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Roseau Hockey
To summarize Roseau hockey in one word: TRADITION
In the hockey-frenzied town of Roseau, Minn., 10 miles
south of the Canadian border, septuagenarian
grandmas can give you a 10-minute lecture on the
technique of a face-off in the defensive end.
But you aren't going hear it today because Roseau is
awash in euphoria – again – after winning the
Minnesota boys' state high school AA championship
Saturday night against a field of opponents with
student bodies five and six times larger than their
own.
The amazement was not that Roseau won the
championship with a 5-1 victory over Grand Rapids,
but that anyone in the jammed galleries of 18,000 in the Excel Energy Center Saturday night should have been surprised. Today marks the seventh time in the tournament's 62-year history that championship banners are flying in the little town of scarcely 2,000 folks just beneath the 49th parallel.
Four days ago the citizens locked up the town, pointed their SUVs south on Highway 89, and drove 430 miles to St. Paul. Most of them didn't need maps or compass headings. Somehow in the biggest tournament of them all, Roseau's hockey team seems almost always to be there, and one of the reasons might have been reflected in the quiet and respectful leave that Coach Scott Oliver took on Saturday morning, the day of the championship game.
His nephew, Chad Allen, lost his life while serving with the Marines in Iraq. The coach and his player-son, Nick Oliver, attended the funeral in Maple Lake, Minn., and then returned to the team. Before each player left the locker room for the championship game a few hours later, they touched their bonding board above the doorway, brought down from Roseau and inscribed "Play Like a Champion."
Roseau thrives on its image as the team of the north. How far north? So far that the huge, ice-sheathed Lake of the Woods, 20 miles away, is a certified remnant of the last glacial age of North America. It is what's left of the prehistoric Lake Agassiz that was created by the receding ice flow.
Sometime a little more recently in Roseau – something like 100 years ago – they discovered hockey. And the community of predominately second- and third-generation Scandinavians created its own history. Thirty one times it has advanced to the Minnesota state tournament, which among most hockey clans is regarded as the blue-ribbon event in American high school hockey. It has given to world hockey the brothers Neal, Aaron, and Paul Broten, all of whom played in the National Hockey League among nearly a dozen Roseau graduates who made it to the pros. Neal Broten starred on the "Miracle on Ice" American team that won the 1980 Olympics.
And after sophomore Tyler Landman scored twice and sophomore goalie Mike Lee stonewalled the more experienced Grand Rapids attackers here Saturday night, there had to be some logical explanation for the little town's remarkable achievement over the decades.
"Well, it's become a way of life up there," says Jack
Almquist, a Minneapolis accountant who was a goalie for
Roseau in the 1950s and the son of the man who became
the godfather of Roseau hockey, Oscar Almquist, the coach
for 30 years. "We were close enough to Canada to hear all
those Hockey Night in Canada radio broadcasts. We had a
lot of ice up there, and hockey was what you did if you
were a kid."
"We played street hockey. We played hockey anywhere we
could," he adds. "Sometimes we played in towns that
didn't have indoor rinks. I remember playing in Williams
one day when it was 40 degrees below zero. But now they
have three hockey arenas in Roseau. A lot of the building
was done with volunteer help, and now there's all the ice
time the kids want, and I guess it's been free, so the whole town gets involved. And the standards are high. The kids take pride. The whole community does, and they're in it together."
What it meant was a decision by the Roseau school system (and the community) to enter the recently created Minnesota Class AA tournament, reserved for the heavyweights of Minnesota schoolboy hockey, although its enrollment of 325 could have qualified for the smaller school tournament. Instead it went for broke and in this year's playoffs defeated Woodbury of the Twin Cities (enrollment 1,765), Rochester Century (1,352), and Grand Rapids (877).
It played with the discipline, swift movement, and confidence that continually impresses hockey scouts from throughout North America who come to this tournament expecting to see the action dominated by megaschools from the Minneapolis and St. Paul suburbs. Often it is.
The big state tournament is a showcase of atmospherics: a noisy and jubilant mesh of State Fair, Mardi Gras, and the biggest family reunion of the year, because in certain parts of Minnesota, including the big cities, hockey creates something close to a cult. You know you're at the state hockey tournament when otherwise sensible people playfully body check their friends and yell, "Keep your head up."
The game does reach obsessive levels among families. Kids' hockey has become part of the fabric of life in many Minnesota communities, from the rural towns to the expanding and prosperous suburbs. It's not uncommon to see 10- and 11-year-olds entered in tournaments hundreds of miles away from home, arrayed in uniforms and the latest equipment.
