MOVE OVER DETROIT
Before Paul Geffre was the President of Mammoth Lakes Youth Hockey (MLYH), he was just a dad who’d started playing the sport himself only a few years earlier.
Geffre grew up in Minnesota, but as one of five kids, his family could never afford to play hockey. So, he got started at 35-years old on his neighbor’s beer leagues.
In 2017, when he moved to Mammoth from Los Angeles, his five-year-old son, Noah, had just begun to play hockey, and he signed him up for the MLYH recreational program.
At the time, the program had just 29 kids across all ages, and the website was a “flashback to the dawn of the internet,” Geffre said.
When he and Noah arrived at the old outdoor rink at the scheduled 4:30 p.m. meeting time, nobody was there. Other parents and children trickled in slowly, but there were still no coaches at the rink by 5:15.
“So I just put my skates on,” he said. “I was like, all right, let’s try to do some stuff.”
Patrick Bernard showed up shortly after and saw Geffre guiding the kids on the ice. Bernard was the program’s organizer, and he became MLYH’s first official president when it became a non-profit in 2018.
He made Geffre a coach on the spot.
MLYH started in 2012, and in 2013, it began holding a tournament called the “Outdoor Winter Classic” to help raise money and give the kids other teams to play against. But they didn’t have enough kids yet, and they’d have to put 10 year-olds on the 8-and-under roster just to have a team.
The program enrollment grew in the years after Geffre joined. He credits the growing enrollment to a global recognition of hockey, as well as his son’s social networking skills.
“Honestly, my son probably had more to do with growing the program than I did just because he would recruit all his buddies. Like, come on, play hockey.”
In 2020, they held the Winter Classic over Presidents’ Weekend and their 8U Mites team took second place … with all properly aged players.
It was the first time any of the MLYH teams had any real success and Geffre said he still has a copy of the Sheet issue where the winning kids were on the front page.
Shortly after, the COVID-19 pandemic began. But since hockey was one of the only sports that kids could still play because they were outside, MLYH could still compete through the winter. The 10U Squirt team again took second place in the 2021 Winter Classic tournament.
However, the outdoor rink posed some significant challenges to the program, cutting seasons short and meaning a lot of time spent shoveling. The maximum number of practices possible on the outdoor rink was 20, Geffre said, but averaged between 12 and 15.
Ground for the new rink broke in April 2021, and MLYH expected to be playing there for the 2022 season, so it created Mammoth Stars Travel Hockey, which played tournaments in other cities for the first time.
The next season, MLYH expanded the 10U (Squirt), 12U (Peewee), and 14U (Bantam) teams. The indoor rink wasn’t finished, but MLYH competed hard and often played in the championship games – making it to the final round but never coming out victorious.
That is, until 2023, when MLYH teams were finally able to play in the indoor rink and won their championship game.
“The more time you have on ice, the better,” Geffre said. “And so being inside has been an absolute game changer for us just in terms of the development of the kids.”
In 2023, MLYH also started an in-house league to provide non-travel players a place to learn and play. It held games every Sunday evening calling it, “Hockey Night in Mammoth,” a nod to “Hockey Night in Canada.” This year, 118 kids are playing in the house league.
There are 45 kids over three teams this season playing full travel hockey seasons. Right now, the 14U Bantam team is 10-0, the 12U Peewee team is 11-0, and the 10U Squirt team is 2-6-1.
They’re only playing B level this season, but Geffre hopes they can climb the ladder to A to stay in a competitive and challenging league.
“As long as we keep winning, every weekend in March we’ll have a playoff weekend,” Geffre said. “Which I can’t even believe I’m saying because when we started, we were just hoping to be competitive and not lose every day – and now we’re on the flip side of that.”
Geffre’s coaching philosophy, though, is more about having fun than anything else.
“If you were to come and watch our six-year-olds practice, it looks nothing like hockey,” he said. “It is literally kids just all over the ice falling down. And that’s a huge part of it: because you just have to learn how to get back up.”
He tries to make the program as welcoming and affordable to the kids as he can, especially since he didn’t get that chance when he was a kid, he said. And he is always looking to find more passionate coaches to help keep up with the program’s demands.
“Just giving a darn is a huge thing,” he said. ”You don’t have to be good at hockey, you don’t have to even understand the game. But if you care and you can learn, then you can coach.”
He puts in over ten hours a week to the program on top of his full time job, but he said it’s a labor of love and he’s surrounded by a great crew.
“It’s the hardest game in the world, but it’s also the most fun game in the world,” he said.
*As to the story title, Detroit is known as Hockeytown USA but Mammoth may not be far behind. At last glance, Mammoth has as many hockey players per capita as the state of Minnesota, and 10x per capita as anywhere else in California.
