Last fall, when I signed my daughter up for a season in St. Louis Park’s Mite league, one of the many expenses was a $200 check, above and beyond the association fees and equipment rental. It was a security deposit against the volunteer hours required of every parent with a child in the hockey program. Some lucky parent might get to run the association website. Some might coach or manage a team. Most will do their time in the venerable concession stand.
Hockey is expensive. Year-round indoor ice costs a pretty penny. Decent helmets can run a C-note, good skates even more. Pneumatic goalie pads go for $600 plus. A magistrate who works several counties in southern Minnesota recently noted that hockey fees have become a hotly contested line item in many divorce settlements.
To keep a lid on costs and preserve access for families left out of the Bush tax cut, most youth hockey associations depend on cash flow from the concession stand. So when the Gastronomer returned to work in food service, a field in which he had not been employed since the late 80s, it was with charitable motives.
In fact, youth hockey is a charity. Most hockey associations are organized as non-profits. Might a shift behind the counter be approached with the Christian humility of, say, serving Thanksgiving dinner at the homeless shelter? No comparison. The average hockey player smells far worse and demands much more than the average panhandler. And parent volunteers have been known to combine the roles of benefactor and beneficiary. The concession stand at Columbia Arena in Fridley (of Mighty Ducks fame) took $11,000 in shrink last year, according to a worker there. Arena staff have now taken over most operations.
Even so, concession workers in St. Louis Park have it pretty good. The rinks are in a separate part of the Rec Center, and the stand is in the heated section of the building. What little breezer skank does waft in can be easily overpowered by running a few orders of chicken strips through the deep fryer. Kids as young as 15 are allowed to work the stand, so St. Louis Park has invested in a low-liability deep fryer minus the wire baskets in open pools of boiling oil. It faintly resembles a small front-loading washer, with a little hinged drawer on the front to deposit frozen food. Set the timer and hot, crispy stuff comes down a chute on the side, ready to serve. Low prices bring a steady demand to the counter during games and practices: hot dog $1.50, chips $.75, slapshot special (hot dog, chips, and soda) $2.50. And it’s easy to work the till, with the 501(c)3 status ending every transaction in round, tax-free numbers.
The other night, the fryer stopped working. It accepted deposits of new food, but released only partial orders, and then none at all. I turned the heater off and gave it some time to cool down. When I opened the access door to take a look . . . well, this is a family magazine, so I just can’t tell you what I found.
“We’re out of fried food,” I informed the cashier. “The morning shift is gonna have to clean this thing.”—Joe Pastoor
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