But in Roseau, tradition is a word they prefer to obsession. In St. Paul Saturday night, it was close for a while, but near the end of the first period, Ryan Larson banged in a goal off a rebound. In the next two periods Ben Johnson, Ben Nelson, and Landman (twice) all scored while the Roseau defense and young Lee in goal shut out the Grand Rapids star, Patrick White.
It was not exactly another miracle on ice. Roseau played as though it expected to win, which it usually does.
Source: www.csmonitor.com: By Jim Klobuchar
At this time of year there isn’t a lot to do in Warroad, Minn., a little town at the southwestern end of the Lake of the Woods, just a few miles from the Canadian border. There is no movie theater, the one bowling alley closed a while ago and the nearest shopping mall is in Grand Forks, N.D., two and half hours away across a windswept plain. You can snowmobile, but the snowfall has been a little skimpy so far this winter. Or you can ice fish, though until just a couple of weeks ago, when the temperature finally plunged to double digits below, it might have been unwise to drive a pickup out onto the lake. Or like many Warroad residents, you can flock to the Gardens, the town’s main ice rink, especially on a night when the Warroad High School Warriors are playing. What basketball is to Indiana and football is to Texas, hockey is to Minnesota, a passion so intense that it borders on civic religion. And even in this hockey-mad state, Warroad, which bills itself as Hockeytown U.S.A. and displays a pair of crossed hockey sticks on the town water tower, is legendary for its fervor.
The Gardens is a kind of oasis — a place to see your neighbors, escape from the grind of a long northern winter and even enjoy a vicarious thrill or two, watching the Warriors cream Crookston or Thief River. Teenagers flirt here. Friends catch up on the news. Mothers bring their kids and let them zip around the lobby on their wheeled sneakers. The railbirds, the guys too nervous to sit, stand in the corner and never take their eyes off the ice.
“What else are you going to do up here?” said Ruben Bjorkman, a longtime observer of the local hockey culture. “It’s cold.”
There are people who even make a point of attending not just the games but even the high school practice every afternoon, among them such local eminences as Mr. Bjorkman, a two-time Olympic player (1948 and 1952) who went on to a successful college coaching career and now keeps an eye on his grandson, Andy Stoskopf, a sophomore Warrior; and Gordon Christian, known for some reason as Ginny, who played for the 1956 Olympic team and is now the town’s walking repository of hockey lore. For these men, and for lots of people in town, watching hockey isn’t just a pastime, it’s part of the fabric of small-town life.
The neighboring town of Roseau, 20 miles down Highway 11, is just as besotted, maybe more so, and the rivalry between them, going back 60 years or so, is probably the most famous and most intense in the state. The teams play each other twice every season, and those two evenings are among the biggest events all winter. People look forward to them for weeks, and replay them in conversations for days afterward.
Like most great rivalries, this one is between two places that are more alike than not, and entails unspoken elements of fondness and respect as well as of enmity. There was some genuinely bad blood a couple of years ago when it was proposed that the county courthouse be moved from Roseau to Warroad, but in most respects Warroad and Roseau are siblings of a sort — little towns in the middle of nowhere that have evolved in much the same way and see each other almost as mirror images, real-life Lake Woebegons. Breanna Jackson, an 11th grader at Warroad High, explained the delicate nature of the relationship this way: “I could date a boy from Roseau, but I would never root for them.”
ROSEAU, the county seat, is larger, with a population of 2,700, and to judge from some of the big, two-story houses in the residential neighborhoods, a little more prosperous. Warroad (population 1,700) has the prettier setting, along the lake and the Warroad River, and is socially more diverse, with a sizable Ojibwe population and a growing number of Hmong people from Laos. Both towns are the kinds of places where in wintertime people leave their cars and trucks running and unlocked while they do errands or stop off for a cup of coffee, the unofficial state beverage. And far from being wary or standoffish, the townspeople in both are startlingly, almost unnaturally friendly.
For places so small, both towns have nurtured an exceptional amount of standout hockey talent. This is in part because Warroad, with two rinks, and Roseau, with three, not to mention a couple of well-maintained outdoor rinks, offer hours and hours of instruction and ice time (all free) to local kids; and in part, no doubt, because the local culture inevitably turns hockey players into celebrities.
“They worship hockey here,” said a Warroad student who was apparently one of the few nonbelievers in town.
Warroad has the edge in former Olympians, thanks mostly to a single family, the Christians: Ginny played on the 1956 team, his brothers Bill and Roger won gold medals with the 1960 team and also played in ’64, and Bill’s son Dave played on the gold-medal-winning 1980 team. Roseau boasts more National Hockey League players, including four from a single block: Bryan Erickson, who played for four clubs in the ’80s and early ’90s, and the three Brotens: Neal, Aaron and Paul.
