Lisa Bry expected a standard meet-and-greet when she visited the manager of the local ice rink.
Instead, she says that a front-office executive for a $2 billion National Hockey League team threatened her.
Bry had just been elected president of Frisco Ice Hockey Association, a nonprofit hockey club for middle and high school students in Frisco, Texas. One of its board’s first actions under her leadership was to cancel the contracts of two coaches who had received dismal reviews from parent feedback surveys.
But at the April 2023 meeting, Bry said Dallas Stars executive Keith Andresen told her that the Stars, which ran the rink where the club practices, wanted those coaches to stay.
His next words are seared in her memory:
“Let me remind you where you get your ice from.”
Andresen later said he did not use those words. To Bry, though, the implication was clear: Unless the club gave the coaches their jobs back, the Stars could stop letting its six teams practice in their rinks. She couldn’t understand why an NHL team would strong-arm a youth hockey club over a personnel matter and hold its kids’ ability to play hostage.
The Stars, she soon learned, had operated that way for years.
The Dallas Stars’ monopoly
Unlike the NFL, NBA and MLB, a handful of NHL teams are intimately involved in running the youth levels of their sports in their regions – perhaps none more than the Stars. In Dallas, the Stars spent decades turning what was once seen as a community good into a lucrative arm of their for-profit enterprise.
Stars executives addressed some of USA TODAY’s questions in a 35-minute interview and emailed statements, but left other questions unanswered.
“We’re really proud of everything we built here, and we’re committed to continuing to grow hockey in the community and across the state,” said Dan Stuchal, the Stars’ chief operating officer. “We’ve become the model for all non-traditional NHL markets that both the NHL and USA Hockey continually point to in terms of how to grow the game, because that’s the focus for everybody.”
At a time of increasing commercialization of youth sports nationally, hockey is particularly vulnerable to capture by corporate interests. Whereas baseball and soccer fields, tennis and basketball courts are ubiquitous in parks and schools, fewer than 3,000 ice hockey rinks exist across the U.S., largely because running them is so expensive.
The Stars capitalized on that dynamic by building an ice empire. They convinced seven local municipalities to spend tens of millions of taxpayer dollars building rinks that the Stars run and profit from. Their ownership group bought up three more. Along the way, at least eight other independent ice hockey rinks went out of business. Now, every level of amateur hockey in North Texas from preschoolers to adults runs through the state’s NHL team.
By monopolizing the ice, the Stars effectively control the pathways by which young players advance to the sport’s highest stages. Knowing most local hockey families have nowhere else to go, the Stars impose their will by reminding parents that they can block the pathway for any kid.
The Stars regularly raise prices on their services while diminishing their quality. They repeatedly retaliate against people they perceive as threats, from coaches who defect to other rinks to parents who criticize them on Facebook. By stacking the regional USA Hockey governing body that regulates the sport with their own executives, the Stars all but ensured no one would stand in their way.
USA TODAY spoke to more than 100 hockey parents, coaches, players, business owners and current and former Stars employees and reviewed hundreds of pages of property records, business filings, contracts, tax returns, court records, emails and internal documents. Together, they reveal how the Stars bullied a community on their path to profiting off a youth sport.
“I had no clue what I was getting into,” Bry told USA TODAY. “If I have an issue or grievance, there is no process for me because they control everything.”
Delivering on their threat
In the face of Andresen’s threat, Bry stood her ground. The club did not renew the two coaches’ contracts. Emails, meeting audio, internal documents and dozens of interviews detail what happened next.
That summer, the Stars informed all two-dozen local high school hockey clubs that the NHL team would be taking over their operations. No longer would the clubs set and collect their own fees, negotiate their own practice ice time, hire and pay their own coaches or sign sponsors without the Stars’ approval. All players would now pay the Stars directly. All coaches would now be Stars hires and employees.
