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Pucks 101, or hockey as a teaching tool

By Helene Elliott
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This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Who knew hockey could be educational?

Longtime Kings fan Mel Powell, whose loyalty to the team goes back to the days of Cowboy Bill Flett, found a unique way to use hockey’s international reach as a teaching tool for local schoolchildren.

Powell is president of the Sherman Oaks Sunset Rotary Club, a branch of the international service organization that is composed of business and community leaders. He participated in a project designed to teach elementary school children how to say five friendly phrases in a variety of languages, and his contribution was to get those phrases in the native tongues of three Kings players: Raitis Ivanans of Latvia, Anze Kopitar of Slovenia and Michal Handzus of Slovakia.

The project was praised in the September issue of the Rotarian magazine, which is distributed around the globe.Powell explains the development of the project here.

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-- Helene Elliott

Sports Now
Helene Elliott

Helene Elliott was with the Los Angeles Times’ Sports department from 1989 to 2024, first as a staff writer and then, starting in 2006, as a columnist. She became the first female journalist to be honored with a plaque in the Hall of Fame of a major professional sport as the 2005 winner of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s Elmer Ferguson Award, awarded to writers “who have brought honor to journalism and to hockey.” A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., and graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she has covered 18 Olympics.

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