“Growing up, I never dreamed of playing pro hockey,” Mr. Erickson said recently. “I wasn’t even the best player on my street.” Neal Broten (one of the stars of the 1980 Olympic team) is considered by many the best college player in Minnesota history. The best high school player is probably Warroad’s Henry Boucha, who spent parts of six seasons in the N.H.L. before getting butt-ended in the eye. But he is more famous for his heroic performance in what is often recalled as the best high school game ever, the 1969 state final between Warroad and Edina. Hockey fans in Minnesota actually remember these things.
This year, Roseau, ranked seventh in the state, was in theory a slight favorite, but the nature of the rivalry is such that rankings don’t matter much and upsets happen all the time. To complicate matters, the brand-new Warroad coach, Bruce Olson, is himself a Roseau alumnus, and the most likely starting goalie for the Warriors, Jacob Vatnsdal, is a Roseau resident who transferred to Warroad to get more playing time. The prospect of Jacob representing Warroad against Roseau delighted some in town but made others uneasy. “I wouldn’t feel right doing that,” said John Heneman, a banker and one of the town fathers. “Play for my rival?”
For budgetary reasons, Warroad had to cut out cheerleading this year, so on game day, Jan. 11, there weren’t as many hallway signs as usual at the high school. But lots of girls and even some teachers turned up wearing yellow and black, the team colors, and some of them — the students, that is — were also in shorts or miniskirts. (Going bare-legged in midwinter is apparently a form of Minnesota machisma.) As is customary on game days, the members of the hockey team were all wearing neckties, and most of them were so wound up that going to class was torture.
In midafternoon, just as school was letting out, Tim Oshie, the junior varsity coach, organized what was billed as “A Night With the Roseau-Warroad Hockey Legends,” 10 veterans from each town who happened to include six Olympians and five former N.H.L.’ers. They joked, swapped war stories and ribbed each other until Henry Boucha got serious for a minute.
“One of the highlights of my career was playing in that state final that year,” he said. “Just playing for your community, that’s the greatest gift for an athlete. The Olympics was the same type of deal, only there we were playing for a national community, the United States. It’s an immense feeling, like having sex for the first time.”
An hour before game time the rink was more than half full, with people continuing to stream in from the parking lot — or lumber in, rather. It was 10 below, and the wind so sharp it sawed at your ears. Many families had made a night of it, with dinner beforehand at the Main Street Bar and Grill or at Shirley’s, across the street from the rink. The final attendance was estimated to be 2,800, not quite standing-room only because the game was televised on Fox Sports North, but nevertheless more than half the combined populations of the two towns, who greeted each other like relatives at a family reunion.
The crowd included at least four generations of hockey fans, if you count babies in plastic carriers, and all the essential high school subgroups: jocks, band kids, theater kids, bare-legged cuties, even a few goths. The Warroad band, which has a big-school percussion section, played “Louie Louie” and, when the team took the ice, the Atlanta Braves’ “Tomahawk Chop” song. Over on the Roseau side, a kid wearing a giant green ram’s head led a green-suited (and, in some cases, green-faced) cheering section. You could hardly hear yourself think.
The game itself was about as good as high-school hockey gets, which is to say, as good as hockey gets: fast, intense and full of passion. Warroad jumped off to an early one-goal lead and clung to it through the first period, with the help of some acrobatic saves by Jacob Vatnsdal, who had been greeted by a hail of boos from the Roseau side but won a lot of admirers among the locals, many of whom had never seen him play before. Still, Roseau scored a couple of power-play goals early in the second period and a third goal halfway through the third.
Warroad tried to rally behind the efforts of Aaron Marvin, who is among the best players in the state but was shadowed so closely it seemed as if vines were clinging to him. In the end Alex Bjerk, in the net for Roseau, made a couple of key saves and the clock ran down with Vatnsdal benched for an additional skater and the Warroad fans, down 3-1, still shrieking for one more chance. Afterward, the Roseau coach, Scott Oliver, who is from Winnipeg, said, “When I got here, I knew this game was big, but until you’re in it, you have no idea.”
Outside, it had dropped seven more degrees, and many fans drove home to hook their engine-block heaters up to electrical umbilical cords.
In just a couple of weeks, on Jan. 30, everyone would get to do this all over again cheer, suffer, exult, despair — only in Roseau this time, where the rink is much older than Warroad’s 14-year-old building. The Roseau Memorial Arena is an old, wood-ceilinged ark of a place with a pine-paneled lobby dinged from decades of floor hockey games.
There is actually a brand-new rink in town, right next to the high school, but the Rams prefer the old one, where they and their fans can commune with the past.
Source: www.travel.nytimes.com: Published: January 26, 2007
"The Game-The Early Years" of Roseau hockey. Image used by permission from artist Marv Espe and
Roseau's Famous "North Rink"
