(Updated 8:30 a.m., Dec. 5)
City Hall display celebrates last wooden hockey stick
By Fred Sherwin
Orléans Online

Robert Hopkins parent Chrystia Chudczak stands beside ‘The Art and Joy of Hockey’ exhibit at City Hall featuring some several hockey sticks painted by students at the east end school. Fred Sherwin/Photo

During the next six weeks, visitors to Ottawa City Hall will be able to see a display of some of the last wooden hockey sticks made in Canada.

The exhibit is just a portion of the more than 320 hockey sticks that were given to students at Robert Hopkins Elementary School in Beacon Hill by hockey stick
manufacturer Sher-Wood after they closed their Quebec plant in November, 2007.

The sticks were central to a school wide project called “The Art and Joy of Hockey” during which the faculty incorporated a hockey theme in every aspect of the school’s curriculum. Outside artists were also brought in to add to the experience for the kids who painted all the sticks.

The project was the brainchild of Robert Hopkins parent Chrystia Chudczak who came up with the idea during a series of conversations with her two sons who complained that their Ukranian dance lessons were cutting into their hockey time.

“Tim Floran, our school council president, asked me if I knew of any grants we might be able to apply for and with my background in doing integrated camps I thought about doing something with art and hockey,” explains Chudczak.

Around the same time Chudczak saw a story about Sher-Wood deciding to close their last wooden stick plant in Quebec.

“We called and asked them about getting some of the sticks and they said they’d sell them to us for $2 each.” she recalls.

With her background in organizing integrated arts camps Chudczak knew about MASC, a west end non-profit organization that brings artists into local schools to bolster arts programming.

From there the concept snowballed. Artist Christopher Griffin came up with the idea of having every student paint one of the sticks using social and environmental themes. Musician Sarah Westbrook wrote a hockey song which the kids all learned, and dancer Peter Ryan taught the kids an improvised dance that incorporated the sticks in the movement.

The initiative was kicked off by Ken Dryden who came to the school and read from Mike Leonetti’s children’s book, “The Greatest Goal”, about the 1972 Canada-Russia series.

The key to the project’s success was in getting the school staff to buy into the concept, which they did wholeheartedly. Before long the hockey theme was incorporated into the school’s literacy and numeracy curriculum.

“The whole thing just blossomed beyond belief,” says Chudczak. “And the neat thing is a lot of the kids had never even picked up a hockey stick before let alone tried on a pair of skates.”

Once all the hockey sticks had been painted, a jury of professional artists chose the best sticks from each class from Junior Kindergarten to Grade 6. Ottawa photographer David Ashe then photographed them in groups of five and six.

Several of the photographs are on display as part of the City Hall exhibit along with about 60 of the painted sticks and a video the school submitted to the Kraft/CBC Hockeyville contest.

The display has been set up near the City Hall art gallery which is currently hosting an Ottawa Archives exhibit entitled “125 Years of Hockey in Ottawa”.

The two exhibits are being run in conjunction with the World Junior Hockey Tournament which will take place in Ottawa over the Christmas holidays.

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