is and then make sure people know that, hey, this sport is growing because the sport is growing. Even in Minnesota, the sport is growing. Let's grow it even more.
I think that if more kids in all of our hockey communities are playing hockey tomorrow than they are today, then we will absolutely continue to make sure that we have ice facilities no different than we make sure that we have bike paths, swimming pools, and playgrounds. If the sport were to start to lose participation, then understandably you could see a community saying, hey, we have far fewer kids playing hockey here than we did a decade ago. Why do we continue to fund this ice facility?
Maybe we could use those resources in a better way. And earlier I mentioned how we pay attention to Massachusetts and try to apply that to Minnesota if we can. And most people that you talk to in Massachusetts, and again, I hesitate to talk about Massachusetts because I've never lived there, but many, many times people have referenced that the rink ownership structure in Massachusetts changed a generation ago, 20 to 30 years ago, from almost entirely not-for-profit, and I believe a lot of them were owned by the state in some way, but I'm not an expert on that, but not-for-profit, and now over a generation, the predominant ownership model of the rink in Massachusetts is for-profit.
It doesn't appear that there's an aggressive movement to start building not-for-profit community-owned rinks across the state. Certainly there could be one or two that I'm not aware of, but you're not seeing a lot of it. So it's likely just going to continue to move more in the direction of for-profit rinks, and therefore hockey starts to look more like dance does in Minnesota, and less like hockey does in Minnesota.
So to put it, to say the tactics are, we got to make sure we keep this wonderful thing we have, which is a public view of our ice rinks, and to do that, we have to make sure that we always have more kids playing hockey next year than this year.
[Jason Jacobs] (32:00 - 32:20)
And so when it comes to mapping out the year and figuring out how you'll allocate your resources as an organization, if the goal, and it sounds like the goal, is to drive up participation in the sport, and that the belief is that the best vessel to do that is by championing and protecting the community model, what do you do?
[Mike Snee] (32:20 - 36:16)
So this initiative, as I mentioned, is part of both our foundation and our team, our business. A big part of Skate It Forward is philanthropic, named after or inspired by the Pay It Forward movement. So a lot of people involved in Minnesota, or in hockey in Minnesota, have a philanthropic outlook on the sport, meaning they don't feel like, hey, that person made a ton of money off of our family being a hockey family, because there aren't many of those people.
It's viewed as, hey, our association was run by a board of directors, or then my kids played high school hockey, and those coaches weren't paid very well. I might have disagreed with their power play, but I know for a fact they weren't paid very well. So in general, and it's not perfect, and I'm not saying that there isn't cases where that exists, but compared to elsewhere, it's understood, I think, that there's not a lot of people making a lot of money off of nine-year-olds playing hockey in Minnesota.
So because of that, but with that built-in cost, and there is a built-in cost to it, it requires equipment, it requires a unique playing surface, it is more expensive, even in its least expensive form, than soccer. And because that soul of hockey is up on the Iron Range and in northern Minnesota, where maybe the incomes aren't as high as they are in suburban Twin Cities, there is this belief, like, every kid in Minnesota should have the right to play hockey, and I'll help if I'm asked to help. So we created this initiative with that idea in mind, that people will be generous, or enough people will be generous, that we can raise money and then reinvest that money back out into the state in the form of grants through our foundation that would allow these wonderful associations and the volunteers at these associations that are on the ground to get even more kids playing hockey in their communities.
Through, like, need-based scholarship? Not necessarily need-based. I mean, it certainly can be need-based.
One thing we have found is that paying for somebody's first year of hockey is a great way to get a family that's on the fence to do it. Because, you know, we already have all of the hardcore hockey families, we have them. If we're going to grow hockey, we have to target those families that have some interest, they're intrigued in some way, but they're not completely sold.
And when you talk to those families and say, why aren't you completely sold? They will frequently reference either the cost and their perception that the cost is actually higher than it really is, or they know what the cost is, but they're not certain their kid's going to like it, so they don't want to make any investment not knowing if their 5-, 6-, or 7-year-old is really going to like it. So one thing that's really worked in a lot of these communities is they make the first year of hockey free, a family tries it, and then, as is usually the case, the kids love it, and they want to keep playing it, and then the parents either can't afford it or they'll figure out how they can.
