Why the Fight Over Youth Sports Is Coming for Hockey Rinks | WSJ News

Hockey rinks are often called money pits. They're really expensive to operate and they only tend to last about 25 years before running into major mechanical issues. And yet, there's this company called Black Bear Sports Group that spent the past decade going around and buying them up. We just spent several months reporting on the business of youth sports, specifically youth hockey. And one of the things that we learned is that even though hockey rinks are difficult businesses, they're also a finite commodity and that is pretty valuable. Unlike with soccer fields or basketball courts, which are all over the place, there are only a few thousand hockey rinks in all of the country because they're so expensive to build and maintain. Even towns where people are really into hockey often only have one. And when you control that rink, you can control other parts of the local youth hockey ecosystem and make money from them, too. That's a big part of what this company, Black Bear, seems to figured out. They're the largest owner-operator of hockey rinks in the country. They own almost 50 of them now. And they aren't buying them to just rent out the ice. They're using all of that real estate to run their own youth hockey clubs and tournaments, to launch streaming service for parents, to get kickbacks from vendors that they partner with, to profit off of a captive audience that often doesn't have another option nearby. All of this is helping Black Bear grow really fast, but it's also making a lot of people pretty upset. — How does the community feel about Black Bear owning the rink? Do you have a sense? They're not happy. And we've heard that from people at other rinks, too. So, we're not the only ones. Like — Chelsea. Especially parents who live in places where there's suddenly this new hockey landlord in town who's coming in and raising prices and taking over hockey programs — that used to be run by members of the community.