It started five years ago with eight guys having a beer and pretending to be National Hockey League stars.
The Covington Street Hockey League has exponentially grown. There’s a rink at Barb Cook Park on Ashland Avenue, a Monday night league and pickup games Thursday nights and Saturday mornings.
“There’s about 130 skaters and about 1,000 followers on Facebook,” longtime member Tim Acri said.
Besides hockey, the CSHL and Covington’s Parks and Recreation Department have volunteered on many projects, including work at Annie Hargraves Park at the corner of Chesapeake and West Robbins streets, and Goebel Park on Philadelphia Street.
“I would call ourselves the city’s muscle,” said Jesse Kleinhenz, who has been with the league since it started. “The city calls us for projects that they want to get done around the area – volunteer projects – and we’re always there with a helping hand. We generally hold quarterly park cleanups.”
‘Comical reasons’
Kleinhenz, aka “Commish,” is one of the original eight. Best he can remember, the idea for what is now the CSHL hatched Dec. 31, 2017 over cold ones at Gypsy’s, a MainStrasse Village bar.
“When we first started this, most of it was for comical reasons,” Kleinhenz said. “There was eight guys that got together. We would play hockey, but we would do these postgame pressers (press conferences) and act like we were professionals and make videos.
“That was really how we got started, and then it was also how we got popular … People felt we were funny and started coming out. We got more serious with the hockey after. Maybe when we built our own rink is when we really started getting serious with the hockey.”
Kleinhenz and the others spent New Year’s Day 2018 shoveling snow off a basketball court at Kenney Shields Park on West Ninth Street.
“Six guys came together, shoveled snow off the court so we could play on foot,” Kleinhenz said. “The next time we were out, which was probably two days later, we were on rollerblades, every single one of us.”
CSHL games are 3-on-3 plus goalie contests. (Goalies may play in shoes.) There are two 20-minute halves, and helmets, gloves and goalie, shin and elbow pads are required.
Most players bring their own gear, but some equipment is available. Tim Acri remembers improvising in the league’s early days.
“We put our goalie in a bunch of catcher’s gear ‘cause that’s all we had,” Acri said.
Acri’s wife, Kara Acri, is the league’s Chairman of the Board – the woman who handles paperwork and marketing duties. She did not shovel snow, but she was a goalie a couple times.
“I had a lot of saves,” she said. “I played field hockey in college.”
‘Wheelz’
Once the city let the CSHL convert a couple tennis courts into where the rink is now, the next task was putting down new asphalt.
“We had about $20,000,” Tim Acri said. “We spent $17,000 on a new asphalt surface that the city let us do; as soon as we got the asphalt down, we put the rink up.”
But the league did not have boards – until the late Kyle “Wheelz” Wheeler, who passed away in 2021, found some from the old Hara Arena near Dayton, Ohio. The arena had been closed since 2016, and when a 2019 tornado tore off the roof, the property owner offered the boards for free.
“We started making a bunch of phone calls, we got a bunch of trailers and a bunch of guys,” Tim Acri said. “We sent 12 guys up there, and they disassembled them.”
A memorial stone and a plaque commemorating Wheeler were added last October.
“Kyle was instrumental in helping us,” Tim Acri said. “He talked about Hara Arena, he played hockey at Hara Arena.”
There are as many stories as players.
Greg Archer, 54, drives to Covington from Middletown. He joined the CSHL about a year ago and is a goaltender on Monday nights – the same position he played growing up in Steelton, Pennsylvania, a town of about 6,200 just four miles southeast of Harrisburg.
Archer wore a St. Louis Blues sweater Monday. He was meant to be a goalie; he read books about Hockey Hall of Fame goalie Jacques Plante, who in 1959 became the first to regularly wear a mask.
The way Archer sees it, he must be pretty good. “As far as I know, they keep calling me to come back, so I guess I’m not disappointing them too much,” he said.
Archer was a surgical assistant at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh. He was at work when United Flight 93 crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania on 9/11.
“We did a 36-hour shift ‘cause we didn’t know if the plane that went down in Pennsylvania, if we were going to get casualties diverted to our hospital,” Archer said. “It never happened.”
Tim Acri – “Tim Bob” to his friends – remembers the CSHL going to a tournament in Las Vegas. One team featured two former Chicago Blackhawks – Kris Versteeg and Patrick Sharp – who won the 2010 Stanley Cup. (Versteeg also won in 2015.)
“They did not crush us; they beat us by one,” Acri said.
The CSHL has ambitious goals: starting a youth street hockey league, putting a roof over the rink, and installing brighter lights.
Archer, meanwhile, wants to play in the CSHL as long as his body holds up.
“They literally welcomed me with open arms regardless of what you actually did, as long as you wanted to play and expressed interest,” he said. “It was like camaraderie.”
For more information, call 859-955-5514, visit on Facebook and Twitter @cshlbubs, or email info@cshlbubs.com.