And because the cost of playing it, both financially and just the time commitment, is so much less than Minnesota, I'm not saying that there's still not a certain level of investment required, but it is so much less that it is so much, that means it's so much more available to more families. So what we want to do is just provide these associations with a resource that gives them a little bit more push to go out, and depending on their community, find five or six kids that last year weren't going to sign up for hockey, that this year you can get them to sign up for hockey. And how can we make that a statewide thing where we just add a few more kids to the hockey playing world every year?
And if we do that, then there aren't many places that are going to say, yeah, but we're going to stop making sure that we have a nice facility in our community.
[Jason Jacobs] (36:17 - 36:35)
I had a really twisted thought as you were talking, and in a weird way, it's almost like the healthy version of like Philip Morris coming out with like chewing gum cigarettes for kids, right? It's like the vegetable version of that. It's like, let's get them young and inspire their love of the game so that when they grow up, they're going to grow up to be rabid hockey fans.
[Mike Snee] (36:35 - 37:41)
Yeah, we actually are introducing a program this year called Big Wild, started by one of my colleagues here, Gabby Billing, a great idea that she had. And it targets nine to 12-year-old kids who have not played organized hockey before and gives them a comfortable way to enter the sport for their parents, I guess, to have them enter the sport where they can be with a lot of kids in the same boat initially and then get that comfort level for the game and then have them go play for their community association. So it's not by any means that you can't start playing hockey after you're five or six, but the research does show, and USA Hockey has that, that by nine or ten, the intimidation factor to the sport, especially with families that weren't already hockey families, that intimidation factor is a lot higher.
Plus, they may have already become basketball players or wrestlers, and now their winter sport is taken and there's not room for them to add hockey. So we want kids to join hockey at any age. Big Wild is helping accomplish that.
But if we really want to make meaningful growth, that opportunity still is in the eight and under age.
[Jason Jacobs] (37:42 - 38:13)
What is it that set Minnesota hockey initially in motion in this direction? And relatively, I mean, if you're in a place that doesn't work like Minnesota, it seems like there's a vicious chicken and egg in that, you know, yeah, it'd be great if you got the government to do that, but you can't get the government to do that without the public support and the public support isn't there. So it's like, all right, well, like, like, until we get this, we won't get that.
And until we get that, we won't get this. And then you just chase your tail around.
[Mike Snee] (38:14 - 39:02)
Yeah, a lot there, too. I feel like in my paying attention, and I'm certainly open to people disagreeing with this, but I feel like there's kind of three parts of hockey playing America. There's Minnesota.
And when I say Minnesota, I include Western Wisconsin and North Dakota. Communities close to Minnesota, like Hudson and Superior and Grand Forks, their hockey looks a lot like Minnesota, starting with the facilities, which are not-for-profit community type facilities. OK, so there's that footprint, the Minnesota footprint.
Then there are areas that have just as much tradition and legacy with the sport. I generally think of Massachusetts and New England, but New York has some amazing history in hockey participation and hockey players and so on.
[Jason Jacobs] (39:03 - 39:04)
Connecticut, New Jersey.
[Mike Snee] (39:04 - 39:05)
Yeah, I said New England.
[Jason Jacobs] (39:06 - 39:07)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
[Mike Snee] (39:09 - 45:35)
So there's areas that used to look either identical to Minnesota or more like Minnesota and have shifted away from that. And then there's just brand new areas, or not brand new anymore, but newer areas that at one time had very little or no hockey. And they've just added hockey right from the start, 100 percent.
From the beginning, it was privatized hockey. So kind of three types of areas. Let's just say Minnesota, New England, and Texas are representatives of those three types of areas.
Well, when hockey first started in Minnesota, and I kind of assume Massachusetts, but I don't really know, so I hesitate to lump Massachusetts into this, but when hockey really started in Minnesota, it was the first documented game in Minnesota, I believe, was 1895 in Halleck. But then when the whole recreational, when people started to have some money and some time and kids started playing organized sports, I think that was mostly post-World War II. And because up in northern Minnesota, some of the communities have invested a lot in indoor ice facilities.
If you ever get a chance to visit the Iron Range, Roseau, some of these northern communities, they have these beautiful, quirky, old buildings. Many of them still standing. And it's worth an afternoon just to go into these arenas and look at them.
And my understanding is they built those rinks. Plus, Mother Nature always cooperated in the winter, so they had tons of ice everywhere. So hockey just became what the kids did in the wintertime.
And then high schools started having hockey teams. Communities had hockey teams. The Twin Cities then were like, why are we losing to these small northern Minnesota towns?
