If it seems like all of Franklin County gathers at Collins-Moylan Arena on Saturday nights in the winter, that’s because the Greenfield hockey team is truly ‘Franklin County’s team.’

Now in its sixth season as a County-wide (and North Quabbin Region) cooperative program, the Green Wave are represented by players from seven different schools — Greenfield, Turners Falls, Frontier, Franklin Tech, Pioneer, Mahar and Athol.

So how did we get here?

It’s certainly been a successful venture on the ice. The program won its first-ever state title in 2020 when it beat Lunenburg for the Division 3A championship, and reached the Round of 32 in the inaugural MIAA Division 4 statewide tournament last season.

That state title was just three seasons removed from a turning point in Franklin County high school hockey. Following the 2016-17 season, Turners Falls High School made the difficult decision to end its hockey co-op. That program consisted of Turners, Frontier, Pioneer and Franklin Tech at the time, and with numbers too low to carry on leading into the 2017-18 campaign, change was in the air.

Turners Falls athletic director Adam Graves recalled that his school had just three players on the roster at the time. With numbers dwindling, it appeared as though Franklin County was no longer capable of supporting two high school hockey programs.

“When I first came on as AD (in 2014), I met with the hockey people – they had their own board, fundraising group – we met, and I made the promise to them that our kids will have an opportunity to play high school hockey, even if it’s not at Turners,” Graves said. “So when we couldn’t support our own co-op with the schools we had in the mix (after the 2016-17 season), we pursued combining with Greenfield. All our kids played together in the FCHA program anyway, so why don’t we do this and see what happens?”

Enter Greenfield. Rivals on the ice, competing against one another annually at the Rabbit Graves Memorial Holiday Hockey Tournament, both programs were struggling with numbers, and with winning games. Turners Falls officially began as a varsity program in 2001-02 after a brief stint as a club team, and while there were spells of success, the team hadn’t reached the postseason since the 2012-13 season. From that point until folding in 2017, Turners posted just a 13-58-6 record. That included a difficult end of the line, going 1-19-0 and 1-17-2 in its final two seasons of existence.

Greenfield won 17 games in the 2013-14 season, but followed that up with a 1-19 campaign the very next year. The Green Wave were 4-13-3 in 2015-16 and then 8-9-3 prior to welcoming a new crop of players from the Turners Falls program.

“It needed to be done,” Greenfield AD Mike Kuchieski said of the move in 2017. “Greenfield was going to be down way below the 15 (player) number at that time, so was Turners – all the coaches in the league agreed that it needed to happen, they wanted a competitive team from Franklin County in the Wright Division. We even agreed to move up to the [more competitive] Berry Division if people thought we were going to be too good to stay where we were but we were told we didn’t have to make the move.”

High school hockey history

Greenfield celebrated its 50th anniversary of sponsoring a high school hockey team in 2020, coinciding with the program’s state title win over Lunenburg. That 1970 team, coached by Ralph Collins, posted a 4-6-2 record in a 12-game slate, playing an independent schedule. Collins would return to coach the program in 1980, going 73-69-7 in seven seasons with the Greenies.

While 1970 was the beginning of Greenfield’s hockey history, the school’s relationship with the sport dates back much further to 1926. That year began the Greenfield’s dalliance with outdoor hockey, a brief but particularly interesting history detailed in a 2020 series of stories in the Greenfield Recorder.

While Turners Falls hosted its hockey program beginning in 2001, hockey returned to Athol in 2008 when the school joined with Murdock High School to form a new cooperative. It was the school’s first hockey connection since 1947, as Athol also competed in outdoor high school hockey from 1936-1947 with home games on Lake Ellis, Silver Lake and Cheney’s Pond. Athol won a Western Mass. title in 1942, beating Agawam in the finals, and later traveled to the Boston Garden where it lost to Melrose in the first round of the New England High School Hockey Tournament. Due to a lack of funding, the program eventually disbanded in 1947, but was revived when Murdock reached out in 2008. That set the stage for eventually joining the Greenfield cooperative.

