Family brought hockey to Kasson

Congratulations Wildcats hockey! What a fantastic year for the girls varsity team, making its first trip to the state tournament and battling to a runner-up finish. And equally impressive was the boys team, that fought their way to a runner-up finish in 2020. My dad always said that success breeds success, so there are great things ahead for the program. Continued success, and go Cats!

What most people probably don’t know is that this is the 50^th anniversary of Kasson hockey. It dates back to 1973 when a hockey family moved to Kasson and wondered why there wasn’t a hockey rink in town. There was a small skating rink on the softball field and a nice warming house but no hockey rink.

That family was us, the Gorvins. My older brother Greg and I grew up playing “park board hockey” on outdoor rinks in Minneapolis. Most parks had a rink and a team at every youth level, which is where we learned the game and developed our skills. Then we moved to Kasson when our folks, Bernie and Pearl, bought the Gambles store in 1973. Bernie always joked that, obviously, he didn’t ask all the right questions before buying the store, like does the city have a hockey rink?

That may have been a deal-breaker, but the sale went through and it didn’t take Bernie long to find his way to City Hall where he tracked down then-Parks Director Ron Bastian and demanded to know what it would take to get an outdoor hockey rink built. The answer was simple: The city would cover half the cost and Bernie needed to raise the other half. Fair enough.

Bernie went up and down Main Street, working with the other merchants to raise his half of the funds. It didn’t take him long — probably because most of his negotiating took place at the Legion. In 1974, the rink was built, right next to the skating rink on the softball field.

The next challenge we faced was that nobody in town knew anything about hockey, except for Greg and I. We were 13 and 15 years old at the time. Bernie had watched many hockey games as we went through the Minneapolis program but he wasn’t a hockey guy. He knew enough to cheer for goals and jeer for penalties. That was it. He was, however, a substitute coach for one game. He won the game and then “retired” from coaching, but he always bragged that he was undefeated as a hockey coach.

Without any hockey minds at our disposal, Greg and I went to work as coaches — I had a Squirt team and he had a Pee Wee team. We scrounged up games wherever we could find them, mostly in Rochester and Owatonna.

Everyone older than Pee Wees played on our town team, which was the biggest bunch of misfits that have ever strapped on the blades. We had guys like Jim Hart, Lee Schoenrock, Hal Dessner, the Kelly boys and Jim Erickson. Schoenrock wore pink pompoms on his skates. Generally, the first opponent to ridicule him ended up on backside, staring up at the sky. It was a different style of hockey back then. What we lacked in finesse, we made up for in determination, and a strong will to survive 45 minutes on the ice while holding the opposition to single digits.

We picked up games with whoever would play us. Pine Island had a similar town team that we played often. I remember their outdoor ice was the quality of indoor ice because they had a homemade “Zamboni.” They’d transport 55-gallon drums of piping hot water from the cheese factory and set it on a sled that was rigged with a boom off the back and jets that laid down a nice thin layer of hot water. They pulled the sled around the rink by hand after shoveling the snow off. The ice had a yellowish tint to it, though, which was weird.

I also remember playing in Farmington when they opened their new indoor rink. They celebrated the new rink with a “grand opening,” which was a weekend full of exhibition games. I don’t remember how we did but it was always a treat to play on indoor ice.

By the time I was a senior, we had joined the Owatonna Midget League, which was an in-house league for players who couldn’t make varsity. Since they didn’t have goalie equipment, you couldn’t lift the puck when shooting on goal. So, the “goalies” would either lay across the crease or play on their hands and knees with their stick lying across the crease. The trick was to get the goalies up on their skates by firing the first shot about chest high. Except for that, teams loved playing us because we showed up with a goalie in full pads. They still weren’t allowed to lift the puck but they did anyway…a lot. Because they could.

Two highlights stood out to me during those early years. One Saturday afternoon while we were playing a pick-up game, a high school kid showed up and asked if he could play. It was Eric Strobel, a 1976 graduate of Mayo High School in Rochester. His parents were in town visiting friends, so he brought his skates with to get a little ice time. Strobel, of course, would go on to win an NCAA national championship with the Minnesota Gophers and then a gold medal with the Miracle on Ice Olympic hockey team in 1980. Needless to say, that kid had game.

The other highlight was in the late 1970s when the City of Kasson arranged for the Minnesota North Stars to visit Kasson for a celebrity softball game. I was a big North Stars fan and was in awe of watching guys like Tim Young, Brad Maxwell, Al MacAdam and others playing a team of Kasson celebrities like…who cares. I remember most of the North Stars had heaters hanging from their mouths then entire game.

Now, 50 years later, Greg and I always joke that Bernie was the Godfather of Hockey in Kasson. Not bad for a non-hockey guy. Dad’s sport was football. He coached his youth teams to a couple of city championships in Minneapolis in the early 1970s, and helped out with baseball as well. But the one constant with Bernie, regardless of the sport, was that he’d do anything to give kids an opportunity to play.

Go Wildcats!

Geoff Gorvin graduated from Kasson-Mantorville High School with the Class of 1979.