PAYING A HEAVY PRICE
IN PURSUIT OF THE ‘ DREAM’ Majority of major junior players are left with little return, broken promises
He fought when he felt it was necessary, often throwing down with bigger, meaner kids who pounded his face as thousands watched, screaming from the bleachers. He never complained about it. He was a good teammate.
Nor did he complain when he was traded from a team in western Quebec to a smaller market club in Atlantic Canada.
Even today — after his team initially refused to pay him the scholarship money offered when he signed with them — he has only nice things to say about his time in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.
Like so many elite- level hockey players in their mid- teens, Kevin signed a contract with the understanding that for every year he gave his team, he’d get a year’s worth of university tuition in return.
And yet it took his entire first semester at university, a time in which Kevin and his parents went back and forth with the league, to finally get the club to honour the agreement.
“One of the loopholes ( in my contract) was that you have to pass all of the courses that you attended while playing with the team in order to qualify for a scholarship,” said Kevin, who spoke on condition that his last name and the name of his former team not be published.
“So, because I slacked off while I was playing in the ( QJMHL), they said I didn’t qualify at first. It was a little frustrating because when you’re with the team, your job is to win games. School isn’t a priority. You’re chasing the dream. It feels like the NHL is within your grasp.”
Here was a guy who bled for his club, who bruised his knuckles to protect teammates, two of whom moved on to careers in the National Hockey League.
Kevin, who is now 26 years old, spent his teenage years busing it from one highway town to the next, earning $ 50 a week — for what was essentially a full- time job — with the hope that he would get something back from hockey.
Forfeit scholarships
Had Kevin and his parents not pushed back, he would have walked away from the game empty- handed.
A look at the players from five 2006 QMJHL teams chosen at random shows that more than 60 per cent of players didn’t see a dime from the scholarship fund administered by the Canadian Hockey League, which oversees the country’s three major junior leagues: the QMJHL, the Ontario Hockey League and the Western Hockey League, which represent 60 teams.
The majority of these young men forfeited their scholarship rights because they chose to pursue a career in pro hockey, earning low five figures in the minor leagues in the hopes of being called up to the NHL.
Meanwhile, the deadline on their scholarships expired.
There are still hundreds of former junior athletes who benefit from the CHL’s scholarship fund each year. In 2013, the league paid out $ 5 million in tuition fees to its alumni.
The league also boasts a high- school graduation rate that’s above the national average.
But if the CHL’s goal is to produce university graduates, it appears to be falling short of any reasonable definition of success.
In fairness, the CHL also produces more NHL players than any other junior league in the world.
A look at the numbers, however, shows that less than five per cent of the 1,300 players enrolled in major junior hockey will play more than a few games in the NHL.
There is no players’ association in junior hockey.
The CHL considers its players student athletes rather than employees. But unlike in the U. S. collegiate system, the 16- year- olds drafted into one of three CHL leagues don’t get to choose where they’ll play or what school they’ll attend.
They compete in upwards of 100 games a season, sometimes missing classes for a week while travelling with their team. Each player earns a monthly stipend of about $ 450, which the league raised this year from $ 200. Instead of living in a dorm on campus, the kids are assigned a billet family.
Ontario native Jamie McKinven never played in the CHL, opting instead to pursue a hockey scholarship at Clarkson University in upstate New York. It was when he began coaching Tier II junior hockey in Kingston — mentoring kids who’d just been released from CHL clubs — that he started to notice something troublesome.
“I spent a lot of time with players coming back from major junior and most of my time was spent talking them out of hating themselves,” said McKinven, author of So You Want your Kid to Play Pro Hockey. “At that stage in their careers, the kids are pretty depressed and dejected. They feel like failures.”
He says the CHL should offer its players scholarships with no strings attached. He’d also like to see an easier travelling schedule and access to mental health resources.
Under the CHL’s new education package, players can claim their scholarship within 30 months of finishing their time in junior major ( the length of the contract was extended by 12 months this year after mounting pressure on the league).
But letting go of the dream so quickly is unlikely, says one former CHL player who is now in his 30s.
“There is a huge incentive for these kids to carry the torch and keep playing,” said James, who spoke on condition that his name not be published.
“If you have to choose between quitting hockey to go to school and giving the game one more chance, that’s not an easy decision. Especially for a starry- eyed 18- year- old.”
Full- time job
The CHL, James says, uses the lure of NHL glory to recruit children while coaches nurture that dream to get the most out of their players.
“You’ve built your whole life around the dream, it’s hard to just turn that off when the CHL is done with you,” he said.
“So you wake up one day just scratching your head going, ‘ Jesus Christ, I was paid basically nothing, I spent four years of my life living in a town in the middle of nowhere, having an owner make, in some cases, a lot of money off my back, while I was taking punches in the face to support a dream I had. And I find out, on the back end, that I’m not really qualified to do anything when it’s all over.”
It might not be the NHL, but major junior hockey isn’t operating on a shoestring budget.
You can watch the CHL on television, play as your favourite team on Xbox, eat out of a cereal box with CHL players on it and pay for that cereal with a credit card bearing a junior hockey team’s logo.
In February, the CHL signed a 10- year broadcasting deal with Rogers Sportsnet to televise 50 games each season.
According to the CHL’s website, junior teams sold about nine million tickets last season.
Successful franchises such as the Quebec Ramparts and London Knights sell nearly 10,000 tickets to each of their 40 home games. Tickets average about $ 15 apiece and the team takes a cut of the beer, food and merchandising sold at concession stands.
The NHL also pays teams development fees for each player drafted into the big leagues.
In a July interview with the Toronto Star, CHL commissioner David Branch said that “one- third of teams are profitable, one- third are close, and one- third are losing money.”
It costs money to train these kids, bus them across the country, pay their billet families and provide their equipment. Some estimates provided by the league claim each player receives about $ 30,000 worth of services from their team each year.
A union and the salary rights it might guarantee could push small market franchises into financial ruin.
This appears to be Branch’s main argument against a players’ union. Branch did not return The Gazette’s phone calls or repeated emails requesting an interview.
There’s no way of verifying Branch’s statements about CHL finances because, as privately owned businesses, teams don’t have to publicly disclose their earnings.
Canada’s largest private- sector labour union, Unifor, is backing a movement to create a CHL players association. Unifor president Jerry Dias says that if the league is going to cry poor, it should open its books and prove it can’t afford to compensate players.
“Of course there are teams that struggle to get by, but it’s the same in the NHL,” Dias told The Gazette. “That’s why teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs subsidize teams like the Florida Panthers.”
Last month, Dias met with Ontario Labour Minister Kevin Flynn to discuss the issue.
“The crux of this is, are these players employees?” said Gene Chiarello, a former major junior player and employment lawyer who was at the meeting.
Under law, an employee is compensated for a service and acts under the direct control of managers. That was the metric used by a federal labour relations board in the United States, last March, when it ruled that collegiate athletes were employees and could legally form unions. The labour relations board determined that scholarships are a form of compensation.
“You were always abiding by the team’s rules, even when you weren’t at the rink,” Chiarello said. “If you wanted to go out on a Thursday night and knock a few back, well, you better do it before 10 p. m. because there’s a curfew. You’re always under the thumb of the boss, the coach. Hey, that’s part of the game; you always need that figure, that power structure to keep things on track. But it was a job, a full- time job, make no mistake about it.”