The Pond Hockey Classic event was scaled back, but not the enthusiasm
By John Koziol Union Leader Correspondent | Feb 6, 2021
Despite being masked up and scaled back because of COVID-19, the 2021 New England Pond Hockey Classic on Lake Winnipesaukee’s Meredith Bay had many participants grinning like kids.
Among them were Lou Shipley and his fellow Andover Convalescents, who hail from in and around Andover, Mass., and competed in the 50’s Open Division.
“We’ve been coming for 11 years and it’s more important than Christmas, from our point of view, and literally nothing would stop us from playing,” said Shipley, who has a vacation home in Holderness, and when he’s not playing hockey, is a lecturer at the Harvard Business School.
Also a former tech company CEO, Shipley joked in a telephone interview that he and the Convalescents “play to our name,” and that they’re thrilled to be able to lace up their skates and sling a puck around.
“We all grew up playing hockey in New England and a lot of us have backyard rinks,” said Shipley, adding that hockey has been “a great outdoor activity during COVID.”
The Pond Hockey Classic is the brainchild of Lakes Region resident Scott Crowder, who played college hockey at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and whose dad, Bruce, and uncle Keith played in the National Hockey League, including time with the Boston Bruins.
The event is considered to be one of the largest pond hockey tournaments in North America. Now in its 12th year, it has never been canceled.
The tournament is following guidelines set by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the NH Department of Health and Human Services, he said, as well as the Governor’s Re-opening Task Force. Spectators were banned from inside the rink venue.
Crowder called the 2021 tournament “a stripped-down version of the event we love.”
Bruce Crowder, whose Essex 73’s team is named after a junior-hockey team he played on in Canada, said the event “is a little bit of nostalgia” for more mature players and “a novelty, an experience” for the younger ones.
Some of the camaraderie has been lost, he said, but COVID-19 didn’t ice the tournament.
“I asked my team” if they wanted to play despite the pandemic, said Crowder, “and everybody wanted to do it,” while being masked-up and following safety protocols.
“We need everybody to abide,” he said.
“We had to make some big adjustments,” Shipley said. Among them was dispersing his teammates to their own accommodations, rather than having them stay with him at his house on Squam Lake.
“We’re doing everything outdoors. I’m bringing a tent to set up on the ice, and we’ll eat outdoors.”
The Pond Hockey Classic is “so much fun for everyone and we look so much forward to it that we just wanted to find a way to make it work,” Shipley said.
The 2020 event had 280 teams from the U.S. and Canada competing in four-on-four, no-goalie hockey on 26 rinks, Scott Crowder said.
This year 130 teams are playing on 14 rinks.
“One of the things that made this special is that it’s free,” Scott Crowder said. “The hardest pill to swallow” is that spectators can’t get up close to the action.
In addition to attendance, corporate sponsorship is down, too, said Crowder, with “a lot of them taking the year off.”
On the positive side, he said many teams that didn’t come to this year’s event already have committed to being there in 2022.
Crowder thanked the town of Meredith, the state of New Hampshire and other partners for working with him to make the Classic happen, saying that, cumulatively, their support has been “amazing.”
The Pond Hockey Classic, which began Friday, wraps up Sunday.