WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : The Icekids Cometh : Time and Money Become Cold, Hard Facts for Parents Trying to Help Their Children Reach Their Goals Through Youth Hockey Leagues

A handful of bleary-eyed fans gather at an ice hockey rink in Paramount just after dawn on a recent Sunday morning, some shivering beneath blankets.

More than half of them are there to cheer on the Sharks, a youth hockey team based at the Culver Ice Rink in Culver City. The fans, still struggling to wake up at 7 a.m., talk in hushed tones before the game begins.

The group perks up when the players--ranging in age from 11 to 13 and varying in size from under five feet to just shy of six--skate onto the ice for the faceoff.

“Go, Sharks, go!,” yell two women in unison, a blanket spread across their knees.

Go the Sharks do, winning the game 6-1.

Youth ice hockey may seem half-baked in the sun-splashed land of surfing, volleyball and roller blading. But the Westside is home to a hardy core of hockey families who trek to rinks near and far, early and late, with all the determination and dedication of New Englanders or Minnesotans.

And the sport, they say, is thriving--thanks, in part, to the popularity of Los Angeles Kings superstar Wayne Gretzky and of roller hockey, a fast-growing outdoor game that has fueled interest in the on-ice sport that spawned it.

The Marina Cities Hockey Club, an 18-team club based in Culver City, is composed of 300 youths ages 6 to 18. This season, the club had to turn away 60 youngsters because it could not accommodate more players. The demand, in fact, is evident throughout Southern California.

“It’s growing here by leaps and bounds,” said Ed Tar, deputy commissioner of the California Amateur Hockey Assn., a grouping of the region’s clubs. “There are more people moving here from the East Coast and they have hockey in their blood.”

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The center of the Westside’s youth-hockey universe is the Culver Ice Arena on Sepulveda Boulevard. Owned by Jerry Buss, who also owns the Great Western Forum where the Kings play, the rink is home ice for the Marina Cities teams. The teams, all of which are called the Sharks, range from the Mites, the youngest with players 8 and under, to the Midgets, the oldest with 17- to 15-year-old skaters.

Not surprisingly, hockey on the Westside has a Hollywood flair.

Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell have a son on the Sharks; so does Martin Short. Meryl Streep’s son used to play on the club before his family moved to the East Coast. Some of the other players are the offspring of movie producers and directors. According to the rink’s regulars, some players occasionally emerge from limousines onto the Culver City sidewalk, dragging their hockey bag and stick.

The Hollywood elite, however, are the exception, not the rule.

Jean and Greg Goeckner-Zoeller, both entertainment attorneys from Mar Vista, more accurately reflect those who have children in the Marina Cities program.

Like many of the other parents, their lives have been in overdrive since their two sons took up the sport. Their oldest, 11-year-old Grant, has played for six years.

“I fell in love with hockey when I first saw it,” Grant says.

That was during the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary--Grant was four--when the family attended the Games and watched Sweden’s hockey team beat Czechoslovakia, 6-2.

“We started taking (Grant) to figure-skating lessons, hoping it was a phase, but he wouldn’t give it up,” said his father.

Indeed, Grant has tried other sports--baseball, soccer and roller hockey, most seriously--but says he loves ice hockey best.

Grant’s 9-year-old brother, Tyler, wobbled onto the ice he was 5. Now he is a goalie for one of the Sharks’ Mite teams.

The boys’ passion for hockey is what has kept the family involved.

“If they were saying, ‘We don’t want to get up at five on a Saturday morning,’ we wouldn’t be in hockey,” said Jean, a hockey fan. “We’re not doing this for our own good.”

With sons on different teams, Jean and Greg run in different directions on the weekends. When Greg has to work, Jean is left to handle hockey duty alone.

Her schedule on a recent--and typical--weekend went something like this:

At 7:30 a.m. on Saturday she drove Tyler to a game in Culver City and cheered him on until the game ended about two hours later. Then on to Tyler’s orthodontic appointment and to Simi Valley, where Tyler had tryouts until 1:30 p.m. for an all-star hockey team.

After the hour or more it took to drive back to Mar Vista, Jean had time for a short break before taking Grant to the Culver City arena at 4:45 p.m. for a game. They left the rink at 7:30 p.m.--and were back at 5:30 a.m. the next morning for Grant’s practice. With rinks struggling to meet the demand for public-skating and figure-skating time, hockey practices often take place at odd hours.