A sense of purpose

According to the MIAA, cooperative programs were created to continue prominent relationships between athletics and academics.

“In an effort to increase participation with interscholastic athletics, various positive factors motivated schools to create ways of saving existing programs and of establishing new ones. The initial purpose of cooperative teams was to combine the participation of multiple schools to build and develop athletic opportunities for students,” the MIAA says in its handbook.

Cooperative programs have become common throughout the Commonwealth, perhaps most prominently in the sport of ice hockey. According to statewide alignment information, Greenfield is one of 24 cooperative programs in Division 4, the lowest of the state’s four boys hockey divisions. That’s out of 52 total programs, and five of the six Western Mass. programs competing in Division 4 are co-ops (Greenfield, Chicopee, Mount Everett, South Hadley and Taconic). Belchertown is the only Western Mass. program competing in Division 4 as a sole entity.

Shawsheen Valley Tech is the largest school in Division 4 (1,265 students), while Saint Bernard’s of Fitchburg is the smallest (105). Greenfield slots in with 367 students, and the MIAA uses host school enrollment as its initial criteria for divisional alignment.

A new era begins

The new Greenfield co-op played its first game on Dec. 16, 2017.

“Local hockey fans will finally get a look at the cooperative team many have been clamoring for over the past few years and the outlook for this year and the future remains bright,” Recorder reporter Jason Butynski wrote prior to the opener against South Hadley, a 5-2 victory at Collins-Moylan Arena.

“No matter where you come from, once you put that sweater on, you are part of the family,” Greenfield head coach Adam Bouchard said in 2017 on the new era of his hockey program.

On the ice, the cooperative program has shined. In five-plus seasons, Greenfield has amassed a 79-21-7 record, good for a .771 winning percentage. The Green Wave have reached the postseason every year in that span, minus the shortened COVID-19 season of 2021 when no playoffs were contested.

The atmosphere at Collins-Moylan Arena for weekend games has been nothing short of festive, with students, families and fans of just about every school in Franklin County showing up in support.

“We’re not trying to create champions, just an opportunity for kids to be able to play hockey,” Kuchieski said. “Having said that, it is cool for the kids to be able to see a lot of people at their games. This is a big hockey community. It’s not as big as it once was, things have changed, but it’s nice to be able to see people rally around the program and support the kids.”

As for the future...

All seven schools in the Greenfield co-op have at least one player in the program, though the majority of the roster is comprised of Franklin Tech and Greenfield High School students.

Turners Falls currently has just one player in the program, and Graves said the school also has a female hockey player competing on the Longmeadow cooperative program after a spot opened up on the Lancers’ wait list prior to last season. Western Massachusetts has just two high school girls hockey programs and both are co-ops — Longmeadow and Pope Francis. 

As host school, Kuchieski said Greenfield is responsible for the head coach’s salary, along with compensation for referees, busing and some equipment. Each school in the co-op pays a portion of the JV coaching salary, while parents raise money for ice time associated with practices and games. Greenfield doesn’t charge user fees for its athletics, a cost that was estimated to be $800 per student for Turners Falls hockey members back in 2016-17.

Bouchard, now in his 11th season as varsity head coach, has one of his oldest teams on record this season. The Green Wave have a sizable senior contingent, something Kuchieski said could impact numbers in future seasons.

“We look at FCHA, see where the kids are coming from and what is coming down the pipeline,” he explained. “It certainly fluctuates. You can see some schools that might not be in the co-op after next year, depending on if they no longer have players in the program. It’s a fluid thing, but that’s part of what comes with having a co-op.”

For now, administrators in the area are happy their student-athletes have a chance to continue playing the sport at the high school level.

“I firmly believe there’s no way to support two County programs so this is what it has to be,” Graves said. “I think it’s good for our area, good for the kids and it’s something that has extended hockey careers for a lot of players in Franklin County in recent years.”

Fans will next have a chance to see the Greenfield co-op in action Saturday night when Mount Everett comes to Collins-Moylan Arena for a 6:30 p.m. Wright Division contest.

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