Tag Archives: culture

Ties that Bind: Louie Nanne and the Minnesota Hockey Fishbowl

This blog has had too much politics lately. Time for a change of pace: hockey season is just around the corner! The NHL and NCAA hockey begin in the next month, junior leagues are already kicking off, and the Minnesota high school Elite League season started last weekend. But in the midst of all the new arrivals, there was also a departure: Louie Nanne, a University of Minnesota recruit, announced he would not be coming to the Gophers.

If you have any familiarity with Minnesota hockey, you’ll recognize that name. Louie’s grandfather, Lou, is Minnesota hockey royalty. As a Minnesota Gopher, North Star, North Star General Manager, and longtime commentator for the Minnesota High School tournament, it’s hard to think of any other person who’s given as much to hockey in this state over his lifetime. He also comes across a genuinely kind and caring person, willing to chat with anyone about anything hockey-related.

His grandson committed to Minnesota back in 2011, but his selection by the Gopher coaching staff quickly came under intense scrutiny. Louie Nanne’s high school numbers at Edina were decidedly pedestrian. He is a good skater, there are plenty of testaments to his excellent work ethic, and most people who viewed his status from some distance thought he could have been a decent lower-line, high-energy forward at Minnesota. Problem is, those sorts of players practically never commit before their junior years in high school—on the contrary, teams usually find them in junior leagues. In reality, the commitment made a lot of practical sense for the Gophers: due to the family’s wealth, Louie could probably pay his own way to Minnesota, freeing up precious scholarship money for other recruits. But, of course, that reasoning doesn’t sit too well with many hockey fans, who tend to be staunch believers in measuring players on merit alone.

The flap over the Gophers was only the start: in the 7th Round of the 2012 NHL draft, the Minnesota Wild snapped up Nanne. The NHL draft is quite the crapshoot by the time it gets to the 7th round, but even so, the cries of nepotism were out in full force: what were the Wild doing wasting a draft pick on Nanne when there were so many other players with better credentials left on the board?

However justified the criticism might have been, it made Louie Nanne’s life miserable. As his former Edina teammates marched to the state championship, Louie spent his senior year in Penticton, British Columbia, playing in the British Columbia Hockey League. At first, Nanne explained the move in terms of his hockey development, but it isn’t too hard to suspect other forces at work, and a later interview seemed to confirm those suspicions. He toiled away in relative obscurity, and has now announced that he won’t be a Gopher. It would be easy to decry the critics who bullied Nanne away, or, for that matter, to say Nanne shouldn’t have let a bunch of anonymous critics on social media wreck his dream of playing for the Gophers.

In reading Nanne’s decommitment note, however, a different story emerges: one of a kid who needed to leave home to come into his own. He grew up a prince of Minnesota hockey, and while that afforded him plenty of fame and advantages, it also burdened him with endless scrutiny and expectation. The community-based focus of Minnesota hockey (and I use that term broadly, so as to encompass even the D-I colleges with their loyal fan bases) often exacerbates that pressure, and it is visible, to varying degrees, in just about any program in the state. Many of us hockey commoners here in our Minnesota fishbowl don’t always see just how mentally difficult it can be to grow up as one of the bigger fish in that fishbowl, and only recently, with the proliferation of AAA youth hockey and player departures for junior leagues, have we come to realize there’s a much bigger hockey world out there.

It was especially interesting to see some of the NCAA-vs.-Canadian Major Junior arguments break out on the forum I moderate. Our members whose primary interest is in NCAA hockey tend to be pretty ambivalent about whether players stay in high school or go to U.S. junior leagues; they think the players’ development for college is more important than some fluff about “devotion to community” or a “well-rounded high school experience.” They tend to be dispassionate, well-measured observers of the high school scene. But when a few other commenters began to talk up the benefits of the Canadian route (as opposed to the NCAA) over the past year, the NCAA backers came out with their guns blazing, fiercely defending the college experience. Hockey has gone global, and the worldwide competition for a limited number of spots in the highest levels makes short shrift of all of that “community” stuff.

Our annual thread tracking early departures from Minnesota hockey over on the forum counted a record number this upcoming season, and it drew any number of responses: some lament the trend, many shrug and say “it is what it is,” and some make no effort to conceal their glee at the signs of erosion of the “restrictive” development model. As Louie Nanne can attest, there is a lot to be said for life outside the fishbowl. Players move around enough that it is easy to shed past baggage, and if they wind up in unpleasant situations, it’s not hard to get out. The lifestyle is a pretty big draw as well, with twenty-some boys whose lives are all wrapped up in the same dream all away from home for the first time. This doesn’t even touch on development, which I wrestled with in a post a few months ago.