Immediately, the Stars imposed a new fee structure that raised registration fees for many players while reducing the number of ice hours their teams received. All teams would now get two preseason games – one fewer than in years past – and no more than one hour of practice ice a week. The Stars later reduced the regular-season schedule from 18 games to 16. That’s less than half the number of weekly ice hours that USA Hockey’s American Development Model recommends for teenagers to improve.
Bry and the other club leaders were stunned. The Stars stripped the clubs of their agency, practically overnight. The Stars reinstated the two coaches. And there was nothing Bry or the club leaders could do – because the Stars controlled the ice.
Andresen told USA TODAY that the Stars made the changes to level the playing field for high school teams across the region, charge each player the same price, pay each coach the same amount, and protect coaches from club leaders with axes to grind. Under the new structure, he said, most coaches got pay bumps, and most players ended up paying less the first year. As for the two coaches, he said the Stars felt they deserved to stay because they had strong track records and had not violated any rules.
Of all the clubs, the changes hurt Frisco Ice Hockey Association the most. The Stars’ contract with the City of Frisco to manage the city-owned rink requires them to give the club a minimum of 104 ice hours each year free of charge. After the takeover, however, the Stars stopped honoring that agreement.
For the next two years, families in the association were collectively billed tens of thousands of dollars for ice they were supposed to get free, Bry said. She and other club leaders reported the apparent breach of contract to City of Frisco leaders, who emails show met with the Stars in March to discuss it.
As of July, the Stars agreed to give overbilled families a discount toward future seasons, city officials confirmed. Families like Bry’s, whose kids no longer play, will get refunds of $312 for each season they were overcharged – a figure she believes falls well short of what they lost.
A taxpayer-subsidized empire
In the business of amateur hockey, ice is power. In the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, the Stars amassed almost all of it.
The Stars inked a deal to buy their first rink in Texas in 1993, the year the franchise relocated to Dallas from Minnesota. The team needed a place to practice, so they bought the only full-sized rink in the state. They renamed it “StarCenter.”
Hockey wasn’t big in Texas at the time. But playoff runs in five of the Stars’ first six seasons there spawned a wave of interest. Kids and adults signed up in droves for the StarCenter’s recreational leagues and competitive teams.
By 1999, the Stars had competition. At least nine other privately-owned rinks in the metroplex were running their own hockey programs to accommodate the growing demand. The Stars looked to grow their footprint.
Over the next decade, the NHL team cut deals with five cities to build new StarCenters using public money.
City contracts lay out the details. The cities each put up around $10 million or more up front to build the rinks. Once built, they leased the rinks exclusively to the Stars, who agreed to repay the cities in rent payments over 20 to 30 years. In theory, the cities would eventually get their up-front costs back, while the Stars would keep the profits.
The Stars continued expanding when Tom Gaglardi, a Canadian hotel and restaurant magnate, bought the Stars franchise in 2011 for $240 million.
His company, Northland Developments, bought two privately-owned rinks months apart in 2014. The Stars partnered with the City of Mansfield in 2016 to build a 78,000-square-foot ice rink and event space that cost residents more than $20 million, city invoices show, after the Stars blew through the original budget.
Today, the Stars run eight of the 11 full-sized ice-rink facilities within 150 miles of downtown Dallas – and are still growing. In 2024, they partnered with the Town of Northlake to build another taxpayer-funded StarCenter, which is under construction. They are in discussions with the City of Forney to build what could be their 10th rink.
The use of public money to bring ice to Dallas helped roughly triple the number of people registered with USA Hockey to play in Texas. At the same time, it crushed the competition and concentrated almost all the market power in a region of 8 million people into the hands of one for-profit company.
“We have the expertise, we have the staff, we have the resources to bring the best-quality hockey facilities and programming to the entire marketplace,” said Stuchal, the Stars’ chief operating officer. “I can’t speak to other businesses that have come into play here, but without our investment in growing the sport here locally, there just wouldn’t be the hockey landscape that exists today.”
The Stars, valued by Forbes at $2 billion, have shown their competitors little mercy.
