The puck starts here

Last year Amy Stewart made a sign to wave at the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade. It read: “Hockey injury donations.” She wasn’t joking, either. Her husband Robert Stewart had just torn his rotator cuff, and before that he broke his ankle and caught a swift blow that cut a six-stitch slice into his chin.

Like his father and uncle before him, Stewart works for the Baton Rouge Fire Department. He comes from a long line of proud, hard-as-nails firefighters, but Stewart sustained these injuries on the ice as one of 75 players who bleed for the sport every October through March in the six-team Baton Rouge United Hockey Association.

Though the Baton Rouge Kingfish are long gone, the minor league team’s seven-year stint did the best thing possible for hockey in the Capital City. It turned the game indigenous.

Like Stewart, few of these players grew up around ice hockey, and they come from all backgrounds and professions. But when they converge on Leo’s Rollerland & Iceland near the Mall at Cortana, these amateur hockey hounds are known as the Bandits, the Bulls, the Cyclones, the Gunners, the Knights and the Spartans.

And each player lives for it.

“The dedication these people have is amazing,” says Stewart, now in his seventh season with the league. “For me it’s a big stress relief from work, from daily life. It’s fellowship. It’s a shared experience.”

BRUHA was born in 1999 when, inspired by watching the Kingfish, two teams worth of amateurs launched a league of their own. Leo’s owner Perry Seaman had recently resurfaced his rink with ice for the first time since the early 1980s and thought a hockey league could be a small but worthwhile niche of business. He was wrong; it has been a huge plus for his bottom line. “I’ve shoveled more snow than anybody in Baton Rouge, I guarantee you that,” Seaman says. Now Leo’s hosts games for the LSU club team, a youth ice hockey league and what he calls “A-League” pick-up games between highly competitive players, most of them transplanted Yankees, Canadians and former Kingfish.

But it is the 75 or so amateur adults in BRUHA who spend the most time on the ice. Teams play two nights a week and spend a third practicing.

Compared with soccer or basketball, hockey can be expensive recreation. League players pony up $500 per season, and can spend another $300 every year on sticks, tape, and replacement pads and gear. When new players enter the league Stewart sends them to Fred Sanford. That’s what he calls Gunners defender Francis Kinamore, in a reference to Sanford & Son. Kinamore has collected a lot of hockey “junk” in the past nine years.

“Hockey can be pretty expensive, so I’ve become the stockpiler,” says Kinamore, a 49-year-old engineering consultant. “New people in the league can borrow old equipment from me to get started, then gradually buy their own.”

Used pads, sticks and skates fill Kinamore’s garage where he spends hours sharpening blades using a machine given to him by the supportive owner of a Canadian sports shop. “He just loves that we’re playing hockey down here,” Kinamore says.

Casey Laborde is a rookie and one of the league’s newest players. The 24-year-old architecture intern recently moved to Baton Rouge after graduating from North Carolina State. He says he discovered the league through a Facebook search. Though Laborde had experience as a roller hockey goalie, playing on ice has been a huge adjustment. Nine games into the season he scored his first goal for the Bulls, a thrilling slapshot he thinks he may have stolen from a teammate.

“I’m just ecstatic about the league,” Laborde says. “It’s been the best way for me to get out and meet people in the area.”

One of the most unlikely players in an unlikely league may be Rev. Sam Maranto, a Redemptorist priest in his 60s. His fellow Gunners say Maranto has the highest attendance rate, rarely missing a game or practice and always leading by example. BRUHA is a “non-checking” league, but things still get rough on occasion, Stewart says.

“[Maranto] is probably the most level-headed player out there,” says teammate Maddie Mayes. “But that probably makes sense since he’s a priest.”

Mayes is one of only six women in the league and at 21, also the youngest. But her lithe appearance belies the fact that the LSU student has played youth ice hockey since her teens. She hasn’t sustained an injury in years. Mayes grew up in Baton Rouge cheering for the now-departed Kingfish, and remembers being named “stick girl” for one home game when she was given a hockey stick signed by the entire team. “There’s school and there’s work,” Mayes says. “But hockey is what I do for me.”

Mayes has formed cross-generational friendships with Maranto, Stewart and other guys in the league. Off the ice, she says, teammates and rivals alike eat sushi and watch NHL games together. Sunday night and Thursday night matches all end with the same post-game ritual. Players hang out in the Leo’s parking lot and drink a beer.

There, the trash talk turns to playful ribbing, and game time partisanship becomes instant camaraderie. Sure they love to skate and score and win, but Baton Rouge’s ice hockey players are also here for this. In a city obsessed with other sports, they feel a sense of belonging among dozens of fellow hockey fanatics.

“These players are so passionate about it that outsiders might think we’re crazy,” Stewart says. “All I know is that throughout the week, I’m just counting down till those games.” icehockeybr.com