InFocus featuring NBHL (Kayleigh O'Melia & Doug Nickel)

From the 22 news plus studio. This is 22 news in focus with Patrick Berry. Hello everyone. And welcome to this edition of in focus. I'm your host Patrick Berry today. We are talking about one of my favorite sports. Many of you older folks might remember playing street hockey out in front of your house as a kid of that. That's how I started playing hockey because my parents could not afford ice hockey. So me and my buddies, we played street hockey in front of the house. Well, it's street. Hockey has evolved immensely since when God that was the mid-70s when I was a kid into a organized National League now, and I'm so excited today because joining me across the desk are Kaylee Amelia and Doug Nichol. They are from the National Ball Hockey League, the NBHL. It's an official League. These two are representatives of the rink and the league out of Lemonster, correct? They're right next. So I'm excited to have you both here today to talk about the growth of the sport and Doug you and I had a conversation. You had mentioned the sport really initiated up in the Lemonster, Fitchburg area. It did. It did the ball itself was actually invented in Lemonster, Massachusetts by Ray Leclerc in the early 70s. Okay, and soon after he opened some rinks out in Lemonster and they've been operating over 50 years now. Really? So that ball that little orange and red ball that we play with called the Milek ball that was invented in Lemonster. Yeah, so we call it the Mecca out there that kind of the birthplace. So is it is it really a Mecca of street hockey? Yeah, I mean a lot of the better players still come from Lemonster. The men's national team is going to be playing in the World Championships in Czech Republic and the women's team as well. We have six players from the men's team that play in our Fitchburg League. Yeah, we have at least five. So a lot of the better players still come from our that is amazing. So going going back in time, you know, how long have you both been involved in the leagues up there? I think the men's started the year before women's. Yeah, if you want to talk about the NBA show. Yeah. Well, actually no, let's go back in time. So you said that yeah, I've been playing since the 80s. I'm 44 years old now. I've been playing since I was four or five years old in Lemonster. Okay, and you just yeah, I've been playing since I was nine. Yeah, but I moved up here in 2020. So it's been around up there for like you said 50 years, but it only got real organized into a national league just a few years ago. Yeah, the National Ball Hockey League or is it's out of New Jersey. No, I got some of the guys in New Jersey. It didn't seem possible at the time, but they said there's this leagues all over the country. Let's see if we can put them all together. So Kaylee Doug mentioned he's been playing since he was, you know, a young boy. How about you? What's your history with hockey? Yeah, I've been playing since I was nine. I have four younger brothers and they all started first and I took some convincing to let my mom let her baby girl play. But yeah, I played down on Long Island for a long time. And then right when I hit like 17, I moved up here and I'm very lucky that there's a lot of women's hockey up here because I don't think I would have kept playing if I had to play down in Menson, Long Island. Really? So it's funny you and I were talking when I lived on Long Island. I played in Farmingdale and but I'm so excited to see this sport really evolve. And I found out about it because I saw a promotion that there's like the NBHL report on the NHL Network, which I think, I mean as a, you know, Doug, as kids growing up with this, you'd be like, we're on the NHL Network. That is like the coolest thing. It is very cool. So where does the league stand today? So we have teams in Fitchburg, anything on Long Island? Yeah, Long Island has, they had Tier 3 and they just started Tier 2 this year. Okay. So they have two divisions going on down there. So where are other teams? So just here in the Northeast? Oh no, California has a league, Seattle, Texas, British Columbia, British Columbia, there's a couple leagues in Canada now. Yeah, there's a Bermuda team that comes up. Bermuda, they play in the New Jersey League, Florida, Georgia, it's great. And they all fall under the NBHL. So if you think of the NHL, you've got teams in Florida, California, whatever, they're all under the NHL. But these are all teams that fall under, they're official teams of the NBHL League. Yeah, you take a look at dnbhl.com. You'll see all the divisions that we have. You play your way out of your division and you win your division, you qualify for the national championships which are in Denver, New Jersey. Okay, so let's go backwards a little bit. Explain to me what ball hockey, I mean, I know, but for our viewers, what is ball hockey? I think it's effectively ice hockey and sneakers. You know, I have a lot of people, especially as a female, like they ask, oh, is it the same as field hockey? Because that's the typical like women's hockey, but it's completely different rules. It's, you know, use the same equipment as ice hockey, just less of it. You know, you don't need a chest protector. You don't wear, you know, ice hockey pants or whatnot. But the rink looks the same in terms of where the lines are, where the circles are, and a lot of the same rules. Yeah, I agree. Like you said, growing up without a lot of money, ice hockey is a very expensive sport, a nice entry into the sport. Yeah, it's just, you know, it's funny. It's you and I are mad, I don't know about you, Kaylee, but you grow up, you know, maybe you don't come from a lot of money. So ice hockey is a very expensive sport. So my parents like, here's a Milek ball, you know, and here's a, you know, $12 stick, exactly. The Milek stick, we started with the Milek stick because you're playing in the