“We have to live within their world,” said Frank Trazzera, who since 2007 has run a rink in Fort Worth called NYTEX Sports Centre. “They do a lot of great things for hockey. Not all of them have been inclusive of us.”
On multiple occasions, the Stars have excluded teams that play at non-Stars-run rinks from their leagues, fracturing what had long been community-wide activities. Last year, the Stars kicked NYTEX’s “house” teams – the lowest level of youth competition – out of their league after 15 years, forcing the rink to form its own league with far fewer players and teams.
The Stars readmitted NYTEX’s teams to its house leagues for the upcoming season. Trazzera said he believes the Stars kicked out NYTEX’s teams because his rink ran spring programs that competed with Stars’ programs.
“They ended the relationship in a text message,” Trazzera said. “We were out with no discussion.”
More money, less ice
Instead of using their influence to make a notoriously expensive sport more accessible, the Stars used their monopoly power to jack up prices.
Kat Pierce’s son played the 2024 season for his local high school team and a competitive travel club, the McKinney North Stars. She said she and her husband spent about $30,000 on hockey expenses last year alone.
Club and league fees – which cover teams’ ice rental – cost about $9,000. Another $8,000 went toward airfare, hotels, rental cars, gas, and meals for out-of-town games and tournaments. The rest covered private camps, lessons, training, equipment and team apparel.
Travel clubs that rent Stars ice have steadily paid more money for the same or fewer ice hours, tax returns and financial disclosures show. In six years, the Stars increased the price they charge travel clubs for ice from $375 to $500 an hour.
Ice costs for the McKinney North Stars’ nine teams increased from $350,000 to $425,000 from 2017 to 2022, tax returns show. Its average team now receives 79 practice ice hours per year, down from 97 eight years ago.
Registration fees for Stars tournaments have similarly ballooned. In five years, the team price for the Stars’ annual Labor Day tournament increased from $1,695 to $2,295. That doesn’t include mandatory hotel bookings, from which the Stars get kickbacks.
Even private lessons – all but required for young players who want to advance in the sport – have exceeded some families’ reach.
A one-hour private lesson with a coach and four kids used to cost each family around $55, multiple parents told USA TODAY. That jumped to between $75 and $100 per kid after the Stars more than doubled their minimum cut per lesson. Under the new fee structure, one-on-one lessons can run upwards of $200.
As ice goes, Dallas isn’t necessarily more expensive than other warm parts of the country where one company controls much of the ice. Ice is cheaper in states like Minnesota and Michigan, where the competition is robust and many rinks are community-owned and -run.
Rising energy costs explain part of the Stars’ regular price increases, said Grant Juengling, treasurer of the Dallas Penguins travel club – but families bear the brunt of it.
“We go through various levels of frustration, acceptance and frustration again with the Stars,” he said. “We are very mindful of reminding them that there’s only so much that we can do. It’s very much a tenant-landlord relationship.”
Stuchal acknowledged the hardships that price hikes cause families. He said the Stars are not immune to rising costs, either, and that the organization’s leaders came to each decision to raise prices “very cautiously and thoughtfully.”
“Everything has gotten more expensive; it’s just the economy we live in right now,” Stuchal said. “We’re really just trying to keep this thing afloat and keep things moving in a positive direction.”
Pierce and her husband struggle to make ends meet. Medical ailments have prevented her from working consistently, she said. Her husband works a full-time job and makes side income from refereeing and donating plasma.
“We live hand-to-mouth,” Pierce said. “It’s a huge struggle just to keep your kid’s dreams alive.”
Cracking down on dissent
When parents and players grow frustrated with the Stars’ business practices, they express it in the only ways they know how: by criticizing the Stars on social media or suggesting they’ll take their business elsewhere.
Many of those people have met the $2 billion organization’s wrath.
Jeremy Thompson was fed up. The Stars had raised registration fees for the adult league he and his friends played in while also introducing a running clock during games, which significantly shortened teams’ time on the ice.
