skip navigation

Focus on Fun Pays Off for St. Cloud

By Minnesota Hockey, 03/26/13, 11:00AM CDT

Share

Fairs are one of our society's favorite summer attractions.  An array of games and activities coupled with foods people crave help fairs around the state produce sizable crowds even in rural areas.  What do these warm weather festivals have to do with youth hockey? Kids of all ages and backgrounds love them.

The St. Cloud Youth Hockey Association (SCYHA) has been promoting and recruiting new hockey players for several years. With three different high school teams (Apollo, Tech & Cathedral) relying on their youth program to produce high quality hockey players, they know how important it is to be proactive, but that doesn’t mean they are always successful.

“We had been noticing a trend at our junior mite and mite levels where the numbers had kind of leveled off and some years were declining,” said Jeff Hess, Mite Coordinator and Recruitment/Retention Advisor for SCYHA. “We wanted to try something new.”

Together, SCYHA came up with the idea of hosting a Family Fun Day.  The plan was to combine their traditional late registration day which targets new families, with a fair-style atmosphere that would be more apt to draw in families who have no prior association with hockey. 

As an incentive for these new families to try hockey, SCYHA offered a special discount for any new players registering that day. They also offered current members of the association referral discounts for any friends that attended the Family Fun Day and signed up to play.

Many kids showed up to take advantage of relay races, an inflatable bounce house, tattoos, face paint and crazy hair, but with the help of Blizzard, the St. Cloud State University mascot, and some hockey challenges, they sparked an interest in hockey and left as the newest members of SCYHA.

“If we got one kid, we would have been happy, but we increased our enrollment at that level by about 15 kids which is about a 10-12% increase over what we had the prior year,” stated Hess.

Not only was the event important for SCYHA, it was helpful for the new families.  They were able to interact with members of SCYHA in a stress-free environment where the main priority was kids having fun. 

“If you’re just promoting it as a registration, people are coming to sign up or find out about hockey. It can be intimidating,” said Hess. “You provide this component as being kind of a fun day. The kids can come and just hang out, go play, while the parents can kind of ask questions, and it’s not so intimidating.”

Congratulations and thank you to SCYHA for their creativity, hard work and dedication towards growing the game of hockey. Their Family Fun Day is another great example of the foundation of youth hockey. Kids play to have fun. Find a way to make the game fun and the kids will come to you!

Keep that in mind the next time you are at an event like the State Fair, and you may be onto the next great idea for recruiting hockey players.

Most Popular