Hockey in Minnesota is different, period. Yet this difference is too often dismissed as an anomaly, as people dismiss Minnesota as “the Canada of the U.S.” When in reality the association-based Minnesota-model is unique and different, and needs to be protected.

Unlike other states where hockey can cost tens of thousands of dollars and requires a plane flight every weekend to find competition, here in the State of Hockey the structure is in place for girls and boys to play for their towns, and with their buddies, all the way from Mites to High School. But hockey parents are hockey parents, and they’re only getting crazier. In a keep up with the Joneses world, the Minnesota model needs to be preserved, protected, and celebrated.

Minnesota Hockey reached out to Pulltab Sports to dig a moat around the Minnesota model. Believing if community-based hockey is a natural resource and our superpower, they should do anything possible to preserve it. 

We started the process with two strategic shifts:

1. Shift perception of Minnesota Hockey from an organizing body to a content channel. 

2. Shift the order of importance to make “Celebrate” the key to protecting the Minnesota model.

When working with an organization like Minnesota Hockey it would be easy to get tangled up in the red tape and try to argue or debate your cause. The problem with that, is every hockey parent / hockey player relationship is different. There is a diminishing return to making an academic or political case about how the Minnesota model is the right way to do things, or the only way to do things. 

By choosing to celebrate instead of argue our way to victory we were able to make a ton of content that showed both how different and how special community-based hockey in Minnesota is. Importantly, we were able to grow Minnesota Hockey’s followers (even airing the first season of The Association on NHL Network), showing the State of Hockey that Minnesota Hockey loved the same things about the game they did.