“Finally, some hockey weather!” Danny Roman said with a smile following Saturday morning’s 12-and-under hockey practice at the Buckskill Winter Club.
Tim Luzadre, Buckskill’s head hockey coach since the winter club opened there 18 years ago, readily agreed. Neither one seemed to mind that it was 19 degrees.
Luzadre grew up playing hockey in Michigan. An East Hampton native, Roman played roller hockey as a youngster, but made the switch to ice hockey after graduating from high school. “I still have a photo you took of our team 30 years ago at the Rinx in Hauppauge when we played there at midnight.”
“Are you sure it was me?” said this writer, who ordinarily is in bed by 9.
“It has your name on it.”
“Well, that proves it.”
Asked to compare roller to ice hockey, which he prefers, Roman said, “Ice hockey’s faster and you can turn quicker. When you stop in roller hockey, you stop.”
Luzadre remembers in the Winter Club’s early days playing pickup games with Billy Tortorella, Randy Leland, Paul Davis, and others. Hockey here had come far since then, he said.
There are four Peconic Hockey Foundation teams, ranging from 8 to 16-year-olds, who are using Buckskill as their home rink at the moment. An up-to-date $6,000 scoreboard that the foundation donated recently overlooks the north end of the regulation National Hockey League rink.
“We train the kids, and then, when they’re a bit older, they take off to play with travel teams up the Island,” said Luzadre. “We’re a feeder program primarily. Later, the kids we’ve trained will come back and tell us they’re playing high-level hockey in college — some of them will help us out with the coaching. It’s kind of like a homecoming.”
As for the hour-and-a-half junior hockey practices, “We do a lot of skating in the first hour,” Luzadre said. “Then we teach them how to carry the puck properly, how to be efficient on the ice, and after that we do passing drills and scrimmage for a half-hour.”
Judging from a cursory view, the youngsters scrimmaging Saturday looked to be quite good, even the youngest, 4-year-old Carter Kochanasz, whose father, Matt, an East Hampton Village police officer, plays pickup hockey at the Winter Club with fellow first responders. “It’s a good stress reliever and there’s a lot of camaraderie,” said the elder Kochanasz, whose other sons, Harrison, 2, and Zachary, 1, presumably will follow in Carter’s footsteps.
Buckskill’s junior hockey players, who have moved up from the introductory bridge hockey level, practice Saturdays and Mondays, though on Monday, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, the 12-u homegrown Buckskill Bears (Phoenix Utsch, Teddy Teryazos, Olivia Green, Mateo Vegara, Clemens Emptage, Merritt Emptage, and Damian Sosa) were to have made their debut at 9 a.m. at the bubble on County Road 39 in Southampton. Originally, the game had been scheduled for Buckskill, whose rink does not have a roof, but a prediction of rain caused the switch, Luzadre said.
The Peconic Hockey Foundation-sponsored teams and teams from Southampton have played some at the East Hampton rink this winter, though, obviously, they’re weather-dependent. “To play sanctioned games you’ve got to have the rink lined,” Luzadre, who also gives private hockey lessons, said. “We have the proper lines, but they melt in the sun.” The club posts a daily schedule on its website, buckskillwinterclub.com.
Luzadre agreed that more and more were playing the sport here. Moreover, said Roman, because Buckskill’s rink is an uncovered one, “Covid hasn’t slowed us down.”