thglobeandmail.com - It’s a problem that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
Minor hockey registration is either flat or down in this country depending on what age range you look at, with just an estimated 10 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 5 and 19 playing the game.
“That’s not a huge number,” Hockey Canada’s marketing director Dean McIntosh said. “It’s a good number relative to historically, but it’s still not a very big number.”
The are myriad reasons for that and they have been widely discussed in hockey circles the past few years, with costs, concussions and fewer new Canadians taking up the game often cited as the main causes.
That trend hasn’t escaped the notice of the private sector, either. A stagnating player base, after all, will mean fewer sales of all things hockey related.
That’s in large part why Bauer Hockey launched an interesting and ambitious plan this week to attempt to double the number of new players entering in the game by 2022, a process that will start with an in-depth study of Canadian parents who don’t put their children in the game.