Still, as I wrote in that post, there is a lot to be said for the cultural power of hockey in Minnesota, and no one knows that better than Louie’s grandfather, Lou. Even as his grandsons all embark on different hockey paths (another left for a U.S. junior team, and a third is staying in high school for his senior year), he keeps on covering the high school tournament year after year. Like most any parent or grandparent, he may have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to his own offspring (see his past comments more or less assuming another grandson would be a Gopher, when that does not appear terribly likely now), but he still cares deeply about the state of the sport beyond them.

In fact, hockey tends to grow not in spite of family ties, but because of parents’ care for their kids, and things snowball from there. Bob Fryberger donated a rink to Duluth East High School so that his sons would have a place to play; the rest is history with that program. Most of the prominent youth and high school programs are the same way, with fathers raising their sons to love the sport as much as they did. Things haven’t really changed, even if the more obvious recent examples are a little more exclusive. J.P. Parisé built up the Shattuck program for his son, Zach. Bernie McBain wouldn’t have founded Minnesota Made if not for Jamie.

As much as the landscape may change, hockey will never get rid of those family ties. They are a double-edged sword that keep the sport going and drive people to hate it when they see bias at work. It can only be managed, not eliminated, and requires the due diligence of every hockey parent. The question for hockey parents, then, is a simple one: are we in it only for our sons, or are our sons only part of the equation? Hockey is one part an individual quest, and as Louie Nanne shows us, sometimes we have to take a leap of faith to find ourselves. But it is also fundamentally a team sport, and every hockey boy knows he needs to have his teammates’ back, just as they have his. Sometimes the individual and the team-centered sides of hockey are in conflict, and this is, of course, why it can make for such good preparation for the rest of life.  Because there is no realm of human life where they aren’t sometimes in conflict.

Lou Nanne, for one, understands that. Since he’s a part of that same tradition, I suspect Louie Nanne does as well, or at least will soon enough. He has his dream and he has his roots, and he wouldn’t be whole without them both working in tandem. For the health of the sport he loves, he can’t afford to neglect either one.

On Developing Hockey Players in Minnesota

The NHL playoffs may be nearing their close, but the hockey season never really ends. For top-end Minnesota high school players, this means the junior league camps are just around the corner. The players will have to decide if they want to forgo the remainder of their high school careers for hockey opportunities in other cities. Some will do so to get out of, say, a bad relationship with a coach, but most will do so in pursuit of better “development” as a player. The better junior leagues have longer seasons and older players, which offer increased competition and challenges that may not be available in high school. Unsurprisingly, this also results in heated and vitriolic debates over which path makes the most sense; I’d guess that over half of the disciplinary actions I have to take on the hockey forum I moderate relate to these arguments.

The number of players choosing different development models shot up dramatically in the late 90s, and though it has since leveled off somewhat, the hockey scene will never be the same. Across the Twin Cities, a proliferation of summer hockey programs has given rise to several that have moved into the winter season and now, whether directly or indirectly, antagonize the Minnesota hockey model. (While the pre-high school, community-based youth associations technically have nothing to do with high schools, the two work in such concert that I will conflate them in this piece.) The new programs attempt to group together elite players on teams that play schedules that are far more intense than anything allowed by the powers that be—whose responses  to such challenges, as one might expect out of a many-layered bureaucracy, have often been rather slow and lurching. Canadian Major Junior leagues now eye young American players with relish, and there is something of a silent war going on between the Canadians and the proponents of high school and U.S. college hockey. (Playing Canadian Major Juniors leaves players ineligible for the NCAA.) The Alec Baer incident this past winter was probably only the opening round in an impending battle of development models.

Putting myself in the shoes of a hockey parent, I understand the shift. If I someday have a kid who loves hockey, I doubt I’d hesitate to give him or her the best development opportunities my money can buy, and I wouldn’t hold an ambitious kid back from heading off to another league if it were a good fit. Sure, I love the high school game more than any other level, and in my perfect world, no kid would ever leave. But perfect worlds aren’t necessarily good guides for what to do in the real one, and I also can look at this game from a far enough distance that I have no desire to sacrifice the goals of others to the altar of community-based hockey.

Still, two issues leave me with some reservations.

