Ranger School students use a lot of modern technology: ArcMap, Carlson, Excel, SILVAH; total stations, trigonometry, measuring logs, Garmins, statistics, chainsaws, planimeters, Facebook, email, WORD, cell phones, IPODS, MP3 players, and more. Life can be stressful and complicated.

Contrast these with a simple plan: Take a puck, hit it with a stick, and put it into the net. Life can be joyous and simple.

Add an opponent, some teammates, and you have a natural recreational activity for Ranger School students.  What else can you do with six months of winter?

Hockey was originally invented as a college recreational activity (King’s College School, Windsor, Nova Scotia, 1800), and it has been a good fit for Ranger School students.

The Class of 1920, eager to get on the Flow. The frozen Oswegatchie River has always been an alluring site.

Jim Coufal, RS’57, told a story of how hockey saved his life.  He said that, as a student at Wanakena, he became very ill.  They thought it was a cold or flu, and he was resting in the dormitory.  Several hockey-playing classmates had to go to the hospital to have stitches removed.  They forced Jim to go along, too, threatening to dress him if he refused.  Turns out that Jim had a ruptured appendix, and needed immediate treatment!

In 1995 and 1996, the Faculty were in a discussion about life at Wanakena.  The students needed some outlet, some activity, something physical to distract them from the monotony of dormitory life and long winters.  Something other than getting into trouble.  It was the Class of 1997 which presented a solution.

It got cold early that winter.  By mid-November 1996, the Oswegatchie River had started to freeze over.  One late afternoon, as the last hour of daylight crept over campus, a few students ventured onto the ice to skate.  The first response from the faculty was panic!  The River was still flowing down the Channel, only the shorelines were frozen.  We could actually see students walking out to the edge of the ice just to look down into the water!  But, this was an outdoor activity, and it seemed to be something the Class was interested in doing.  It was decided that, with some supervision and reasonable caution, hockey might be a solution to some social problems.

Class of 1997 hockey club, inside the Clifton-Fine Arena in Star Lake, NY. Ted Krenrich and Jim Norman, front middle, kneeling, helped train their classmates in basic hockey skills.

We got permission to rent the Clifton-Fine arena in Star Lake. Using their own equipment, students played on weekends to develop their skills. Jim Norman, Ted Krenrich and others were already skilled players, and tried to teach the rest of us. Things seemed to be going well until the first (and only!) concussion happened.

Winter Weekend, 1997, was a social event when students from the Syracuse Campus came to Wanakena for a few days recreation.  As hockey was already scheduled for Saturday night, we opened the game to students from ESF.  I remember watching Brent Ludlow go onto the ice to place the hockey net in place, and then a student from ESF stepped through the doorway onto the ice.  He fell with his first step, facedown right on the ice, and cut his face.  Then, I noticed Brent standing up, dazed, at the other end of the rink.  As he had been pushing the net down the rink, he slipped and knocked his head into the metal post of the net.  He couldn’t remember how he had gotten there!  Within minutes of starting, we had to take two players to the hospital for treatment.  (Brent did have a minor concussion.  It was very disconcerting to his wife, who had come to watch him play for the first time.)

The next week, we heard from the Arena that any hockey players had to wear helmets (a policy they had not enforced prior to that weekend).  With a strong show of support for the support, the Ranger School faculty agreed to purchase hockey helmets for students who wanted to play.  That’s when equipment storage started to become a problem.

Students in the Class of 1998 also showed a lot of interest in the game. Ryan Hanavan and Jay Lawrence spent their evening hours making a wood-framed wire hockey net.  They also organized a trip to Ottawa to watch the Senators play Saku Koivu and the Montreal Canadiens, October 25, 1997.  The Canadiens won, 4-2, and a van full of Ranger School students enjoyed a brief trip to another nation’s capital city.