street and you need that plastic blade that didn't wear down and wear down as much. So do you only play in Fitchburg or do you travel? Do you, so do you travel to Pittsburgh? I'm, is there a team in Pittsburgh? Yeah. Okay. So do you try to pull that off, but so do you travel or do you only travel if you succeed during, you know, during your regular season? So for NBHL specifically, you play your local teams during it's a 10 game season. And then if you, I think if you have six teams or more, you can send the runner-up and the champion. If you have less than six teams, it's the champion and they go down. That's the only time you really travel for NBHL specifically, but there's a ton of women's and men's tournaments that we have some that we host up here in Fitchburg Lemonster. There's some in Pittsburgh and whatnot, but one of the exciting things NBHL started a couple years ago was the NBHL elite. And so that's effectively a draft of all the players who could possibly want to play, you know, it's not region specific having an all-star team. Exactly. And so they have I think four teams and they host weekend tournament style seasons. I know they've done some in Pittsburgh. They've done some in Jersey. I played last year and we traveled for that and it was a lot of fun. Yeah, there's been a healthy tournament circuit for the better part of 40-50 years where we've all been playing against each other. So it's not like we don't know these players that we're playing against. Right, you kind of see the same faces all the time, just getting older. Yeah, it's kind of a niche sport. So like you said, you know, the rinks that you play in like I'm sure we'll go there and say, oh, okay. Right. Yeah, so it is a niche sport, but growing quickly. Too funny. We are up on our first commercial break folks. Stay with us. Plenty more to talk about when it comes to the NBHL. We're back in just a minute. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry. Oops, wrong button. Welcome back everyone to this edition of In Focus. What you're looking at right now is ball hockey at its finest and you'll see there's men's leagues. There's women's leagues. I think these are images from various parts of the country. Some of them I think are up your league up in Fitchburg. If I'm correct, it is all Fitchburg. So joining me across the desk today to talk about national ball hockey is Kaylee Amelia and Doug Nichol. Thank you both for joining me. You are, let's see, directors of the Massachusetts tiers based out of Fitchburg. So thanks for joining me to talk one of my favorite sports. It's interesting. I don't know in your experiences, if you've ever had really good ice hockey players may try to make the transition to to that sport there where you're running and every ice hockey player I've ever talked to is like I can't do this. It's number one. It's running ice hockey's gliding and then the way you the way you shoot is completely different. Sometimes you either got to shoot on the run on literally as you're running or you stop, you know, so have you guys had that same experience where ice hockey players like I can't do that. We have quite a few of our top end talent players or ice hockey players like one of my friends on one of my team. She was, you know, a d1 ice hockey player and I think that they make that transition early enough where they can run. I feel like it's it's different. Maybe if you've played ice hockey your whole life and you're you know, a little older and then you're trying to run and it's you know, not in shape in the same way, but a lot of our top end players are ice hockey players. We actually have there's also a beginner ice hockey league that tries to take ball hockey players into ice hockey. Do they get both? So yeah, how about you? We sort of have a mixed bag. Okay number used to players that would come in and say, oh we have these d1 players. They're going to come play and they would get there and they they think that they were just going to dominate because we're these people right and they would show up and it wouldn't really go that way for him. So they start getting frustrated and they start getting tippy and say, well, if we were playing ice hockey, we'd win the girl. All right. Well, we're not so, you know, we're playing bad midnight or something else, but this is what we're playing right now. So, you know, both of you kind of passed over the comment very briefly is how in shape ball hockey players are because you're constantly running. It's three. We play in Westfield. It's three 10-minute periods. I don't know if you guys do the same thing. So you're running basically every single shift. There's no gliding, you know, so do you find it's a, you know, you're in better shape when you're playing? Oh, a hundred percent. I used to find that when I was younger, I could just play to stay in shape. I found as I've sort of age that I need to stay in shape and continue to play. It's an interesting way of looking at it, right? So what positions you both play? I play defense. All right. Nice. A fellow defenseman. I love it for all right. We got that. We got two defensemen on a four. We need two more forwards to feel the team. How many players on a team like in women's how many players will our minimum that you need to have is 14 including your goalie. Okay, there's a couple teams. We do so tier one. There's like a salary cap and so I know that's how the men do it, but it's where you have a certain amount of points each player. So it's not money. No, no, it's it's points based on their experience and you know, effectively how good they are. And so a lot of teams will build their team to use the minimum amount of players to get more of your high-end players with your salary cap and then some teams will say well we want, you know, three full lines, which means maybe we don't have a player or as many players who were like worth of five and we have a couple more threes