New Canaan High School Principal Tony Pavia is putting students on ice for what he calls "inappropriate" behavior at last Saturday night's FCIAC Championship Hockey Game, in which the Rams stomped Ridgefield 6-1.
In a "Dear Rams" letter sent to students and copied to parents, Pavia laments a "troubling and embarrassing development" that's come in the form of a stern warning from the CIAC. The state athletic conference, Pavia relates, has told New Canaan that for the balance of the tournament, "upon the first incident of negative, obscene, or inappropriate chants, the entire student section will be ejected from the arena" with no first warning.
In other words, the CIAC means business.
I wasn't at the game last Saturday, so I turned to the supreme authority on all things Rams—Patch sports reporter Bob Goldsholl—for his take.
Goldsholl, himself a former star athlete, has a long history of covering heated NCHS sports contests. Of course, New Canaan-Darien is the mother-of-all-rivalries, though Goldsholl says New Canaan-Greenwich and Darien-Greenwich are always interesting, and New Canaan-Ridgefield (which was on display last Saturday) is gaining in the rivalry ranks.
Goldsholl didn't observe anything too wacky at the FCIAC final, though his disclaimer is that he wasn't sitting near the student section, while Principal Pavia was within earshot of the New Canaan rowdies. While Goldsholl heard the usual taunts and jeers aimed at the Tigers, he didn't hear chants of a not-so-nice word that begins with F and rhymes with a common water fowl. This has, our sports reporter related matter-of-factly, occurred on at least one occasion earlier in the season, with Darien being the culprit.
Unless Goldsholl took an ill-timed potty break or needs his hearing checked, it doesn't appear that anything too shocking happened at Saturday night's showdown on ice.
"It was a pretty ordinary game," according to Goldsholl.
I don't know what passes for "ordinary" at a hockey game in New Canaan, but when I lived in the Midwest it wasn't uncommon to see bare-chested cheeseheads and dead animals being hurled onto the ice in the name of good, clean fun. In Wisconsin they don't talk about a hockey game breaking out at the fight without good reason.
My Friday phone call to Principal Pavia went unreturned (as I suspected it would) after I revealed the nature of my call to a suspicious secretary. My sources within the student body at New Canaan were also tight-lipped about what occurred.
A video clip of the final minute of the game on New Canaan Patch provided no evidence of obnoxious fans, though I thought the Rams' victory dog-pile at the buzzer could be construed by some as aberrant behavior.
