Hockey Town
LIFE ON THE ICE THRIVES FOR CHILDREN, FAMILIES, AND ADULTS
By Lisa Gregory
Photography by Turner Photography Studio
John Cetrone began playing ice hockey at 6 years old on a frozen pond near his Massachusetts home. Now 69, Cetrone is still playing. On Friday mornings he meets up with other 60-and-older players at Skate Frederick. The senior group, appropriately known as Frederick Friday Hockey, moves fast and hits the puck hard. Still.
“I think once you start playing this sport you love it,” says Cetrone. “You just keep going and doing the best you can and look forward to playing.”
His teammate, 81-year-old Tom Tanton, agrees. “It’s a very social thing at this age,” he says. “Being in the locker room beforehand and getting dressed and all the chatter going on and then afterwards the same thing. It’s fun. It’s a great sport.”
It’s a sport enjoyed by many in Frederick County, as participants, coaches and spectators. From youth leagues to the beer or adult leagues and everything in between, ice hockey is thriving locally. Those playing range from boys and men to girls and women to those who face specific challenges, such as deafness.
“Hockey is big in Frederick and a lot bigger than people realize,” says Neal Jerrell, who coaches teams for the Frederick Freeze, a youth travel hockey club, and also plays in an adult league. “The hockey community is intertwined. Everyone knows each other and loves the sport. We coach together during the day and play against each other in the beer leagues at night.”
That love starts early. Carlo Pauli, 5, began skating at the age of 3 and is currently participating in Learn to Play through the recreational Victory Hockey Program at Skate Frederick. According to his mother, Graziella Bianchi, Carlo has become quite taken with the game. Not that anyone in his family is surprised.
“My husband has been playing ice hockey since he was a little bit older than Carlo,” says Bianchi. “When we got married it was understood without question that our children would be playing ice hockey. Now his passion for this sport has rubbed off on his son.”
FAMILY THAT PLAYS TOGETHER
As evidenced by Carlo’s family, hockey is very often a family affair. Sometimes even creating them. Frederick couple Eric and Laura Rigsby actually met through hockey. Eric was playing for the club team at UMBC. “I was in a chat room trying to drum up some people to come to our games,” he says.
One of those people was Laura, who took him up on his offer and came out. Although, “I didn’t really understand the game,” she says. However, she wasn’t too thrilled by the reception she received from Eric. “I waited for him after the game, but when he came out, he didn’t say a word to me,” says Laura. “We had a bad game,” adds Eric with a grin and a slight shrug of his shoulders.
Laura left to go to her car with her friend. “I was mad,” she says. When Eric walked out of the building, “I stepped out of my car and yelled at him, ‘You make me drive an hour and a half and you’re not even going to say hi to me?’” says Laura.
Finally, Eric spoke, saying, “Can you give me a ride back to my dorm?”
She did.
Fast forward to today and the couple have a hockey-playing son of their own. Fifteen-year-old Austin took to the ice as a toddler and now plays with the Frederick Freeze. And Laura has spent her own time on the ice playing and even working at Skate Frederick, where she drove a Zamboni. “He was always here, so …,” she says nodding toward her husband.
While Laura no longer plays and now describes herself as a hockey wife and mom, Eric, who also co-hosts a hockey podcast called Beers in the Lot, has not put down the stick. Besides coaching hockey, he plays for a league called the Old Fat Bald Guys or OFBG. “We’re just about getting together and enjoying the game,” says Eric. And doing some good while at it.
This year’s 17th annual OFBG Ice Hockey Summer Tournament, played in memory of a teammate, a veteran who died by suicide, raised more than $20,000 for local charity Platoon 22, which works to help struggling veterans.
Unlike the Rigsbys, Nicole Holler and her husband, Justin, didn’t see hockey in their future. “My husband was a basketball and baseball player, and I think he was hoping we’d have basketball and baseball players,” she says. “I was a swimmer.” Adding with a chuckle, “But we got none of the above.”
Her son, Lukas, attended a Washington Capitals hockey game at the age of 4 and decided that was the sport for him. Both Lukas, now 16, and his younger brother, Maddox, 8, play travel hockey with the Freeze. Lukas is a student at Walkersville High School and also plays high school hockey for the Middletown Valley Hockey Association. Some high schools in the area have their own teams, while others are created through co-ops with players from different schools.
“The good news is the practices are different days,” says Holler. “The bad is when we add the high school team, we are at the rink six days a week.”
HOME OF CHAMPIONS
Through its programs, from rec to travel to high school, Frederick develops impressive hockey players. Urbana High School, under the direction of coach Toby Heusser, has been Monocacy Valley Hockey League champions during the 2010-2011, 2018-19 and 2022-23 seasons. The league consists of teams from Frederick, Carroll and Washington counties.
“My goal is just to have the players enjoy the game,” says Heusser, who has been named Coach of the Year by both the local league and the Maryland Student Hockey League. “Players who want to come to the rink and want to be around their teammates. That strong community that you build in the locker room and strong culture you have as a team leads to victories.”
The bonds last once those players are no longer on the ice and under his direction. Heusser, an accomplished player himself who was selected to the USA Hockey player development camp in 2018, has been invited to the weddings of former players and is sent baby pictures of their new arrivals. “That’s the stuff that means the most to me—the friendships and relationships you make through the years,” he says.
Some players choose to continue playing even after high school. “I couldn’t imagine myself at college not playing,” says Jared Kifer, a forward who plays at Davenport University in Michigan. Jared was a student at Thomas Johnson High School and played as part of a co-op team.
Kifer is not only playing hockey but studying sports management and hopes to become a coach. This past summer he worked at Skate Frederick as an assistant coach. “It was like looking at myself 10 years earlier,” he says.
