(Quotes below are testimonials from some of our current 20Skaters organizers)

“All summer I had to think about whether or not I was willing to continue losing $100 per week to organize and play pick up hockey.”

If you have yet to literally put your personal money down to purchase icetime to run your own pickup hockey game, you may genuinely be curious who’s making the profit on a game? If that’s you, let me save you some cash and share how the experience goes. First you pick an icetime and book it by paying $285+ on your personal credit card. You obviously don’t want to profit so you run the numbers and figure you’ll charge $14 each for 20 skaters which gets you $280. That means you actually paid $20 to skate in your own game but you don’t want to risk anyone thinking you’re not paying or you’re making money.

You then bust your ass emailing, phoning, texting and you get your 20 skaters confirmed. If you’re really lucky, only five of those people fall asleep, get drunk, have a date night etc on the night and flake out on you. Oh, and then there’s the two who forgot to hit the bank machine or forgot their wallet.

If you’re lucky you collect $14 from 15 skaters and only lose $75 hosting your first pickup hockey game. Yay! What comes next is the immediate decision that you’re never running a pickup hockey game again.

“It was costing me about $2000 a year to play 20 games, and that’s my best guess, because it was very hard to do accurate bookkeeping with money here and there and promises to pay next week, etc.”

Here’s the simple truth. Most (read: all) people organizing regular pickup hockey are losing money doing it.

We encourage our organizers to charge more than they first estimate. You can always lower it but more importantly all it takes is one poorly attended game to wipe out that $10 ‘profit’ you earned on the previous few games. If you actually end up with cash at the end of the year, you can throw a ‘team’ party with extra funds. Or you can always lower next year’s season fees.

“20Skaters is saving me a ton of money, and making it a whole lot easier to organize the weekly scrimmage.”

End of day, we love pickup hockey and want more of it. Organizers losing money will not get us there so if you’re playing pickup hockey, pay your organizer early and often! If you’re organizing, we can help!