Sponsored By
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
DICKINSON — Hockey in Dickinson is continuing to grow and evolve since it was established back in 1985. The sport expanded four years later with Dickinson High getting a boys and girls team. Over the past 11 years, enrollment in youth and high school programs has tripled — increasing from about 200 participants to nearly 600.
“As Dickinson has grown with the oil boom, it’s created another opportunity for kids. One thing that I think we do really well at hockey that other sports can’t compete in is we’re able to get them in the door at 3, 4, 5-years-old,” Dickinson hockey coordinator Dallas Kuntz said. “You never know if they’re going to be stellar athletes, but I feel we’re getting more of those athletes coming out and playing hockey because we’re able to target that age range to get them hooked on the game.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The Dickinson Hockey Club, known as the Dickinson Outlaws, expanded further heading into the 2025-26 season. They added an additional bantam B team, for kids aged 13-14, to go along with its four peewee teams and five squirt teams.
“I think hockey, more than any other sport or activity, teaches life lessons. It’s a sport very similar to golf in the aspect that till the day you quit playing, you will not attain perfection — skating, puck skills, all that kind of stuff,” Kuntz said. “It’s a sport that you’re not going to get better at unless you truly dedicate yourself to it. I also think that it’s the best team sport.”
One program that continues to grow exponentially is the girls hockey clubs. Dickinson now fields separate 10U and 12U teams instead of one group composed of players aged 9-14.
Most players that go through these youth programs at an early age tend to have more success when they arrive at the high school level. Meanwhile, there have been a small number of individuals who are still playing hockey past high school. While the pipeline is small, Kuntz expects that pipeline to grow.
“We have a lot of kids in our youth program that we’re gonna be seeing in the next year or two. I’m really excited to see what our high school programs are gonna look like and that’s a credit to the kids that are coming up,” Kuntz said. “We have more kids today that are on the ice 12 months a year, or they’re putting the work in away from the rink. We started our summer program here three to four years ago. We got over 200 kids that are on the ice in the summer, Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.”
Two of the most notable figures that are still playing are Michael McChesney, who is in his third season in the Southern Professional Hockey League with the Peoria Rivermen, and Sierra Raatz, who is in her third season of ACHA club hockey at Adrian College.
One of the foundations of the success of the Dickinson Hockey club is its Learn to Play program. This is the grassroots of young players in the area to get their feet wet and hold a stick and shoot a puck for the first time. The high school players also hop out on the ice to provide instruction and guidance.
ADVERTISEMENT
“It’s giving those kids that introductory balance. We just want these kids buzzing around on the ice. We can teach them proper knee band, proper stride, but we just want the balance and we want them to be super aggressive,” Kuntz said. “The best hockey players that I’ve seen come through are the ones that, when you put them on the ice and they don’t know how to skate, they literally run three feet and then just wipe out.”
The community support is what drives the programs to build for the future. A big goal for the club is to build a third sheet of ice so more kids can have more access and reduce competition for ice time. That has been one of the biggest challenges that the Dickinson hockey community has had to face for the past few years.
“I know a lot of people don’t think it’s a top priority for us but the hockey community here in Dickinson is very strong and very big. More ice time is going to be big for us,” Kuntz said. “We want kids to keep coming out and playing. It’s challenging because they only have a half-ice for their practice. So there’s a lot of challenges but we’re ready to tackle them and just kind of adapt and overcome as we can.”
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
