Ed Sneddon is one of those guys who leads a double life where the only way to know what the other half is up to is to follow him around at night.
All you know for sure is some days Sneddon shows up for work with bruises on his face, walking with a limp.
So you ask him: “Ed, what the heck happened?”
And Ed (through a jaw that might be wired shut) says: “I play hockey.”
The truth is there are a whole lot of Ed Sneddons in this world.
Every night -- on ice rinks in Marietta, Kennesaw, Alpharetta, Duluth and Cumming -- they're out there: men, women, children, skating, bumping, swinging sticks and thwacking pucks. You want to know how big amateur hockey has gotten in Atlanta? A city short of water is now running out of ice.
“We’ve booked all our ice and people are already asking us when we’re going to open another sheet,” says Paul Ross, the owner of The Ice, a $6 million facility that opened just two months ago in Cumming.
“We’re maxed out,” says Steve Jacobs, Director of Hockey Operation and Athletics at the Cooler in Alpharetta where his two rinks are booked with games and events months in advance.
It’s hard to get an accurate number of how many players are out there because there are so many house teams and leagues and levels of play. But, the biggest of them, the Atlanta Amateur Hockey League (AAHL), estimates there are 2,000 players on its roster of nearly 100 teams.
“It’s gotten insane,” says Marc Hoffritz, a vice president of the AAHL.
Hoffritz grew up in Buffalo and was practically born on skates with a stick. He said the growth of amateur hockey in Atlanta is in sync with all the snow belters who have moved here over the past three decades, making the city increasingly more Southern in name than natural inclination.
“When I started with the AAHL twenty-two years ago we had six teams and one ice rink, in Stone Mountain,” said Hoffritz. “Over the last five years it’s taken off. A lot of people have moved here from Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, Canada, the north. And that’s a lot of what is driving it.”
Dr. Al Dever, the oldest player in the AAHL and still on the ice twice a week at age 70 (“I joke that if I fall down I might not be able to get back up”), remembers the first ice age in Atlanta. It was 1974 and the National Hockey League had opened its first franchise in Atlanta, the Flames.
Dever was playing for a semi-pro hockey team, the Atlanta Knights, but there wasn’t a rink in the city big enough to play games. “So we had to drive to Macon,” said Dever. “Can you believe that?”
The AAHL is the second largest independent amateur hockey league in the nation, behind one in a suburb of Boston, where one facility has 12 rinks, said AAHL president Steve Whitfield. Independent leagues play games at multiple facilities and rent the ice. This year the AAHL will spend about $1.2 million on ice time, said Hoffritz. All the rinks in the metro area also have their own teams.
The sport isn’t cheap. To play in the AAHL, fees are $395 a season, and there are two 20-game seasons a year (the AAHL summer season is just ending), so that's about $800 to play 40 games, plus the playoffs. Equipment – skates, sticks, pads, helmet – can easily run $1,000. For players on travel leagues – who play games as far away as Canada – the annual costs can run into what it costs to send a kid to a private university.
“You’ve got people paying $25,000 a year for their kids to play travel hockey,” said Paul Ross, a Forsyth businessman who opened the The Ice because he saw huge pent-up demand for another sheet. “The money goes fast when you start adding up air fare and hotel and weekend trips to Canada and Chicago."
Ross built his rink with refrigeration equipment and the space on his property to add two more rinks. “The potential is huge,” he said. “You’ve got all these northern transplants moving down here and they’re bringing their love of the game. They get their kids on the ice, and once they do, they’re hooked.”
Recently Mike Zwierzchowski’s 12-year-old son, Tyler, was practicing with The Ice house team, the Bandits, going through shooting and skating drills led by the rink’s general manager and team coach Stephane Normandeau.
“Hockey is part of our lives,” said Zwierzchowski. “We love to watch it and my son loves to play it. He started roller hockey, but it’s now all ice hockey.”
Ed Sneddon and his team, the Niners were in the dressing room getting ready for their 8:15 game as the kids were finishing practice. By day Sneddon, 47, is a sales manager for an equipment manufacturing company. He has played hockey since he was 6 years old and was on his college team at the Western Michigan University.
After moving to Atlanta from Chicago ten years ago he saw no reason to give up the game. The Niners are in the open league which means there’s no age range, a skater just has to be 18 years or older. “Some of us have doubled and tripled that,” said Sneddon, lacing on his skates in the locker room. “You just learn to adjust your game as you get older.”
The Niners lost to the Thrashers, 5-3, but it was a tight, and physical game, the players bumping each other around once they got warmed up. Thrasher Zach Essig, 27, said afterward it was a typical, intensely competitive game in the league he’s played in four years. “I was intimidated at first when I joined because I hadn’t played in a few years,” he said. “ And there are guys out there in their 60s who can still play.”
Women, too. Ann Mahasaen, who is treasurer of the AAHL, has played hockey twelve years, first in an amateur league in Boston before moving to Atlanta where she now plays on three different teams, two co-ed, one in the all-female Lady Thrashers league. “I’m five foot two and weigh 130 pounds, so I give up at least 40 to 50 pounds against most male players,” she said. “But there are other ways to play besides being physical.”
She said she's never felt discriminated against on the ice, and the no-check rule has limited her collisions with larger men. "I've had a couple of incidents over the years, when I ran into a male player who played dirty," she said. "But it wasn't because I was a woman. It was just because he was a dirty player. But they don't last long in this league."
"We all play hard," said Sneddon, in the locker room and about to put his helmet on for another game. "But we keep it clean."
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