“I don’t really remember too many details (about building the nets) other than I’m glad my tetanus shot was current. I thought we put two nets together so we could play hockey up in the tennis courts. We tried to bring them out to the flow but they were no match for real pucks. They worked great with the plastic street pucks and balls that we had though.  Jay was the mastermind behind that plan. We worked on them after school and over the weekend and then cleared off the cherry seeds and leaves from the tennis courts.  Those were the days…”

Ryan Hanavan, ’97, January 2011

The Class of 1998 also wanted to play against someone.  A real game.  At the time, ESF in Syracuse had a team of faculty and staff who played regularly with their own club.  A deal was struck; the ESF faculty traveled to Star Lake and had a Saturday afternoon competition against the RS students.  After much haggling over how to count goals (multiplying the player’s age times the number of goals, that sort of thing), it turned out to be a disaster for RS hockey.  The experienced faculty ran over the amateur Ranger School students and soundly trounced them.   We never tried that again.

Street Hockey.  For a few years, the tennis court was turned into a street hockey court.  This was popular mostly during the fall semester, before the snow started to fall.  We purchased some street hockey sticks, pads for the goalie, and eventually got some real hockey nets.  Street hockey did get the students excited for winter ice hockey.

1999 Street hockey team in front of the wooden net made by Ryan Hanavan and Jay Lawrence, ‘98.

The Class of 1999 wanted to play a real game, too. (this was despite one of the students losing his front teeth in a nasty interaction of his mouth with the ice).  By now, two years of hockey alumni had accumulated, and a natural competition presented itself as simply as dew in the morning.  We rented a rink in Fulton, NY, and everyone had a good time.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, a new Ranger School tradition had been started.  Other than the Alumni Reunion in August, the annual Alumni hockey game may be largest gathering of alumni, students and their families each year.

Ranger School students, alumni, and faculty attending the 1999 game in Pulaski, NY

The 2000 alumni game was also played in Fulton, NY, but in 2001, Kirby Coon (’94) arranged for the arena in Pulaski, NY.  By then, a large number of alumni wanted to return to play.  The Pulaski arena was easily accessible, just off the interstate, and was a shorter drive from Wanakena.  It still had wire walls instead of glass (it was an arena “in progress”), and Pulaski had a Ponderosa restaurant which held tables for us after the game.  So, Pulaski became the place to be for a March hockey game.

Vern Fonda was a memorable student in the class of 2001.  As he’s currently an EnCon officer for the DEC, we shouldn’t say anything too incriminating.  But, he did instigate a change in Ranger School hockey tradition by designing a jersey for the team.  Its design of an axe crossed with a hockey stick, mountains in the background, has been used by each class since.  Most of the classes have had a forest green jersey, but there have also been white and black jerseys.

Kevin Reagan, RS'2007, wearing the green team jersey.

The Class of 2007, motivated by Dan Cycon, a hockey player, did something very special.  Dan conspired with the RS Alumni organization to make a permanent display of the Alumni game results.   They also got a hockey cup to present to winning teams, the “Bridgen Cup”.  Jim Norman, then president of the Ranger School Alumni Association and one of the original ’97 hockey team, presented the Cup and plaque to Professor Bridgen during the May 2007 graduation program.  A special display of the plaque, Cup, and photos from each Alumni game is mounted on a wall in the Ranger School cafeteria as an inspiration for future students.

The annual Alumni game was moved to Tennity Arena in Syracuse, starting with the 2009 game.  Although the original reason for the move was to make scheduling easier, the arena’s nearness to ESF, its nicer quality rink and dressing rooms, and its accessibility for larger crowds of families and other spectators make Tennity Arena a special place for the last game of the year.  Usually held the first Saturday in March, the alumni game also dates the oncoming of spring and the meltdown of the Clifton-Fine Arena.  It’s an occasion of mixed feelings, an exciting opportunity to show off newly-developed skills, marked with sadness as the season comes to an end.

Hockey has probably become a permanent part of Ranger School life.  As long as winters stay cold, with the Oswegatchie freezing solid, Ranger School students will continue to respond to the call of the ice.

Ranger School students play a pick-up hockey game on the Oswegatchie River in Wanakena, NY