GIRLS RULE
More women and girls are taking to the sport as well. According to USA Hockey, participation in girls’ hockey programs has increased 65 percent over the last 15 years. In fact, Hood College will be introducing a women’s ice hockey team during the 2024-2025 winter season. “I currently have six female players on my high school team,” says Heusser.
The Freeze has recently added two girls-only teams for 12 and older and 14 and older, colloquially known as 12U and 14U. The 12U team began playing last season. “The team played well above the expectations of a first-year team,” says Bill Robinson, associate director of girls’ hockey for the Freeze.
The 12U team finished second place in the Chesapeake Bay Hockey League. So, the decision was made to add a second team for 14U. “With two girls’ teams this season and a big enough core of girls who move up to 16U next season, our goal is to expand to three girls’ teams for the next season,” says Robinson, whose daughter plays.
“So many girls love hockey and are really good at it,” says Jerrell, whose daughter, Sydney, plays and who also helped spearhead efforts to create girls-only teams. “I hope it just keeps getting bigger for girls who haven’t discovered the sport of hockey.”
Deann Jackson discovered the game, but she came to it much later in life as a widow who lost her husband to cancer. For Jackson, hitting the ice in her 50s is a way to cope with her grief and isolation.
“Just after my husband passed, I knew that I needed to get out, meet people, see people on a regular basis and develop friendships,” she says. Jackson accomplished all the above with hockey and is giving back as much as she has received from the game. Recently, she skated with the local Mid Maryland Hockey Club and helped raise $2,200 for Habitat for Humanity of Frederick County.
“There’s no family like hockey family,” she says.
“HOCKEY IS FOR EVERYONE”
“It’s just about the love of the game, you know?” says Mike O’Neil, associate hockey director for the Freeze. He has been involved with local hockey since 2005, including running clinics as a coach and player.
“Hockey is for everyone,” O’Neil adds. “It doesn’t discriminate based on your gender, your race or your age.”
That includes players like Cameron and Dylan Vore. The brothers are both deaf and love hockey. “As far as we know there are only four deaf youth hockey players in Maryland,” says Michelle Vore, their mother.
Currently, Dylan plays with the Frederick Freeze 12U travel team and Cameron with the Frederick Victory 10U rec team. Both have played hockey for several years. Those in the Frederick hockey community are working to ensure that they have the same opportunities as any player.
According to Michelle, the Freeze is providing a deaf coach who helps Dylan during practices and games. “Cameron’s coaches this year, both of them, know ASL [American Sign Language] to some degree and it has been a really positive experience for him having access to communication,” she says.
Teammates are stepping up, too. “Almost everyone on Dylan’s team is trying to learn some sign language,” says Vore. “It’s really cool seeing a hockey team bond through sign language like this.”
Coaches for both boys work together to find ways that will make the sport more accessible. For example, “We got an app we’re going to try that’s voice to text,” says Jason Morrill, one of Cameron’s coaches. “So, if I can’t sign him something, at least I can speak into the phone and then he can read what I’m trying to tell him.”
Other game adjustments are also in the works. “University of Maryland engineering students are trying to create a wrist band that will vibrate when the official blows the whistle,” says Vore. “It’s a semester-long project, and we expect to see the result of their work sometime in December.”
All efforts that matter, says Bill Kinloch, Dylan’s coach. “I’ll never forget when Dylan scored his first goal this season,” he says. “He was on the bench waving to get his dad’s attention to make sure he saw it. That was a good moment.”
“LET’S GO CAPS”
Ian Oland stood observing the festivities taking place around him in Washington, D.C., as a massive crowd of Washington Capitals fans celebrated the team’s first Stanley Cup in June 2018. In the midst of the crazy joy, someone covering the event leaned in and said to him, “You know, you are a big part of this.”
“I just kind of teared up,” says Oland.
Oland along with Peter Hassett, both of Frederick, who met in high school, are the creators of the Russian Machine Never Breaks, or RNMB, blog. Created in 2009, the blog currently has 46,000 followers and is considered by many the go-to blog for Capitals fans. Even players themselves have been known to follow. Through its website and social media, RMNB keeps fans up to date on all things Caps and hockey.
“We want to make hockey as fun to read about as it is to watch,” says Oland.
The blog is named after the quote by Caps star Alex Ovechkin, who once nonchalantly responded to an injury by saying, “Russian machine never breaks.” It has even covered non-hockey news. When the Chelyabinsk meteor struck Russia in 2013, RMNB was the first to report the event since it happened in the hometown of Caps player Evgeny Kuznetsov. The breaking, RMNB-generated news was picked up nationally and internationally.
“That was a big one for me,” says Oland.
But Oland never forgets why RMNB began and why so many are drawn to it. “I literally felt like I would not have lived life to its fullest if I didn’t see the Capitals win a Stanley Cup,” he says.
Donya Layden and her husband understand that sentiment all too well. The Frederick couple were so thrilled by the Caps winning the Stanley Cup that when she and her husband celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary that same year, she honored both. Layden baked a cake shaped like the Stanley Cup with figurines of her and her husband wearing Caps jerseys.
“I love my husband, and I love that he loves hockey,” says Layden.
Hayley Carper’s passion for the team is no less enthusiastic. “We have an entire Caps wall dedicated to the team and have Caps stuff throughout our basement,” says Carper, also from Frederick. On that wall are newspaper clippings, a bit weathered and yellowed now, of the Caps Cup run. “I knew I would want to look back on it,” she says.
Of course, Carper is now looking forward to attending games this season. She and her boyfriend will be taking a first-timer along, as well. Their new baby boy, Levi, who already has a Caps onesie, will attend his first game.
“We can’t wait,” says Carper.