So the Twin Cities started investing in ice rinks, and not because there was any business plan for this or any strategic plan for it. We just ended up building ice early and often and in a community way. And at that time, every single sport was delivered in the exact same way.
You played for your community. You played for your school. You didn't fly across the country.
Nobody was making money at it. Sports was looked at like your K-12 education. It was all part of the way to bring up a young person in a healthy way.
It was part of a way to bring the community together. So whether it was hockey, basketball, football, baseball, volleyball, softball, whatever it was, you weren't doing it for a private club. You weren't getting on a plane every third weekend and flying to some baseball showcase in Atlanta or some volleyball showcase in Dallas.
So nobody sat around and called it the Minnesota model because it was just how all sports was delivered. And then as hockey has grown, and full credit to the NHL and USA Hockey for expanding to new markets, because it's a great game and people will play the game. But what used to be the case was most hockey was played in the northern part of the U.S. And a lot of that was Minnesota and Massachusetts, and they both delivered hockey in a community way. So if you were some really good young hockey player playing hockey wherever, Hibbing, South St. Paul, wherever it might be, your mom and dad weren't being inundated with phone calls from privatized hockey businesses elsewhere in the country looking for a customer. And ideally that customer is pretty good at hockey. Now, if you're a good hockey player at 14 or 15, phone calls, emails, texts, grabbing you in the lobby of an ice arena, I've got something better for you than cute little community hockey.
That's the predicament we're in now. So Minnesota has maintained what I would say is the absolute normal way to deliver sports, which is very local, very local, and minimize the identification at an early age of who the super-duper elite quadruple-A kids are. You're just playing hockey with your community mates and you're playing against the other community and developing a healthy dislike for that other community because you're rivals.
So I think that's what I mean is that this does require, I think, some depth of thinking to draw back why is it the way we are now, but because the predominant way that hockey is delivered to families in our country is in a privatized way. And I understand in certain cases, like you just said, taxpayers in probably the state of Virginia aren't going to start to prioritize dozens of ice facilities. So it requires somebody that loves the game to take a risk, use their money, build a rink.
So I understand that. And I'm glad that that's happening. But that doesn't mean then that so the best way to deliver hockey then is to make it $30,000, put people on airplanes, have people start playing hockey in August and end playing hockey in April, and every third weekend be in a different time zone with their 10-year-old playing hockey.
And that's kind of the outcome we've had. And now that that is the predominant way that hockey is delivered, we have suddenly started to refer to Minnesota as the Minnesota model, as though it's some special sauce or some magic dust, when in fact, no, it's just how all sports used to be delivered. And now today in this country, simplified statement here, but when it comes to competitive sports, you have football delivered that way in the entire country, Minnesota and the other 49 states.
You play for your local association, you play for your high school, you do it in a publicly owned field. You're rarely getting on a plane in football and traveling across the country every third weekend to go play some other super football team. It's very spread out.
The word I use is watered down in a very affectionate way. That's how we deliver football. That's what hockey looks like in Minnesota.
But the highly competitive levels of volleyball, soccer, lacrosse, baseball, softball, have really gravitated towards the for-profit way, not because it's good for the kids, not because it's good for the sport. It's because people have realized I can make money, and in some cases a lot of money, if I package youth sports and sell it to the segment of parents willing to pay a lot of money to buy it.
[Jason Jacobs] (45:36 - 46:38)
So on the one hand, I mean, the vision sounds awesome. And for all the right reasons, the joy, the community, the life skills, the memories, the friendships, all the things that for the vast majority of the kids that play, sports are really about. What I do hear is I hear people tout Minnesota spitting out more D1 commits, Minnesota spitting out more NHL players, so the model's working.
And I want to just push on that. I don't know the data. You probably do know the data, or you certainly know it better than me.
But I just want to give you a hypothetical for discussion purposes. Let's say, because you seem like you're all about top of the funnel, top of the funnel, top of the funnel, get more people into the sport and staying in the sport, right? Which I love.
It's great, right? But are we optimizing for just the number? So let's say Minnesota has, I'm just making up stupid numbers, but like 1,000 people that play the game.
Just completely off, but just hypothetically here.
[Mike Snee] (46:38 - 46:39)
There's about 60,000 that play.
[Jason Jacobs] (46:39 - 47:08)
Okay, so 60,000, and let's say out the other side of the assembly line, if you're just looking at performance and achievement, right, there's X many that make it to the NHL, let's say, right? Or D1 commits or whatever, right? So in the absolutes, maybe it's the highest number, right?
