As hockey season gets underway, hyphenated team names become all the more common: the Pembroke-Campbell Spartans, the Brady-Valley Kingsmen.
The names don’t always roll off the tongue, but these cooperatives (co-ops) between schools are the best way of giving as many student-athletes as possible the opportunity to participate in high school athletics, especially for some of the sports like hockey and football that require larger rosters and costly equipment.
The New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association has an esoteric explanation of the purpose of co-ops in its handbook: “The objective of cooperative teams is to provide educational-based athletic opportunities for schools that may not be able to provide those experiences for their students.”
Mike Desilets, the Bow athletic director who’s also on the NHIAA committee that approves and denies applications for hockey co-ops, provided a more specific explanation.
“We form co-ops to give kids opportunities,” he said. “I think that’s really the bottom line to it. Was it kind of unwritten that maybe these two schools will (eventually) form their own two teams? Yeah, it probably was, but I don’t think that’s ever happened, and I don’t know that it ever will. I think a lot of these co-ops are formed just out of necessity to keep at least one of the programs alive and to give the opportunities to the kids from the other school to play as well.”
At Merrimack Valley, a group of students was interested in playing boys’ hockey, but they didn’t have enough interest for the Pride to have their own team. Luckily, Bishop Brady was also short of the number of players needed to form a team, and they joined forces along with Concord Christian Academy for the 2022-23 season.
In a perfect world, the co-op would allow a school like Merrimack Valley to have some time to generate a wider interest in boys’ hockey, so a few years down the road, they can split from Bishop Brady and create their own team. But especially at smaller schools, this is tougher to accomplish because there simply aren’t enough kids. As Desilets said, co-ops more often become a means of survival.
Kenny Edwards, MV’s athletic director, is upbeat about growing boys’ hockey at the school, but for the moment he’s content with the current opportunity for his student-athletes.
“We’re hoping that the momentum that this co-op creates will cause a larger interest among our students for ice hockey,” he said. “We would always love to have our own standalone team, but at this point in time, the chance for our student-athletes to play ice hockey and to represent Merrimack Valley, we’re very happy with where we’re at right now and very appreciative to Bishop Brady and Concord Christian.”
The process of forming the co-op is relatively straightforward: The collaborating schools need to appoint one of the ADs as the liaison to the NHIAA and provide information about how the team will be funded, who the coaches will be, how transportation will work and some other administrative details.
After this information is provided and the school boards and administrators from each school have approved the agreement, the NHIAA Classification Committee and NHIAA Executive Council will have the final say on approving the co-op. If approved, the agreement lasts for two years, after which the schools can choose to continue the co-op, break off into separate teams or form different co-ops.
Pembroke Academy has had a long-standing co-op with Campbell High School in Litchfield for boys’ hockey that predates current athletic director Fred Vezina’s six-year tenure. Understandably, having to constantly coordinate with another school 27 miles away can prove challenging, especially when dealing with game cancellations and rescheduling.
“It’s all about communication,” Vezina said. “You just gotta keep communicating. Sometimes it gets lost, especially days when you’re trying to cancel games or something like that and you forget about the other school. For the most part, though, as long as you keep in touch with the other school, everything seems to work smoothly.”
As far as funding goes, each co-op works a little differently, but most seem to abide by a general formula where schools contribute based on how many players are part of the co-op. With Pembroke-Campbell for example, Vezina’s the lead AD, and Pembroke pays for everything related to the boys’ hockey team. Then at the end of the season, he adds up all the costs (transportation, coaching salaries, officials, renting arena space, etc.), divides it by the total number of players on the team and determines Campbell’s financial contribution according to how many players they had.
With the Merrimack Valley co-op, Edwards said they’re following a similar process, though the players are covering some of the expenses as well.
As Vezina mentioned, though, there’s no precise science to how co-ops operate.
“All I know is that we want to keep a hockey team going, and us and Campbell are making it happen,” he said. “I’ve been around where one school had 18 kids on the hockey program and the other school had four, and (the NHIAA) said, ‘The school with 18, you can be independent now. The school with four, go find something else. Find another school to co-op with.’ ”
But even through all the possible hurdles and the oddly long and clunky team names, the bottom line is that without co-ops, student-athletes wouldn’t have as many opportunities to play the sports they love. And for area athletic directors, the extra administrative challenges are worth it.
“I think the co-ops have been a great thing for a lot of the kids, just to be able to play high school sports, get to represent their school,” Vezina said. “The more kids we’ve got being active, the better off we are because all the studies show, once kids are active, they’re less likely to get in trouble, they’ll keep their good grades, they’ll be more of a functioning member of society, all that good stuff. Anything we can do to help provide opportunities we look at.”