A ‘World Unto Itself’ in New York Area Yeshivas: Floor Hockey
In the basement of a mammoth old building in Upper Manhattan that houses the Yeshiva University High School for Boys sits a cramped gym that is home to the high school’s floor hockey team, known as the Lions.
The school calls the gym the Lions’ Den, but many visitors call it the Dungeon and liken playing there to playing hockey inside a box. Games are raucous affairs with rough play and frenzied fans squeezed onto the narrow bleachers at one end, between the squads of panting players.
Several miles away, in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, is the comparatively luxurious indoor rink at the Salanter Akiba Riverdale High School, known as S.A.R. With its sturdy boards and rounded sides, the rink resembles a real ice hockey surface. Its scoreboard is flanked by American and Israeli flags.
Between these two extremes exists the little-known but thriving world of interscholastic floor hockey at yeshiva high schools in New York City and surrounding towns.
The game in these Orthodox Jewish private schools stretches back at least to the late 1970s, but in recent years, it has grown enormously popular. The championship match can fill an arena with as many as 1,000 fans, with more people watching live online. Players in elementary grades at Jewish schools now set their sights on yeshivas with the most powerful hockey programs.
“Outside the Orthodox community, this is a foreign thing,” said Amir Gavarin, 22, a former floor hockey league player. “But inside, it’s a whole world unto itself, and supercompetitive.”
The teams play in the Metropolitan Yeshiva High School Hockey League, which includes 18 varsity and 15 junior varsity teams for boys. There are also 12 girls’ teams, which play in the spring season.
The game is similar to ice hockey, but played on foot on a gym floor with a hard orange ball and five-player squads made up of a goalie and four roaming players.
Goalies wear full padding, but the other players wear sweatpants, jerseys and helmets with face masks. Under the jersey, some players wear a tallit katan, a religious garment with knotted fringes, or zizit.
Blatant body checking is banned, but there is plenty of contact. The teams play mostly in conventional gyms set up with temporary barriers.
Orthodox youngsters are often introduced to the game in summer camp or by friends from their synagogue, and end up playing in one of the many youth leagues that have cropped up in Orthodox neighborhoods, before joining teams in middle school.
“In some New Jersey yeshivas, floor hockey is more popular than basketball,” said Yoni Stone, the varsity coach at the Yeshiva University High School for Boys. “Forget high school — every single day school has a team, and the kids start in the youth leagues.”
Players, abiding by their religious tenets, use the sport as an outlet between long hours spent studying Judaic texts and other subjects. Since they observe the Sabbath, there is no play on Friday evenings or Saturdays before sundown. The season runs from late October through March.
On a weeknight last month, the Lions made their dramatic pregame entrance to blaring rock music. They were there to take on the Cobras from the Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School in Livingston, N.J., a school financed by the family of Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President-elect Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Kushner himself was proficient at the sport, having played for the Frisch School in Paramus, N.J., when he was a teenager.
The Cobras wound up beating the Lions, a fatiguing feat since the ball rarely escapes the playing area, making for almost nonstop action. Each game has three periods, with each period lasting 12 minutes.
In fact, the team from the Ramaz School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side prepared to play at the Lions’ gym by having one of its players, a senior training to enter the Israeli Army, put his teammates through rigorous military exercises.
The Ramaz School holds games in a modern, brightly lit gym that is a far cry from the Lions’ Den. One night last month, the Rams of Ramaz took on the visiting Thunder from the Rav Teitz Mesivta Academy, or R.T.M.A., from Elizabeth, N.J., and won the game in sudden-death overtime, prompting a celebratory mob of Ramaz players.
At certain powerhouses, hockey is perhaps the most prominent sport, and rivalries have developed between neighboring yeshivas.
In Brooklyn, the games can be particularly intense whenever the Magen David Yeshivah or the Yeshivah of Flatbush, both in Midwood, or the Yeshivat Darche Eres in Sheepshead Bay, face off.
“They’re seeing all these kids in synagogue the next day, so that creates a certain competitiveness,” Mr. Stone said.
When rivals in the Five Towns section of Long Island play, “the whole town shuts down” for games that can attract hundreds of spectators, said David Kolb, a hockey writer for MSG Networks and the operator of Camp Dovid, a summer hockey camp in Pennsylvania where campers wear the names of their yeshivas on their jerseys.
Two top teams in the Five Towns — the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway and the D.R.S. Yeshiva High School for Boys — have nurtured a long-simmering rivalry. And in the league final in 2014, when the Hebrew Academy finally avenged years of losses with a victory, “you would have thought the messiah had come,” said Seth Gordon, the hockey commissioner for the Metropolitan Yeshiva High School Athletic League.
“Some of these rivalries start in elementary school, with the seeds planted when these kids are in sixth grade,” Mr. Gordon said.
Though the sport has drawn a loyal and passionate following, the athletes are ultimately religious students who are urged to put their spiritual priorities before their athletic ones.
“It’s common with the Jewish identity that we can’t do certain things because of the boundaries of observant Jewish life, so we create our own parameters and do it to the fullest,” Mr. Gavarin said.
Mayer Schiller, a Hasidic rabbi who in the 1990s coached Yeshiva University High School to six consecutive league championships, is recognized as the progenitor of the yeshiva floor hockey scene. He was hard to miss, since he coached wearing his black hat and coat.
Rabbi Schiller, 65, still an avid fan of rock, pop and punk music, established the now popular tradition of having players enter the gym to loud music. The rabbi’s choice: the Ramones.
He grew up playing roller hockey in Queens. In the late 1970s, with New York’s professional basketball teams sagging, students began rooting for two local hockey teams, the Rangers and the Islanders, Rabbi Schiller recalled. Rabbi Schiller was a devout Rangers fan who was particularly fond of the raucous play of Nick Fotiu, a native of Staten Island who became a brawler for the Rangers.
The rabbi formed a team at the Ramaz School in 1979, and helped organize a fledgling yeshiva hockey league with a half-dozen teams that grew significantly over the years.
He regarded coaching as a form of spiritual service and striving at sports as a complement to studying sacred texts and worshiping God.
“If God didn’t mean for this greatness to exist, why did he give us Gretzky and Jordan?” Rabbi Schiller said.
On a recent weeknight, the S.A.R. team — which includes Mr. Kolb’s two sons, Gordie and Henri — was put through power-play drills and scrimmaging by its longtime head coach, Howie Falkenstein.
Mr. Falkenstein also runs a hockey program at the Westchester Summer Day camp in Mamaroneck, N.Y., and a league in the Bronx that attracts players from across the region. Its youngest level is the Mites division, which is open to first and second graders.
Mr. Falkenstein was getting his team ready for its game against the Frisch School and had players practicing penalty shots. Gordie, the S.A.R. Sting’s captain, deftly scored on his brother, a goalie, prompting a chorus of hoots from teammates.
S.A.R. wound up beating Frisch, solidifying its status as one of the league’s top teams.
“It’s definitely its own niche, but it’s still hockey and it has the team camaraderie that people are looking for,” Mr. Falkenstein said. “It has the same excitement when you score a goal or make a save.”
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/nyregion/yeshiva-floor-hockey-new-york.html
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