But percentage-wise, relative to the denominator, it might actually be a much lower percentage than some of these smaller- I'll interrupt you.
[Mike Snee] (47:08 - 47:29)
We do have those numbers, Jason. A reason why I have a very high level of passion for this is I believe there's a belief that some people will acknowledge, yeah, hockey in Minnesota is cheaper. Hockey in Minnesota, you don't travel as much, and it's cool to play in front of student sections and your girlfriend and all that good stuff, but your development suffers because of it.
[Jason Jacobs] (47:30 - 47:34)
What if the absolute number was higher if you took the same denominator?
[Mike Snee] (47:34 - 47:46)
Minnesota, Jason, gets so much more juice from their squeeze, okay? In other words, we over-index. So you asked about data.
I want to avoid getting too deep into data, but here we go.
[Jason Jacobs] (47:47 - 47:48)
I know you know the data.
[Mike Snee] (47:48 - 51:34)
One out of 59 people in our country are from Minnesota. So one out of 59 Americans are Minnesota. We're a small state.
We're a small state. One out of 10, approximately. It's hard to get the exact number.
One out of 10 hockey-playing Americans under the age of 18 are from Minnesota. One out of five American men that play Division I college hockey are from Minnesota. One out of four and a half American men that play NHL hockey are from Minnesota.
One out of three American women that play NCAA Division I hockey are from Minnesota. One out of 2.7 American women in the PWHL are from Minnesota. So the further up you go that hockey pyramid, the better it gets.
Minnesota doesn't lead because we have more hockey players, which we do have more hockey players. We get so much more out of those hockey players. I want to say I'm not an expert in this because I don't have any degrees or anything like that, but I've paid a lot of attention for 17 years.
We have about 135 community hockey associations across the state providing hockey to kids mostly from age 15 down. We have about 140 boys' varsity high school hockey programs. We have about 115 girls' high school hockey programs.
Last year, 68 of those 140 programs had an alum playing Division I men's hockey. Last year, 68, 60 of the 114 girls' varsity programs had an alum playing Division I hockey. And last year, 32 of the 140 boys' varsity programs had an alum in the NHL.
So the magic to hockey in Minnesota from like why does it squeeze out more high-end players is because we keep more players playing longer and taking themselves serious as hockey players. So we have 140 boys' varsity programs. We have 140 16- or 17-year-olds that say to themselves, I'm the best goalie on this team and this team matters.
If you're only going to put your kids on eight teams, you reduce that. We have 140 boys that are captains of their teams, 114 girls that are captains of their teams. So you keep more players playing longer.
There's a player, I was watching him last night. I know this is going to be played later, but I was watching Colorado against Seattle and looking at Sam Malinsky's stats. Pull up Sam Malinsky sometime.
You look at what it looks like. I've never met Sam Malinsky. I don't even know if I know what he looks like.
But I know what his elite prospects page looks like. And he just kept playing hockey. I don't think anybody at 14 thought Sam would play Division I, much less be a top four NHL defenseman and doing what he's doing right now.
And Sam isn't like this big-time oddity. Sam is representative of what I think makes Minnesota really good. Those superstar players, I don't know.
I think everybody says this. Is this really true? They're going to figure it out.
But it's how do you allow those other players to just stay involved, take themselves seriously, see themselves as a serious hockey player, so that if there is a time that they're going to suddenly kind of like take this big leap in who they are as a player, that they're still playing the game. And, again, I've never, like I said, never even talked to Sam Malinsky. But maybe if he was growing up in a different place, the model in the other place would have told him, you're not part of the top tier, so maybe you should take yourself less seriously as a hockey player.
[Jason Jacobs] (51:34 - 51:52)
So some follow-up questions for that. One, and I guess I'll list them, but then you don't have to take them all at once. But one is, you know, there's a saying out there that's steel sharpens steel.
I would just like you to react to that, given that— Can I react to it right now?
[Mike Snee] (51:52 - 53:07)
Sure. That's a phrase used a lot by people trying to make money at hockey. I mean, it is.
It's a phrase used a lot by people trying to make money at hockey. And an example I will use, there's a great football player for the University of Minnesota named Coy Parrish. He's very similar to Cooper Dejean with the Philadelphia Eagles.
