“This is my legacy.”
Philadelphia Flyers founder Ed Snider and I were standing in the middle of a dry, under-renovation ice skating rink in West Philadelphia in 2011 when he made the remark.
He looked the picture of health then. Tennis-tanned and trim with his slicked-back snow white hair offering a contrast to his jet black warm-up jacket with the orange logo of the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation.
The rink – the Laura Sims Skatehouse at Cobbs Creek Park– belonged to the city. But Snider helped spruce up the previously down-and-out semi-enclosed facility and three others, kicking in $6.5 million of a $13 million renovation program.
Ed Snider talks with members of the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation in October 2005. Snider passed away Monday at age 83.
Snider Hockey was his, created in 2005 to teach the Philadelphia-area’s at-risk youth about the world of possibilities beyond their neighborhoods and life skills lessons through the prism of hockey. When the program needed more ice time for some 3,000 kids and growing, Snider ponied up to help enclose and modernize the public rinks without flinching.
He was a billionaire who sported two Stanley Cup rings and desperately thirsted for a third. He was a driving force in the National Hockey League, and a giant in sports and entertainment fields – but all those accomplishments took a back seat to Snider Hockey.
“It’s the only thing I’ve ever put my name on,” he told me for a story about the program was published in 2012. “We’re going to fund it properly and when I’m no longer around hopefully it will be a program that will go on forever. When I see what we’ve done for young children who may not have been able to accomplish what they’ve accomplished, what greater satisfaction in life can you get?”
Ed Snider, far right, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, and then-Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, cut a ribbon dedicating a renovated Laura Sims Skatehouse at Cobbs Creek Park in November 2011.
Ed Snider, the fiercely proud patriarch of Philadelphia ice hockey, passed away early Monday in California at the age of 83 following a two-year fight with cancer.
Much of discussion of Snider’s life Monday centered on his role with his beloved Flyers, and rightfully so. But he also left a legacy with Snider Hockey, establishing one of the top non-profit, minority-oriented youth hockey programs in North America, if not the world.
According to Snider Hockey, 95 percent of its participants perform at satisfactory or above in core classes; 99 percent achieve grade-to-grade promotion; 85 percent of high school seniors continue their education in some form beyond high school.
“Ed created the Flyers professional, no-nonsense culture, fostered their relentless will to win and set the highest standards for every activity on and off the ice, including such initiatives as the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation and the Flyers Wives Carnival,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said Monday.
In a statement announcing his passing, Snider’s children said their father “was a man with deep convictions and never hesitated to promote causes in which he believed.”
“His children and grandchildren will continue his philanthropic mission for years to come through the work of the Ed Snider Youth Hockey Foundation (Snider Hockey) and the Snider Foundation,” the statement said.
John Sanful, executive director of Ice Hockey in Harlem, said “Mr. Snider’s greatest achievements come through his philanthropic efforts.”
“Snider Hockey has impacted the lives of thousands of Philadelphia youth leaving a legacy for which Mr. Snider will always be remembered,” Sanful told me.
Philadelphia Flyers players, like forward Wayne Simmonds, volunteer their time to Snider Hockey, the late Ed Snider’s legacy.
Snider Hockey’s reach extends beyond the Delaware Valley. On my way home from a convention in Minnesota last summer, I ran into a group of Snider Hockey players at the Minneapolis airport.
Dressed in the program’s team sweats and toting hockey sticks and duffel bags, they were on their way to Brainerd Lakes, Minn., for a camp through the combined efforts of Snider Hockey and former Flyer forward Scott Hartnell’s #HartnellDown Foundation.
When developers of a currently-stalled project to build the world’s largest ice skating facility in a gigantic old armory in the Bronx, New York, were struggling with gaining acceptance from the mostly-minority neighborhood around it a few years ago, they loaded 65 community leaders onto a bus, drove to Philadelphia, and showed them Snider Hockey.
Snider followed up the bus trip with personal telephone conversations with Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr.
“What I saw was amazing,” Diaz told me in 2014. “To see 75 black and Latino kids in the centers enthusiastic about coming in after school; to see them with their big duffel bags full of equipment that, by the way, was donated and readily-available to them free of charge; to see them getting academic instruction in math and reading; and to see these kids get on the ice as if it were second nature. You look at the numbers from the program and we see school attendance has gone up, we see that bad behavior has gone down. That’s exactly what I want for my Bronx kids.”
Diaz jokingly told the developers that “you guys messed up” because “you allowed me to come to Philly and see the Ed Snider program…And that’s the standard I’m going to hold for them right here in the Bronx.”
Snider was charitable, but he was also highly competitive. As we toured the Sims Skatehouse in 2011, he explained to me that the mission of Snider Hockey was to build good people, not necessarily to make good hockey players.
Then he pointed out that Sims and the other public rinks that he helped renovate with NHL-standard boards and lighting would be open year-round, giving his urban Snider Hockey participants “more ice time than…those kids in the suburbs.”