Southern migration

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By Ben Goessling

During the winter months, the social calendar in Fergus Falls, Minn., has a blissful singularity to it. The late-model race track is closed. So are the parks, the golf course and the batting cages.

The tiny, snow-swept outpost on Interstate 94, about 50 miles from the North Dakota border, has a five-screen movie theater, a bowling alley and a hockey rink.

“If you're in Fergus Falls on a Saturday night, you've got one option - go to the high school hockey game,” Jeff Nygaard said.

After playing all the way through high school, Nygaard moved away from the seat of Otter Tail County once: to attend William & Mary. He returned and took a job in Grand Forks, N.D., as a public relations director for the University of North Dakota. But the cold weather chased him and his wife away two years later to the D.C. area, home of warmer weather and more robust entertainment options than the municipal hockey rink.

“Once we decided to live out here, I never even thought about hockey,” he said. “I figured it was all over.”

But then something funny happened: Hockey followed him south.

Nygaard is now the executive director of the Washington Little Capitals, one of two Tier I youth hockey associations in the D.C. area. Since 2006, they have shared Kettler Capitals Iceplex with the NHL club.

And they have been benefiting from the Capitals' popularity in plenty of other ways.

They're not alone. The District is just one of the many hockey markets across the country where the recent arrival or rise of an NHL team has stoked a fire among young players.

Youth participation is up 28 percent in the District and 14 percent in Virginia in the last 10 years. It has made double-digit jumps in the Denver metro area, where the Colorado Avalanche moved in 1996, and in Florida, which added two NHL teams in the last 16 years.