In Coy's case, he went to a super small high school in northern Minnesota playing for— it's called ESCO, super small. Fifteen percent of the boys in his high school were also his football teammates. There were guys that were probably 120 pounds, 5'8", that were his football team.
Different versions of steel. And Coy isn't, again, an aberration. That's what football looks like.
You play in small towns, wealthy suburbs, urban core, tons of players needed for a roster. Some guys are five-star recruits headed to Alabama, and other guys can't bench the bar. All right?
So steel sharpens steel is a frequent statement used by people trying to make money at the game, trying to convince your 12-year-old in small-town Minnesota that he's going to die on the vine if you don't pull him out of there and put him at my program, where we travel the country playing games with and against better players.
[Jason Jacobs] (53:08 - 53:18)
So a similar thing that you hear is, like, there's no real development there. Like, oh, this place has real development. That place develops players the best.
[Mike Snee] (53:19 - 53:31)
Do they develop the players the best, Jason, or do they aggregate the best players? Do they go out and get the best players already, okay, and then bring them together and then say, we're developing the best players?
[Jason Jacobs] (53:31 - 53:57)
Okay, so that leads me to my last one that I had jotted down as we were talking here, which is that it sounds like to you you need the staying power for the big leaps to happen and that the real key is, like, don't die. And I don't mean die literally. I mean die like stop playing the sport, right?
That implies that big leaps are more internal versus external, and that environment doesn't matter.
[Mike Snee] (53:58 - 54:05)
Again, I need to be careful. I'm not a long-term athlete development specialist. I'm just a guy with access to the internet, okay?
[Jason Jacobs] (54:05 - 54:09)
Like, whatever you are, I'm less than that in this topic.
[Mike Snee] (54:10 - 56:37)
So here's what I say. First thing, most important thing is it doesn't matter how good your hockey coaches are. It doesn't matter how good your hockey academy is if all the kids chose basketball or wrestling, okay?
So the first most important thing is we got to cram as many six-year-olds, seven-year-old girls and boys into the hockey funnel, okay? Another stat Minnesota leads in, we have a lot more lightly talented hockey players than everywhere else, okay? And that might be the most important stat because that's the one that makes us a state of hockey, is we have all sorts of people playing hockey, okay, including some lightly talented ones, which is probably what you would say I am.
But the most important thing is whatever model environment you have, is that it's appealing to as many parents of six- and seven-year-old kids as possible so that they say, yeah, I'm signing my kid up for hockey instead of basketball. That is bar none the most important thing, okay? So one, that's the number one.
And then number two, do we have an environment that encourages those families to keep their kid playing hockey for as long as possible? That's what I would say. So get as many playing and keep them playing for as long as possible.
And I don't think it takes, it doesn't take somebody with a couple of doctorate degrees to realize if the requirement for your 10-year-old daughter to play hockey is $18,000 every third Friday out of school for your 10-year-old because she's got some kind of thing in Anchorage and then some kind of thing in San Jose and then some kind of thing in Buffalo. So you're always on a plane. You're using your vacation to follow your 10-year-old daughter around the country.
And you're paying all that unnecessary money, okay? If that's what your hockey looks like, then there are a whole lot of parents out there saying, we're not getting our daughter into hockey. If hockey looks like my daughter, all of her practices are at a rink near my house.
Half of her games are at a rink near my house. Her teammates all live near us so we can carpool if necessary. Her other games are at rinks 5, 10, or 15 miles from our house.
That's going to be more appealing to a lot more people. You'll get a lot more 6, 7, and 8-year-olds playing the sport if that's what it looks like. In the macro view, get as many 6 and 7-year-olds playing your game and then do your best so that they're still playing the game when they're 16 or 17.
[Jason Jacobs] (56:38 - 57:09)
This was great. One of the values of the show is not only for me to unpack a better understanding of the ecosystem where I am and have a more informed perspective because I think it's definitely enlightening. It gives me a lot to think about and hopefully listeners as well.
Thank you, Mike, for taking the time and sharing your perspective. I think it's awesome what you guys have in Minnesota. I'm really glad that you're so passionate and even made it your professional charter to protect, reinforce, and grow it.
I think it's great for Minnesota and great for the sport.
[Mike Snee] (57:09 - 57:13)
Thanks, Jason. I appreciate the invitation and I enjoyed our conversation.
[Jason Jacobs] (57:13 - 57:26)
Me too. Thanks for listening to Puck Academy. If you enjoyed this episode, follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone serious about their game.
See you next week.