The first comes from Herb Brooks, the Minnesota hockey legend and coach of the U.S. national team that won the gold medal in the 1980 Miracle on Ice. Brooks envisioned hockey development as a pyramid, with a broad base of community-centered hockey propping up the top players. By its nature, this model is somewhat inefficient; it doesn’t allow the top players group together to maximize their development. But it also recognizes that culture matters, and that the long-term health of hockey in Minnesota requires attention to the things that make hockey more than a game. It is near-impossible to measure the value created by the bonds of community loyalty and the mystique of the ever-so-Minnesotan high school tournament, but it certainly exists, and I sincerely doubt the dream of playing for a team in Alberta or the 2004 Birth Year Team Minnesota Wolfpack Sponsored by Car Dealer X would be able to match the pull of playing for Edina or Roseau or Hill-Murray High. The reason football is so embedded in the American psyche is because its sole development model touches just about everyone who goes through a traditional American high school; kids who have minimal interest in the game still show up on Friday nights to join their friends in a rite that venerates the players but also lets each and every fan participate, an experience passed forward through schools and families and generations. The same is true for Minnesota hockey in many communities, and losing that cultural cachet in the interest of efficient development would be a real loss.

This is especially true for a sport that, due to high equipment and ice rental costs, has largely come to be the province of the wealthy. Hockey has big enough image issues as it is. In this day in age we like to pretend that any choices we make that are “best for our kids” don’t have any consequences beyond said kids. They do. People who act according to strict self-interest are naïve if they think others will not judge them for abandoning a community or having different priorities. I’m not saying it is right for those considering leaving to abandon their aspirations under communal pressure, but if they do not understand where the community is coming from, conflict will ensue. Culture matters.

The second issue has to do with the very notion of “development” itself. Many critics have wondered whether young hockey players are mature enough to leave home early, or whether the rigors of an intense training regimen will lead to burnout or injury. These are real concerns that have affected some players who seek different development paths, though they can be mitigated in various ways. Still, my questions are a bit more profound. We can justify just about anything claiming that it leads to better development, but development is such an abstract term that any serious contemplation of what it means requires some distance. Sure, more ice time will almost certainly make a player better, but we have a very limited grasp on the degrees to which it can help. At what point do we hit the point of diminishing returns, and can a different path fundamentally change the trajectory of careers that are also dependent on genetics and work ethics and other issues that pop up in life? Advocates of models have lots of anecdotes and select statistics they like to throw around, and plenty of them do make intuitive sense. But until someone can put together a study with a huge sample size that takes players and compares their career trajectories and isolates as many variables as is humanly possible, we are all groping around in the dark.

I can go even further on the development front. Does the arms race for better hockey development have an ending point, or will it simply go on until the end of time, with more and more opportunities that are less and less accessible to most anyone? On an even more existential level, is youth hockey always a means to an end, or is there more to it? Is childhood a constant progression from one step to the next, or does thinking of hockey players as crops to be grown and harvested somehow impoverish our understanding of them—and if so, in what ways?

I don’t pose any of these questions with the hope that they will lead anyone to have a sudden change of heart. I just hope people might consider them with as much objectivity as possible, instead of running away from them because they are too deep and complicated, or trying to cram knee-jerk responses into a preexisting worldview. Our inability to be completely objective is no excuse for not trying.

For the Minnesota kids who do choose to leave this offseason, I’ll be rooting for all of you. But I do have one simple request: remember where you came from. Even if you bounced around for a bit or didn’t quite fall in love with your particular program the way some people do, it is a part of you. If you love hockey, you are in some way indebted to the many people who keep it going at each and every level.

Take the example of Zack Fitzgerald—a player who is not from Duluth (his family moved there when his older brother, a future NHLer, was in high school), and left Duluth East High for Canadian Major Juniors after his freshman year. He has had a successful career as an enforcer in the American Hockey League, one step below the NHL, and got into one game in the big show. Yet he spent his formative years in Duluth, and this summer will find him back home, running a hockey camp along with his older brother. There are countless ways to help, whether through volunteer work or philanthropy; God knows schools (both public and private) need all financial the help they can get. I’d also advise donors to look beyond one’s alma mater, as means allow; for example, the need for support at Duluth East, while real, is far less pressing than it is for the dwindling program of their crosstown rivals, Duluth Denfeld. Sustaining the hockey culture in Minnesota requires a broader perspective, and programs that get financially disadvantaged kids on skates can help in ways that go far beyond the rink. So long as the base of the pyramid remains solid, I am at peace with players pursuing their hockey careers in any way they see fit. And if that base isn’t solid, before long it won’t much matter which paths players take.