and you kind of have to build it like that. But for tier two, it's a draft. So that just depends how many people sign up and then we soak it equally. Okay. So it's a lot of information. Sorry. Okay. So when it comes to this sort of salary cap explanation, so everybody's assigned a number so five being the highest for women's. Yeah, I don't know men's. Okay. So so so five is going to be your top player. Okay, and one is sort of your new one. It actually 0.5 would be so so you have teams that have mixes of fives and ones and 0.5 and threes. Yeah, there's always teams that are always in the search of a 0.5. Yeah, like even the tier one guys, you'll have guys that if you've never played in the NBHL or if you've been out of sort of the tournament circuit long enough basically reset to a 0.5. Okay, so we had a player last year that hadn't played before and one of the better players in the league as a 0.5. So those players are very very valuable. So what's the cap limit for protein? So is it a number like 30 and then you try and balance that my guy got a couple of fives couple of three. Yeah, effectively. I don't know exactly what our number is. I in tier two were 25. Yeah, I don't know. Around 30. I think I would know as the director. You know, I'm not building the rosters. Right, right. So you don't come into it with a set team. So when we play at Amelia Park, I've been playing with the same guys forever, you know, there might be you know, one or two here or there that you know, they just they have kids and they can't play anymore time constraints. So do you play with the set team for years and years or do because players get better their points exclude them from your team? Yeah. So women's actually we just switched to a salary cap. This is our first season up until this year. We only had one division and so we did a draft in a sense of like we want people to come play and if you don't you know, you don't know anybody you don't have a team might stop you from signing up. And so this year was the first year we had enough people and we had enough talent that we split it into a tier one and tier two. And so tier two is still that draft for everybody who wants to play maybe is a little intimidated doesn't know anybody sign up for the draft. You'll make friends. Everybody's very nice. Tier one is you have your friend groups you form your team and whatever and so going forward. I kind of expect the teams will stay substantially the same and then you know, those fringe points might have to you might have to change a person or two, but I don't expect the teams to change all that much. Yeah, we have a lot of the same core guys and then as your younger players start to get better and their numbers start to get higher. I think it's good. It provides a lot of turnover. You don't have the same teams meeting every year because these players as they start coming up. They got to start their own thing or else you're going to start calving yourself out. Is that the structure of Fitchburg or is that the structure of the NBHL is it as a whole as a whole? Okay, we're actually the only women's division with the tier one. We actually yeah, every other division is tier two and then we have Massachusetts has won the milet Cup, which is the national championship. We've won all for all four years. They've had it for women. I am we in the midst of a chance your times actually good for you. Congratulations. So we decided that we had enough talent here to operate a tier one and a tier two. And so that's where we'll see with women's how those teams come out. This is kind of a new thing. You know, it's interesting the way you describe this sort of salary cap system and I think of I think of our league at Amelia Park. It would create better parity among the teams, you know, what the way it's designed is, you know, you want parity among among the teams. You don't want one team dominating every single season. I will say Massachusetts is one every year, but it's been a different team every year because we were a draft. Okay, so that's kind of we'll see how to your one goes, but that's what they've started with women's was a draft to create that that parity of like if all the best players are friends and you'll have one team, right? That kicks everyone's butt and we don't want that. Exactly. We are. Oh, go ahead. Let's make some awkward phone calls though. Sometimes in here. Some of your good friends. You just yeah, you got to make the call. Sorry. Yeah. You can cut this. NHL GM. Hey, sorry. You're cut. Ouch. Oh, that's funny. We are back up on a second commercial break. Plenty more to talk about when we return. This is 22 news in focus with Patrick Berry. Welcome back everyone to this edition of in focus. I'm your host Patrick Berry joining me across the desk from me from the National Ball Hockey League are Kaylee Omelia and Doug Nichol. Thank you both so much for joining me. What has been the growth of the sport since the NBHL sort of I don't want to use the word took over but sort of streamlined ball hockey. Has it remained stagnant? Has it grown? Has you know, you know, you mentioned, you know, the Fitchburg Lemon Strairs of the birthplace of street hockey because of the my leg, you know, molded ball, you know, so I have to imagine there's a lot of people out there but has it kind of remains stagnant or are there a lot of teams looking to play especially women or kids or you know, older guys like me who are like, oh man, I want to get back into it. What's it been like? Yeah, I know for women's I moved up here in 2020. So I don't know really what it was like beforehand, but even just since that beginning season, we've had so many more players join. I mean to the point we have in just a few years. Yeah, it's a point. We have two now two divisions with we have five teams and one four teams in the other and we started I think with four or five teams total. Wow. Yeah, what's it been like on