Brawl at Canadian youth hockey game leads to police investigation
An unruly brawl at a Canadian youth hockey game on Saturday got so out of hand that police in Ontario are now investigating the incident to determine if charges should be brought against one or more of the parents involved.
Beware before you press play below: Some explicit language is involved, right from the get-go.
As reported by the Canadian Press, among other sources (Online Sports Guys among them), a Bantam Pee Wee C youth hockey game between a team from Tweed and a Six Nations squad was the surprising site of a major brawl in the stands between parents of the two teams. The fight was captured on camera and uploaded to YouTube on Sunday.
This isn't the first time that parents have gotten overly aggressive at a youth hockey game -- as was proven all too well in February -- but it might be the most dramatic and physical case.
After a parent of a Six Nations player told a group of Tweed parents to "Come over here and get it, you [expletive]," a group of Tweed parents did just that. The result was a major melee between both sides, with multiple adults throwing punches, wrestling and eventually requiring a number of other bystanders to pull them apart.
The fight occurred at the finals of a Bantam Hockey league, with the game played in Tweed, a town roughly at the midpoint between Toronto and Ottawa. The nature of the game, with a title on the line, apparently led to some pregame activities, with parents from the Six Nations squad telling the Bellevue Intelligencer that their counterparts from homestanding Tweed were drinking in the parking lot before the game and spent much of the contest aggressively heckling Six Nations players.
Regardless of what motivated the fight, the result was an ugly scene for Canadian hockey, and youth sports in general.
"The sad thing is if this deters even one kid from signing up to play minor hockey that's a big loss," Ken McKichan, president of the Tweed Minor Hockey Association, told the Intelligencer. "Where's the sense in this? People are passionate about their kids playing hockey and tempers can get out of control, but it's an embarrassment.”
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