If you look closely, it’s easy to trace the arc of what makes Reading, Mass., a premiere hockey town in New England.
Of course, like any great hotbed of athletics, it’s not just one moment. It’s a gradual build-up over decades, backed by a community willing to support its teams through good times and bad, knowing that a sheet of ice, a pair of skates and a stick can provide so much for players and spectators alike.
For this quaint town, located just north of Boston, the tide really began shifting on the ice in the early 1980s.
Though the sport had been played in Reading for many decades prior, the 1982-83 boys high school team pushed the envelope when it captured the town’s first league title.
Behind the likes of Steve Smith and Mike Golden — a 1993 second-round NHL draft selection by the Edmonton Oilers — Reading would go on to face powerhouse Matignon at the Boston Garden in the Division 1 tournament, before ultimately bowing out, 6-4.
But it was this team that seemingly sent the Rockets in the direction of being one of, if not the, best public school programs in the commonwealth, spurred by the desire of its youth players to stay on at the high school level and play for their hometown.
These roots were firmly established in their youth program, which continues to be one of the state’s most consistent in terms of numbers and success.
For many years, the Reading Youth Hockey league was forced to work outside of its own borders, as there was not a rink, though the town would set up outdoor sheets at parks in the winter time, and backyard rinks were popping up virtually everywhere else, a tradition that still dots the Reading landscape once temperatures dip enough in the region.
“When I was a senior in high school, a buddy of mine, Mark Marfione’s dad built a small little rink, but it was perfect for two-on-two,” said Sean Collins, a 2001 graduate of Reading Memorial High School, and to this day the program’s all-time leading scorer with 270 points (130 goals, 140 assists). “We’d played two-on-two after school and then we’d sharpen our skates and go to hockey practice two hours later. We used to scrimmage two-on-two against the girls team. We would even go down to the parks — Coolidge Park and Memorial Park. It seemed like every Saturday from 1 o’clock in the afternoon until the lights turned off at 10, there was something going on down there.”
In November 1994 the town finally got what it deserved when the doors to Burbank Ice Arena opened, giving Reading a hockey facility to call its own.
This solidified the game’s hold on the town, and soon thereafter, the results of its construction would reap massive benefits in the form of state championships for the high school, including the big one in 2008, when the boys team shocked the state by becoming the first public school to capture the elite Super 8 title.
“I was playing minor-league hockey when the ’08 team won and I remember getting phone calls what seemed like every five minutes of updates,” said Collins, whose brother Garrett was on the ’08 team. “Obviously, it was a big moment for the town and our community. I think it brought a lot more kids to hockey in Reading.”
The main reason Reading has continued to maintain its grip on the sport through the years has a lot to do with those who enjoyed their tenures in the youth and high school programs remaining or returning to town to do the same with their young families.
It helped Reading Youth Hockey maintain 24 teams this past year, including five girls teams and 300-plus total players — number which haven’t changed much over the years.
“When I came I noticed there was definitely a correlation,” said Reading Youth Hockey president Chris Meehan, who moved from another hockey town, Medford. “There was a lot of interest in it, a lot of interest in the high school game at the time. The teams were very successful in the late ’90s with players that went on to play at UNH and BU, guys like Chris Dyment, Steve Saviano, Sean Collins. So those guys were kind of in their high school years when I moved to town. That generated a lot of buzz about the program.”
What the youth program has done is allow kids the opportunity to form early bonds, despite the fact that they might not live in the same part of town, and those relationships last through the players’ formative years.
“It was awesome. When I was in Mites and Squirts, I was playing with the boys. I loved competing with them,” said current University of Vermont forward Ali O’Leary, winner of the 2015 ESPN Boston “Miss Hockey” award after helping guide the Rockets to a Division 1 championship. “A lot of the kids I was playing with, I wasn’t in school with. Once I got to high school, I had connections with these kids from when I was younger from playing with them. It’s a lot of connections around town that are nice to have.”
Those connections spread all around the town, from places such as Dynamik Sports, which was owned and operated by Rockets coaching legend Peter Doherty, who was at the helm of the 2008 title team. Dynamik is still owned and operated by the family, with son Mark welcoming customers to his shop when not serving as coach of the current boys program, which he helped steer to a 2014 Division 1 title.
And in the category of those returning the favor, Golden served as girls head coach during their ’15 title run, Dyment runs the youth skills program and Collins has seemingly coached at all levels, knowing full well he is tied in for many years to come with a 7-year-old currently playing Mites.
Much like everyone else who has hockey ties to Reading, Collins, who plays in a four-team league of mostly Reading alums at Burbank every Tuesday night, would have it no other way.
“We’ll be in Reading Youth Hockey for the next 10 years or so,” he said with a friendly sigh of a parent who knows what his schedule will be looking like for the next decade. “It’s statewide, but you see a lot of kids leaving, whether it’s to go to juniors or private schools. I’m going to do my best to make sure most people in Reading stay at the high school and feel what it’s like to play with your buddies in front of your hometown and their parents and their friends.”
