Foes on the Hardwood, Friends on the Ice: Hen Hud/Haldane Hockey Team Wraps up a Winning Season

The current Hendrick Hudson High School hockey team, a third-year program, is enjoying a well-deserved rest after clinching the Conference 1, League 2 championship. The Hen Hud squad includes five players from Haldane High School, in Cold Spring – a common opponent in other sports, especially basketball, where the games are always close – but, when it comes to hockey, everyone skates under the Sailors banner. 

With so much emphasis nationwide on shared services and collaboration for both schools and municipalities, it’s exciting to see collaboration taking place outside the traditional academic environment, but still in a school setting.

Practices during the season are twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at the Ice Time rink, in Newburgh, and most games take place at the Brewster Ice Arena, which now has both indoor and outdoor hockey rinks. With limited rosters as it is, there’s no junior varsity program to work as a feeder system for the team, so virtually everybody also plays in travel or club programs around the area. 

The Sailors’ Head Coach is Mike Grean, a product of the Rye schools who now lives in Cold Spring and makes his living as a contractor (Grean Contracting Inc. - www.mghammer.com). “Hockey’s a small world,” Grean said; the current coaches at John Jay and Rye Town/Harrison are also Rye hockey alumni.

One downside of not having a junior squad is the range of heights and weights from 9th through 12th grade. Since hockey is a physically demanding game with short “shifts” during which “lines” of players hit the ice for a few minutes at a time, there are opportunities for almost everyone on the bench to play. Grean’s 2013-14 squad, which included five players from the Haldane school district, had three goalies, three offensive lines, and two sets of defensemen, which is a little shorter bench than he’d like, but obviously workable, given the team’s 7 and 4 league record, and 13 and 8 record overall.

The rules in high school hockey are not that different from what you would see at an NHL game: there is full checking (physical contact) with the usual penalties applying; teams play three 15-minute periods (as opposed to 20); and penalty time is 1.5 minutes (as opposed to 2 minutes). If teams reach a tie at the end of regulation, they play a 5-mniute overtime period, and a tie is declared if there’s no winner. In playoffs, a shootout would follow.

Grean is enthusiastic about the future of this program. Although he’s losing three seniors to graduation, there are at least three interested ninth graders in the pipeline. Coming up soon is a spring, after-school league, with 12 games and two practices, designed to keep players in shape, but mostly, Grean said to “let them have fun.”

Hen Hud Athletic Director, Tom Baker, said of Grean, “Mike has done a nice job,” and of the players, “It’s a commitment, and I give them all credit.” As for the connection with Haldane, Grean couldn’t be happier with the skills and enthusiasm the Putnam players add to his bench: “It was a beautiful marriage,” he said.