Celebrating Pennsylvania Puck on the hockey magazine’s 10th anniversary
Stay will be offering a Pennsylvania Puck Tee in time for the holidays
October is one of my favorite months: cooler temperatures, colorful leaves, the promise of the holiday season.
From a business perspective, I celebrate the birth of Stay Apparel Co., which began Oct. 5, 2017 with the opening of stayapparel.com. And six years before that, on Oct. 1, 2011, I launched an online ice hockey magazine called Pennsylvania Puck.
The latter was short lived; we didn’t make it through that hockey season before it became painfully clear to me that I couldn’t generate enough eyeballs fast enough to attract the advertising revenue that we needed.
But I don’t view the experience as a failure. Clearly, our business plan was flawed, but I’m proud of what we achieved in a short amount of time. We delivered a beautiful website with great content.
We covered hockey across Pennsylvania, from youth to high school, junior to college, minor pro to the National Hockey League. No one had ever done that before and no one has since.
We located Hersheypark Arena’s original Zamboni ice resurfacer. We wrote about Canadian hockey icon Don Cherry’s ties to Hershey, where his pro career began and where he met his wife Rose. The Hershey Bears reproduced (with permission) our feature on the team’s upscale bus in a game program.
How-to videos make the NHL
Even after the website’s demise, I continued to post regularly to Pennsylvania Puck’s Facebook page until 2018, stopping ostensibly to focus on Stay and other time demands. Three years later, I still get occasional notices that someone has followed the Pennsylvania Puck page despite the dearth of new content.
If that weren’t affirmation enough, I also can point to our original series of hockey and skating videos, which have garnered hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
And it got even better this month. My eagle-eyed brother, who lives in our native Maine, was watching an episode of “Bruins Academy,” a learn-to-play hockey TV show produced by the NHL’s Boston Bruins. Gary thought he spotted a youth player wearing the Pennsylvania Puck logo on his jersey.
I was skeptical, but I tracked down the episode online and, much to my surprise and delight, discovered that excerpts from our stick-handling video are featured twice, starting around the 8:15 mark and again at 8:47.
Videographer Keith Goldstein shot the videos for us at Klick-Lewis Arena in Palmyra in summer 2011.
The Bruins didn’t ask for permission to use our content or credit Pennsylvania Puck; to quote Denis Lemieux in “Slap Shot,” they should feel shame. But It’s a pretty cool achievement for our little old hockey magazine, lost in the wilderness lo these many years, to have arrived in the NHL.
It seems like something worth celebrating. Stay is going to do that by issuing the first-ever Pennsylvania Puck T-shirt in time for the holiday season. [Update Dec. 13, 2021: We’ve put plans for this tee on hold.]
Now if we could just get that old Hersheypark Zamboni back in Hershey, we might even have a parade to celebrate Pennsylvania Puck’s 10th anniversary.