“But there is also state co-financing,” someone will say. Yes, but they are bones against the background of the private sector injecting hockey into the bloodstream. Including in the construction of halls, the load of which is once again borne by the parents of hockey players. They lead their offspring to train and a lot of dads go to play in their free time, paying for the so-called expensive ice, so that the halls can offer cheaper groups of children. The same people – the parents of the hockey players and their offspring – then gather in the stands and at the screens, allowing the representatives of hockey life to satisfy the interests of the sponsors. Sponsors buy advertising space in hockey in exchange for seeing more pairs of eyes for their brand than in other sports.
Instead of building an environmental object “Hockey Player’s Parent” near an ice rink, the virtues of Latvian hockey are often drawn in the opposite direction. Thus, already paying parents are “milked” impassively. As an example, several long-time hockey players cite a scheme that many know about, but no one is talking about publicly (yet). There is a children’s tournament in municipality X, team coaches make parents save money, for example, to rent ice. The parents also meet, not knowing that the municipality has already covered the cost of ice for the tournament. The coaches then share the black profit with the tournament organizers. The same thing happens later in municipality Y, but instead of ice there may be other variables – judges’ salaries, catering costs …
Also popular profit events are various foreign tournaments, which are justified by parents as vital for the growth of hockey players, but in reality there is often nothing more than coaches’ profit trips. Of course, it is possible to give up, but it can have an impact on the future role of the young person in the team.
Some of the coaches’ financial ambitions are growing in the fact that they themselves have played hockey professionally in the recent past and are not ready to lower the salary bar so sharply when they change to coaching. As anecdotes, stories with the financial requirements of the newly baked children’s coaches wander around the corridors.
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