Krause: Tech hockey in jeopardy

Reports are running rampant that Lynn Tech will no longer host a collaborative hockey program that included North Shore Vocational and Essex Agricultural ? and while nobody’s saying it’s a done deal, the handwriting is certainly on the wall.Tech director James Ridley yesterday spoke to four of the six returning players that attend Tech and confirmed that there have been discussions about merging the program with the already-formed co-op of Classical and English.”I was honest with them,” said Ridley. “I told them were only six of them, and that I’d like to fight for them, but it was going to be an uphill climb. It may have to come to this.”School superintendent Nicholas Kostan also said that declining numbers and widening economic woes that are already causing talk about closing an elementary school have to be weighed seriously.”We’re looking into (merging the Lynn Tech players with the Lynn Jets),” Kostan said. “From what I’m told, there aren’t many players at Tech.”Kostan admits that the idea of merging Lynn’s Tech players with the Jets has to clear a couple of hurdles. First, the School Committee has to approve it – a move that nobody expects to be much of an issue.The other is whether the Northeastern Conference would be amenable to adding another school to the collaborative. Inquiries have been made, but Kostan says there are no hard answers yet.Ridley also has concerns. First, he wants the six remaining players to be on the team without having to try out. And second, he’d like assistant Dave Wall to have a role.”At the same time,” Ridley said, “once the puck drops it’s all about competition. These kids all know each other. They grew up playing youth hockey together, and they know their pecking order with each other.”Kostan admits this would be in great part a cost-saving move. But he also said, “if we’re going to have a collaborative, then it just makes more sense to put them with other Lynn kids.”Kostan stresses that nothing formal has been decided. But one gets the impression that absent the aforementioned formalities, this would seem to be in the cards.And as much as it would hurt a program that previous coaches Jay Richards and Tim Serino worked very hard to save, merging Lynn players from Tech with the two other Lynn schools is the lesser of a number of evils.There’s ice time to consider. Right now, the city is on the hook for an entire season’s worth of ice time at Connery Rink for the Jets (which comes to between $15,000 and $20,000, depending on practices, tournament games, etc.); the middle school hockey program; plus whatever it had to pay this year for the Tech collaborative. Obviously, the city would save substantial money if it didn’t have to pay toward a third team using the Connery ice.There are also coaches’ salaries, transportation, and officials to consider. It may seem like chump change, but it all adds up.Since Serino has already resigned, now would be a perfect time to do this. It would eliminate the awkwardness that arose last year when Kostan had to choose between English’s Al Melanson and Classical’s E.J. Breen to coach the Lynn Jets.Obviously, this doesn’t sit well with Tech parents. Serino did a great job keeping that program together. It’s a hard sell to convince kids from Lynn, Danvers and Middleton that they’re one big family, but by all accounts Serino did that well.Hockey is probably the most expensive of all high school sports – even more so than football, probably – due to the added costs for renting ice. And sometimes, the numbers just don’t support the money expended. This could be one of those times. It’s not the best situation, and in a perfect world you’d love every school to have its own identity when it comes to sports.But these collaboratives, especially in sports that either don’t draw a tremendous amount of interest or are too costly to run on their own, seem to be the way of the future. And unless we’re able to make some sense out of spiraling public education costs, you could s