the men's side? I think on the men's side. It's always been so big here that it's hard to gauge the growth on geographically for us but on the national level like some of these leagues that you guys play here in Westfield. There's leagues in Jersey and Georgia and you start looking at the national team and some of those players are starting to creep into the national teams. So like we're finding that, you know, there are players out there besides the ones just in Pittsburgh in New Jersey. The one thing I've noticed over the years in Westfield is it's harder to find the younger guys, you know, they're there, they're there but there are a few teams like, you know, like I said, I think of my team are goalies 65. I'm 58. Eric is 55, you know, and then there's, you know, the couple others that are around 50 and then we got like I think three guys in their 20s, but there's not a lot of younger guys. So are there are there younger women or younger men that that are coming into the sport? Yeah, they just started a like a future stars program. And so they're running teams. I know there's a U19 women's want to say there's like a U16 or younger team around there and they're starting to grow that and they have their own like tournament circuit and I know they do like, you know, a team Massachusetts team Jersey team Pittsburgh or team Pennsylvania and whatnot. Yeah, and I found that the women's game is really grown as the woman's side used to be a lot of a college field hockey players that have transitioned that like, you know, they can't play field hockey anymore. So we'll start playing ball hockey and now you check out the leagues and Lemonster and half the leagues are girls. Yeah, that's awesome. What what about you know, and I know for ice hockey, there's like over 40 leagues over 60 leagues is ball hockey the same the organized ball hockey. Are there links for guys like me who still want to play but I can't keep up with the 25 year old or the 30 year old anymore. Yeah, locally in Pittsburgh. We just started a legends program this year. Okay, players over 45. We've had a lot of players who used to play 20 years ago who haven't played in a while and didn't want to maybe dip their toes into the thing is the 2025 year olds, but they've had a lot of fun playing with some of the older guys. Now the interesting thing I found when I when I first heard about the NBHL is this is all well and done. You know, you guys playing Fishberg, you know, I playing Westfield, you know, there's teams all over the country, but you then like professional leagues the winner of Pittsburgh and the winner of Georgia and the winner of Florida. You all meet somewhere and play for the national championship, correct? Yes. So is it in the same location every year or does the championship move around? I believe it's been in Jersey. Oh, with a home base of NBHL. They did try one year in Buffalo for the tier one, but people found they liked it when all three tiers were together. Is there anything above that? I mean, okay. So say your team goes to New Jersey. Yay. We won the national championship, which is kind of cool, though. I'm not understanding it. What happens after that? You come back and try to defend it. Yeah. All right. So there's no, is there any international aspect of the sport? Yeah, as far as the NBHL is concerned, there's just Canada and the US as of now. But as I said, the world championships will actually be taking place next week. Yeah. I think they're leaving the Czech Republic. Okay. Yeah, please. The 21st, the 28th. Yeah. Okay. So the end of national teams are picked by USA ball hockey. There's like a scouting process. There's camps out the teams. They select the teams from a large pool of players head over to the your hockey times. So it's not been the champion of the tier that wins in New Jersey. This is sort of kind of like the Olympic team, US Olympic hockey team. You would pick the, whomever you think are going to be the best players across America to compete in this Czech Republic. Yeah. So they do, they have a, like a senior national team, which is, you know, any, any age and then they also have a program for, I think the boys goes down to like U14, maybe U14, U16, U18. And they also have over 35 or 45. So they have, they have different age brackets too. It's not just this one national team. So have either of you, you won the national championship with the women. Doug, have you? Not yet. No. Okay. But have either of you had the opportunity to go play in the world in the Czech Republic? Yes, I went over in 2023. We landed in Prague and drove about an hour and a half outside the city with U23 team. How about you? So it's not always in the Czech Republic. Oh, yes. Circles. I've actually been hanging around a while playing this sport. So I've been able to play in 2000 in Czech, 02 in Switzerland, 07 in Germany, 09 in Czech. I'm going to the Czech for the legends over 45 in July, this summer. I would like to shout out my co-director Karen also made the women's legends team. So she's heading over the summer as well. For you. I do have to, this is the, I accidentally hit this button earlier, but that is my championship team from Amelia Park in Westfield. That's me in the back center. I forget what year this was in Amelia Park. We usually play two sessions, a spring sort of a April to July and then a late July into late September. I forget which session that was, but we won it. I had to put that up. I know the guys on the team will be appreciative that that was there, but I am very appreciative of you both giving me your time and driving out here from Athol and Framingham. I am so excited that what I call street hockey is kind of elevated into a much bigger sport and I'm so excited that you guys have positions in NBHL and we're kind enough to come talk to me about it. Good seeing you both. Thank you. Thank you for having us. You bet. This is 22 News In Focus with Patrick Berry.