New Trier hockey celebrates 40 years with alumni games

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Chuck Lauer (left), one of the founders of the New Trier West Hockey Club, and his son Randy Lauer in 1976. Randy Lauer is the current president of the New Trier Hockey Club Board.

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Updated: January 30, 2012 8:09AM

Hugh Brower and Chuck Lauer reminisced over scrapbooks of old newspaper clippings detailing New Trier Hockey Club victories they coached decades earlier, as Brower’s granddaughter Kathleen looked on.

They were sitting rink side at the Centennial Ice Rinks in Wilmette waiting for Kathleen’s father, David Brower, to take to the ice in an alumni hockey match, one of three held Thursday to celebrate the club’s 40th anniversary season.

Kathleen, a 2010 graduate of New Trier Township High School, had just played on the girls’ alumni hockey team, which defeated the current New Trier Girls Hockey Club in their match.

Lauer’s and Brower’s sons, Randy Lauer and David Brower, who are the current president and vice president, respectively, of the New Trier Hockey Club, would play later that night on the over-40 alumni team. Their sons, Ted Lauer and Ben Brower, the third generation to play for the New Trier Hockey Club, refereed the game.

The club started as the New Trier East Hockey Club in 1971. That was when both New Trier High School campuses, in Winnetka and Northfield, operated as four-year schools.

The Chicago Metropolitan Hockey League, composed of players from Chicago-area high schools, was forming and looking for teams to join.

Winnetka resident Bert Keats, in 1971, decided to start a team with boys from New Trier East High School, although it had no official connection to the school.

“I decided I’m starting a team and that’s that,” Keats said. “I wasn’t going to interfere with the other high school sports, but I would follow as close to varsity rules as possible. I believed the trend in Illinois was going to go to high school hockey and I wanted New Trier to be a part of that.”

New Trier East entered the Chicago Metropolitan league and won the league championship in 1972-1973.

The next season, Chuck Lauer and Hugh Brower, formed the New Trier West Hockey Club.

Keats, Lauer, Brower and other early supporters of the two hockey clubs, including Ken Fox, Walt McNerney, Hugo Martens and Bob Cremin, had a strong pool of players from which to draw.

For decades, the Wilmette Hockey Association and the Winnetka Hockey Club had organized games on outdoor rinks for children of all ages and some post-high school teenagers.

“All of the boys on the New Trier teams were also playing for the Wilmette or Winnetka (hockey clubs),” said Keats, who coached teams in multiple programs.

“There was a stretch of 14 straight evenings when I was on the ice either for practice or games,” he said.

Keats, 85, grew up playing hockey “on open ice” in Chicago. “We played on prairies with two stones for the goals. The fire department would flood the field with their hoses.”

His counterpart, Chuck Lauer, grew up in Hamilton, Ontario and near Buffalo, New York.

“I fell in love with hockey at 4 years of age,” Lauer said. He went on to play college hockey for Middlebury College in Vermont.

Lauer had a wife and two small children when he moved to the Chicago area in the 1960s.

“I wanted to play (hockey), but I didn’t know anybody,” Lauer said. He learned about the Wilmette Hockey Association. “They were very organized. They had a wonderful rink” in Howard Park in Wilmette. “Everyone congregated there.”

“And we thought, ‘Jeepers, why don’t we have our own rink in Winnetka?’” Lauer remembered. He, Keats, and other parents promoted bonds the Winnetka Park District issued to build the Winnetka Ice Arena in 1972.

“We were all hockey nuts,” Lauer said. “If you think (hockey fans) are nutty today, we were even nuttier.”

“Hockey is a very passionate sport,” Lauer said. “It takes a very diversified athlete. It’s fast, you have to be smart, you have to keep your head up . . . . It takes great peripheral vision to pass the puck. It just gets in your blood.”

Lauer’s son, Randy, played three years with the New Trier West club, but during that time, he told his father he didn’t think he should coach the team anymore.

“Hugh Brower and I used to coach together,” Lauer said. “Both our sons, Randy and David, were on the team. But when they got older, they told us they didn’t like us coaching them. I can understand. The kids are embarrassed to have their old men coaching them.”

The boys had to have been pleased when their fathers found a former National Hockey League player to replace them. Eric Nesterenko, who played for the Chicago Blackhawks for 15 years, including on their 1961 Stanley Cup Championship team, was hired to coach the New Trier West Hockey Club and led the team to the state championship in 1977.

“The kids hung on every word he said,” Lauer remembers.

Randy Lauer went on to play three years for Lake Forest College’s hockey team as a defenseman like his father. Randy Lauer’s son Ted continues the tradition playing defense for New Trier’s top varsity hockey team.

The East and West teams merged about 1981, then later expanded to include three varsity boys teams for different skill levels, one junior varsity team, and two girls teams. Randy Lauer theorizes the hockey club’s popularity has remained strong because “we draw from two very strong youth programs,” namely the Wilmette Hockey Association and the Winnetka Hockey Club. In addition, “we offer four different levels of competition,” Lauer said. “Our philosophy has always been to try not to cut kids,because kids develop at dfferent ages.”

New Trier’s blue and white varsity teams and its junior varsity team play in the Metro North Hockey League, which consists of 22 teams from public and private high schools in the area.

New Trier’s top team, the green team, independently plays highly-ranked teams both in the area and out-of-state, such as Loyola Academy’s Gold varsity team and Culver Academy in Culver, Ind.

“In January, we’re playing in a very competitive high school tournament in Buffalo, N.Y. with prep schools from the area and Canada,” Randy Lauer said. With such opportunities for competitive games, “we tend to keep kids in our program,” rather than lose them to private clubs, he said.

The club’s top varsity team has won the USA Hockey High School National Championship the past two years and won the Illinois state championship three times since 2005. The current coaches, Scott Sortal, Rob Malstrom and Tyler Crowley, are all products of the New Trier Hockey Club.

“We are unique . . because we give as many opportunities at every level to as many players as we can, and we combine that with the some of the best coaches in the state,” Randy Lauer said.