VALDEMORO, Spain – Spain could not quite win the Olympic Qualification Group L, but despite missing out to Serbia in the last minutes of the final game, hopes on the Iberian peninsula remain high.
The rivalry with the Serbs is due to be renewed on home ice in April when the 2016 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship Division II Group A comes to Jaca, and Frank Gonzalez, President of the Spanish Ice Sports Federation, is hoping to build on the buzz that had Valdemoro’s ice rink full to over-flowing.
“In the end I think we were a bit short on seats,” Gonzalez said, despite installing a temporary stand in the Francisco Fernandez Ochoa rink. “Over the weekend we saw more and more fans coming along as they heard about what was happening here and saw some of the TV coverage. That’s a real asset for our sport, and that’s why we need to organize these events.”
The equation is simple: more events means more coverage; more coverage means more sponsorship; more money, eventually, should mean more rinks.
“We’ve seen that there’s a lot of interest but the problem is we don’t have enough arenas,” Gonzalez added. “If we get the facilities, the clubs will follow. We have a lot of inline hockey teams in Spain who would love to jump on to the ice, but first they need that ice to play on.”
On the international stage Spain is also developing fast. The men’s team is gaining experience with every game, and promotion to Division I is a realistic, if challenging goal. The roster in Valdemoro had an average age of just 22 and played an impressive high-tempo game for much of the competition before running out of the steam in the last game. As head coach Luciano Basile pointed out, the weekend was a whole new experience for most of his players.
“In Spain most players have maybe three games in a month,” he said. “Here we had three games in three days. Maybe that was asking a bit too much for them, but I think over the course of the competition we found a real identity.”
That identity certainly rallied the supporters of the national team, who stayed behind the players until the very end and were generous in their ovation for both nations after Serbia’s 5-3 victory sent the Balkan state to the next qualifying phase and left the host to reflect on the narrow margin between triumph and despair.
“There’s a lot of disappointment because we really wanted to get through,” Basile added. “We played great hockey for seven of our nine periods here but we stopped playing our vertical game in the second period here against Serbia and even though we corrected that we didn’t have enough in the tank in the end.”
Despite that disappointment, though, Gonzalez is looking at the bigger picture. He is optimistic for the U18 roster, which will be in action in Valdemoro in the spring, as well as the fast-growing women’s section.
“Our ladies were over in Sheffield at the weekend and they won their games against Great Britain and Poland,” he said. “It’s true that we had our adult team against their under-18s, but countries like that are a long way ahead of us in women’s hockey. The next step is to start a women’s U18 team. That would give us five national teams, plus the two university sides.”
Much of this progress has come in the eight years since ice hockey and the other ice sports separated from Spain’s winter sports federation and began seeking their own funding and sponsorship. Hosting events like the Olympic Qualification, despite the costs involved, helps to generate new partnerships with national and local government and attract new sponsorship and media coverage.
That new income, helped by negotiating good agreements on transport and accommodation for visiting teams and officials, can then be reinvested into the game. In Valdemoro that meant a thorough makeover for the town’s rink, creating a good-quality facility in the Greater Madrid region and bringing hockey out of its traditional strongholds in the Pyrenees.
“The money we raised off the back of the Olympic Qualification can really be dedicated to the development of our sport,” Gonzalez concluded.
ANDY POTTS |