“If you have young kids, you’re probably running around with them in sports like soccer and baseball,” said Greg. “But those games usually are local and they’re at saner hours, like 11 (in the morning) or 1 (in the afternoon).”

Small wonder that hockey has made it hard for the family to maintain a social life with anyone other than Sharks.

“A lot of our other friends beg us, ‘Please, just don’t talk to our kids about hockey,’ ” Jean Goeckner-Zoeller said.

The Sharks play in a regional league that uses 18 rinks scattered throughout Southern California. To get their sons to games during the hockey season, which runs from September to April, the Goeckner-Zoellers must drive to places such as San Diego, Lake Arrowhead and Palm Desert. If they have a 6 a.m. game in Ontario, they have to leave home at 4:30.

Several times, hockey has taken the family to more distant cities--Toronto, for instance--for tournaments.

The expenses add up as fast as the miles. Besides the cost of travel, there’s the equipment (close to $800) and the hockey club’s fees for ice time ($839 a year per child). The couple figures it costs them about $8,000 a year to keep Grant and Tyler in hockey, an amount that would be greater if they took their sons to more tournaments.

Yet the Goeckner-Zoellers and other parents involved in the sport agree that the money is worth it.

“Hockey keeps these kids busy,” said Norm Sloan, whose 16-year-old son, Mike, plays on the Sharks’ Midget team. “And it gives us a common purpose to be together, as a family. We get to travel to places we might not otherwise go.”

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The luster of ice hockey, however, fades for many Westside players as they approach high-school age and realize that if they are serious about developing their hockey talents, they must leave Southern California.

Otherwise, their main hockey options are college club teams at UCLA and USC or the Southern California leagues for older players.

“The kids can go until they’re 16 or 17, then the competition has got to increase,” said Peter McNab, a former NHL center who is originally from San Diego and remembers playing many games during the mid-1960s at the Culver Ice Rink. “But there’s a real ceiling in California as to how far they can go.”

For that reason, each year about 20 players, primarily 13- and 14-year-olds, are selected to take part in a program called Operation East. In 10 days, the youths, many from the Westside, visit eight or nine private prep schools--including Tabor Academy, Exeter Academy and Phillips Andover Academy--and play against those schools’ hockey teams.

“They skate more so they were a little bit faster,” said Tyler Snyder, 15, who participated in Operation East last year and, like his brother, Cody, plays in the Marina Cities league. “But they weren’t unbelievable.”

For the schools’ administrators, it is a recruiting device. For the players, it is a chance to see what it might be like to play on the East Coast. Last year, three of the Westside’s Sharks players decided to play prep school hockey in the East.

To make it, California players often must overcome low expectations among their East Coast peers.

“The arrogance of the East Coast versus the West Coast in hockey is similar to the arrogance of Canada versus the United States,” said McNab, a former Boston Bruin. “They don’t look at the team or the player, they look at where he’s from.”

Small wonder that Westside rink rats are sometimes defensive about their game.

“I think hockey around here is just fine,” said Grant Goeckner-Zoeller “Sure they produce more superstars back East. They have more players.”

But ever so gradually, that gap may be closing.

“I can think of three (California players) in five years who have come to Tabor,” said Tim Pratt, the hockey coach for Tabor Academy in Marion, Maine, which has had seven NHL draft picks in the past five years. “Some of the players from California are capable, some of them aren’t, but they’ve definitely gotten a lot better in the last five years.”

That, in part, is because most California ice hockey players have been weaned on roller hockey.

“Playing roller hockey has improved my shot and my stick handling,” said Chris Nelson, 26, who played hockey at the Culver City rink as a youth before receiving a hockey scholarship to the University of Wisconsin. Nelson is playing on the semi-pro Atlanta Knights team and also competes for the L.A. Blades roller hockey team.

Grant Goeckner-Zoeller hopes to put his own talents to the test. He says he wants to go all the way with hockey, even if it means moving to the East Coast when he finishes junior high school. Tyler, on the other hand, shakes his head and crinkles his nose at the thought of leaving home.

Their parents, for their part, don’t like the idea of sending their sons away at such an early age--even if the reason is hockey.

“I hear some of the parents that we talk to talking about sending their kids to prep school, but that distorts the point of the game,” said Greg. “Why deprive them of their childhood?”