Ranking up there in the odd department with curling and underwater hockey, broomball is often described as field hockey on ice (which, believe it or not, isn’t simply regular hockey). Interestingly, broomball, which got its start as an organized sport in Canada in the early 1900s, has been around in Charlotte to varying degrees for nearly 20 years. Every Sunday night, the members of Carolina Broomball get together and play at the Charlotte Ice House skating rink inside Eastland Mall.
Who knew?
“You don’t need as many skills or as much capital [as regular hockey requires],” says Carolina Broomball president Mondo Normile. Like most Carolina Broomballers, Normile, who works for a technology-staffing firm, is originally from the North. He started playing broomball while in college in upstate New York. “Some people,” he says, “call it the poor man’s hockey.”
Instead of skates, broomballers wear sponge-like, rubber-sole shoes that resemble Converse high-tops and give players a better grip on the ice. And rather than a hockey stick, players use a “broom,” which is basically a stick with a flat, wide head made from aluminum. Players use the broom to hit 5-inch rubber balls into the goal.
The rules are similar to hockey. Each team has five players and a goalkeeper. However, Carolina Broomball, like most broomball leagues, is co-ed, and there is no checking, so players are far less likely to be knocked around or get involved in an ice-clearing brawl.
“With a lot of ice hockey leagues it’s very competitive and all about winning,” Normile says. “With broomball, the primary purpose is to have fun.”
When Normile, 36, moved to Charlotte about eight years ago, Carolina Broomball had been going strong for nearly a decade. It included 15 teams that competed at three skill levels. But when new management took over the Eastland Mall ice rink several years ago, it became harder for the league to get time on the ice. Interest in broomball dwindled. Then about three years ago, Normile started to resurrect the flailing league, and it’s now back up to four teams and about 50 members.
Normile convinced his friend and neighbor Geoff Person to give broomball a try about two years ago. “It’s definitely a weird sport,” says Person, a 34-year-old business analyst who moved to Charlotte from New York about 10 years ago. “I never played ice hockey or broomball before, but as soon as I tried it, I was hooked. I work in the office all the time and don’t get out much, so this a great excuse to get some exercise and meet a great group of people. Plus, the league’s co-ed, so it’s really diverse.”
Angela Synan, 32, joined the league about two years ago, shortly after she moved to Charlotte from Minnesota, where broomball is all the rage. “I wanted to meet some people and play sports, so I went online and found Carolina Broomball,” says Synan, who works in TV production.
Wendy Teal grew up playing ice hockey in Canada. Shortly after she moved to Charlotte in 2001, Teal saw some people playing broomball at Eastland Mall and decided to give it a try. “Although it’s not as rough as ice hockey, broomball is more exercise,” says the 29-year-old Teal, a speech-language pathologist. “You have to be in better shape to run on ice than to skate or glide.”
Of course, you don’t have to be from the Northeast or pepper your speech with distinctive upper Midwest Fargo-speak to play broomball. In fact, Charlotte native Mike Hall, 33, started playing it nearly 20 years ago when he was a teenager working at the Eastland Mall rink. Over the years he’s traveled and competed in tournaments from Canada to Minnesota, New York and Las Vegas.
“I like broomball because it’s just so different,” says Hall. “It’s definitely not what you’d call mainstream.” Hall says he’s looking forward to his son joining Carolina Broomball in a few years. “Hopefully, once we get the younger generation interested, the league will really get going again.”
Carolina Broomball is an adult, co-ed league, that meets on Sundays at 7pm in Eastland Mall’s Charlotte Ice House. For more information, check out www.carolinabroomball.com.
This article appears in Oct 19-25, 2005.