Senior hockey player Danny Brickman is leading the way this season as a captain for the hockey team…of Whitfield School.
“It was weird at first when I first started playing sophomore year,” Brickman said. “But they welcomed me instantly and now it just feels like I’m part of another hockey team that I played on growing up.”
Parkway Central has not had a hockey team since the 2011-12 season, leaving current students without a school team to play for. However, since hockey is a club sport in Missouri, the rules are more relaxed on who can play where.
For high school hockey in Missouri, a school needs at least 11 players from its school on the team, and then can add a maximum of four players from other schools. Brickman and a few others have decided to go this route and play for other schools.
“I look at it as just playing for another team,” Brickman said. “I try not to think about it that much and just play hockey.”
Last year he scored 12 goals and 15 assists for Whitfield. This year, he already has 3 assists in 6 games, and he has been appointed a team captain by his head coach.
“I was honored and eager to embrace my new role on the team,” Brickman said.
Brickman has been playing club hockey since he was 4 years old, first for the St. Louis Rockets and then for the Chesterfield Falcons through freshman year. He is a defender, one of the players that typically does not cross the center line, but is feared for his strength and powerful shots.
He went through elementary and middle school believing that he was going to play for the Central high school team, but his dream was cut short after seventh grade, the last season for the team.
“I was disappointed because it would have been really cool to play for Central,” Brickman said.
However, he also understands that there are barely enough people at Central willing to play for a team, and even less that are able to play at a varsity level.
“It’s not that no players live here,” Brickman said. “It’s that they all choose to go to private schools.”
Since private schools like CBC, SLUH, and De Smet are schools with long hockey traditions, a lot of players that live in other districts go to those schools to try to win championships rather than stay in their public school and help build up their local teams.
One of those players was Danny Brickman’s older brother Aaron Brickman, who started playing for De Smet after briefly playing for the Central hockey team before it was discontinued. Aaron was the goalie for the De Smet team that went to the State Championship in 2014.
“My brother was able to get [to State] and not win it so if I was able to win, it would mean a lot,” Danny Brickman said. “I also hope that if I could win State that would increase the popularity of the sport at Central and hopefully lay the foundation of a future team.”