Southern migration

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.

It’s up 27 percent in Texas since the Dallas Stars won the Stanley Cup in 1999. In Georgia, it’s up a staggering 216 percent since that season, a year before the Atlanta Thrashers started play.

“It stems back to Wayne Gretzky’s times with the L.A. Kings and the growth of the game that came with that move,” University of North Dakota coach Dave Hakstol said. “You look to Texas, there’s a direct correlation with the Dallas Stars [and the growth in youth participation]. You go to Colorado, it’s the Avalanche. If that’s just coincidence, it’s happened quite a few times over and over.”

And the numbers are impressive beyond the youth level. The Bay Area and Southern California are now cranking out college players. So is the District and its surrounding suburbs - 17 area natives are playing for Division I teams.

The growth has changed the game at every level, from the high-profile youth tournaments now handing out trophies to teams from Texas to college coaches making recruiting trips farther south than they ever have before - and trying to sell the game over Canadian major junior leagues to families who don’t live within 500 miles of a Division I program.

At the top of it all is the NHL, pointing to the growth as a measure of vindication for its oft-criticized strategy to move the game into the Sun Belt and quietly hoping that today’s youth hockey players turn into tomorrow’s season-ticket holders and television viewers.

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