Corporate-backed youth hockey is very big stuff in Metro Detroit.
Bryan Gruley of Bloomberg Business reports on the long-standing phenomena in Detroit, and how its produced some top-notch players in the National Hockey League. Some players come from all over the world to play in the youth leagues here.
Gruley writes:
HoneyBaked Ham Co. sells glazed, spiral-cut hams at 425 shops nationwide. Little Caesars is one of the world’s largest pizza chains. Compuware Corp. is a business software firm with thousands of customers.
Together they’ve produced more than 50 players for the National Hockey League.
Only in ice hockey -- and almost exclusively in Detroit -- do large companies lend their brands and hundreds of thousands of dollars to individual teams that shape grade-schoolers into college and big-league prospects.
Some youth soccer teams wear sponsors’ logos, and companies such as Nike Inc. and McDonald’s Corp. subsidize soccer, lacrosse, and basketball camps and tournaments. But those arrangements are a far cry from the Motor City’s year-round, vertically integrated hockey machine.
Along with retailer Belle Tire Inc. and auto dealer Victory Honda, Little Caesars, Compuware and HoneyBaked are known in the hockey world less for what they sell than how teams wearing their colors rank among the best in North America.
Frank Provenzano, former assistant general manager for two NHL teams, skated against some of Detroit’s corporate squads when he was growing up in Canada. “I didn’t even know what Compuware was,” he says. “I still don’t. I just know they put out great hockey teams.”
The reputation of the youth leagues in Detroit is widespread.
Gruley writes:
Players come from across the U.S. and even Europe to compete for the Detroit teams in elite AAA leagues for girls and boys age 11 to 19. A Florida real-estate mogul married to supermodel Elle Macpherson flies his 11-year-old son to Detroit to play for a Belle Tire team ranked No. 1 in the country.
