Knights see bright future with high school league after 1st season

The Golden Knights’ success has led to a youth hockey boom across Southern Nevada.

Almost 3,000 kids age 18 and younger are registered to play in the state, according to USA Hockey. There were 539 in 2016-17, the season before the Knights’ inaugural NHL campaign.

The team wants to continue that growth. That led to the creation of the Vegas Golden Knights High School Hockey League, which wrapped up its first 15-game season in July.

“This is something that, quite frankly, in year one when I got here, it was like, ‘How do we do this?’ ” said Knights broadcaster Darren Eliot, who is also the team’s senior vice president of hockey programming and facility operations. “First, everybody’s got to play. That’s goal No. 1. Get hockey sticks in hand, get them to love the game. And we’ve been successful from that standpoint.”

Hockey isn’t a sanctioned sport by the Nevada Interscholastic Activities Association. The main reasons are the lack of access to gear and equipment and the limited amount of ice time at local rinks. Only two Southern Nevada high schools — Bishop Gorman and Faith Lutheran — have varsity teams.

Level playing field

The Knights wanted to do something for the kids they felt weren’t getting opportunities. There was demand for it, as 1,110 of the players registered in Nevada are between 13 and 18 years old.

The Knights created a coed league to get them in a competitive environment. They hope it’s just the start of something bigger.

The league was unveiled Feb. 11 and featured 16 teams from eight different areas of the Valley: Centennial/North Las Vegas, Summerlin, Summerlin South, Spring Valley/Durango, Enterprise/Anthem, Paradise/Green Valley, North Henderson/Black Mountain and Southeast Henderson/Foothills. Each area fielded a team in a major division and minor division.

The Knights hoped to get 320 boys and girls to sign up. They got 430 to do so within a month. There ended up being 320 participants after tryouts.

“It was night and day (from) what we actually thought the product would look like,” said Wally Lacroix, the Knights’ director of facility management. “We weren’t really sure what the product would look like, but pleasantly surprised with the outcome of the skill level and the attention that everybody had for it — the parents, the athletes, the coaches.”

The Knights decided to begin the league in April to ensure ice was available at City National Arena, America First Center and Hylo Park Arena. That also opened the door for local players in travel leagues to participate.

The Black Mountain Miners, based in North Henderson, went 15-0 and won the major division on July 25. The team got a huge boost from players that also skate on travel teams.

“What we hope is that more travel kids would play next year,” Eliot said. “Next year, let’s have more travel kids be a part of it and see if that tips the balance (of competition) a little bit.”

What used to be

Lacroix managed Crystal Palace Skating Center in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the facility held the largest high school roller hockey league on the West Coast.

Thirty-two teams played in one building.

Doing the same thing with ice hockey would have been a little more difficult. It helps that the Knights were able to spread their games over three rinks.

Lacroix said the organization wasn’t sure at first if it could pull off a league with primarily high schoolers. They came up with the idea of dividing the Valley into eight areas after looking at hot maps provided by USA Hockey that showed where registered players lived.

The Knights talked about putting together a league in which kids played for their specific high school, but Lacroix said it would have only involved six schools.

“So to get the community involved, that’s where we came up with the hot map and called them areas,” he said. “Instead, you take three or four schools to do one team and you’re fighting for your area.”

Program’s future

Lacroix said the Knights’ goal isn’t to run a high school league forever. Their hope is eventually high schools will pursue hockey as an NIAA-sanctioned sport.

Finding ice time remains the primary problem, especially in the fall. All seven rinks in the valley are busy during that time of the year.

That makes the timeline for the next steps fluid.

“I think it’s still a project that’s anywhere from two to five years away,” Lacroix said. “But in the meantime, the goal is to keep it hot, keep it going and then get everybody even more interested so when it does start, we get out there with a bang.”

Contact Danny Webster at dwebster@reviewjournal.com. Follow @DannyWebster21 on X.