After nearly a thousand people signed Thompson’s online petition calling on the Stars to address his and his peers’ concerns, he took to Facebook to suggest starting a beer league at one of the three non-Stars-run hockey rinks in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Soon after, a Stars rink manager banned Thompson from the league, emails show, for violating the Stars’ social media policy.
“Your consistent and prolonged attempts online to draw people away from our programs and facility as well as your continued defamation of StarCenter programming is a direct violation of that policy,” then-StarCenter Mansfield general manager Milt Highfill’s February 2024 email said.
Highfill did not respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.
Thompson and his friends now play exclusively at ICE at The Parks, a rink inside an Arlington shopping mall. Although later reinstated, Thompson – who said he paid the Stars’ league several thousand dollars over the years – had no interest in returning.
“I got kicked out of a league that I had close friends in,” he told USA TODAY. “Hanging out with my guys on the ice brings me so much joy, and to have that taken away for no reason, and it cost me that much? It’s just wrong.”
Pierce, who runs a Facebook group called Texas Hockey Parents with more than 4,000 members, criticized the Stars in a 2021 post after a game in which her son sustained a concussion. That post landed her in hot water with Todd Cochran, then the StarCenter McKinney general manager and president of the McKinney North Stars.
According to Pierce, a SafeSport complaint she later filed and her typed notes memorializing the conversation, Cochran instructed Pierce not to post in her Facebook group for at least six months “if your son wants any future here in Dallas hockey.”
Cochran, who no longer works for the Stars or McKinney North Stars, did not respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.
Pierce said Cochran also instructed her to remove other “negative” posts from the Facebook group. Many times, Pierce complied.
“I definitely made myself small for a period of time out of fear,” she said. “You get so beaten down, and you see your kid get screwed over for opportunities, and you decide, ‘You know what? Maybe I do have to play by their rules to get where I want to be.’”
Another father who coached for years in the Stars’ youth programs grew frustrated by what he saw as a rink manager’s failure to address a safety concern. So he called the NYTEX Sports Centre ice rink – the Stars’ biggest competitor in the region – and asked about coaching there instead. Emails he shared with USA TODAY show what happened after the Stars caught wind.
John Naylor, general manager of the StarCenter Mansfield, fired the father from his coaching positions and banned him and his daughters from all Stars rinks, according to the father’s emails to Naylor memorializing their conversations. His daughters were 5 and 7.
Naylor reversed the ban three days later, emails show, but continued to forbid the father from coaching his daughters’ teams.
Naylor denied the father’s allegations, saying the Stars never banned his daughters. He said the Stars removed the father from coaching for “inappropriate behavior detrimental to the league” but declined to say what that entailed.
“The suspension or removal had absolutely nothing to do with the alleged actions mentioned,” Naylor said.
Added Stuchal: ‘We would never threaten or oust any individual from any of our programs, as long as they were competing and behaving within the stated rules of the league, policies of our company or facilities. We pride ourselves in having safe, clean and positive facilities and programs, so any actions that have been taken were ultimately done for the safety and protection of our customers, officials and staff.’
The father initially agreed to speak to USA TODAY on the record. Shortly after the interview, he asked the news organization to withhold his name.
“It’s going to negatively impact my kids,” he said. “I can’t risk it.”
Stacking the governing body
Anyone who has a problem with the way the Stars do business can take it up with the Texas Amateur Hockey Association, the USA Hockey affiliate that regulates the sport in the region.
The problem: Its board has long been filled with Stars executives, some of whom used their positions to enrich themselves.
USA Hockey, recognized by federal law as the sport’s national governing body, delegates much of its authority to its 34 regional nonprofit affiliates, including the Texas Amateur Hockey Association, which oversees amateur hockey in Texas and Oklahoma.
The association’s board members are elected by the region’s clubs and leagues. But their votes are weighted by the number of players they register – a structure that gives the Stars a colossal advantage.
Of 13,700 players in the two states, more than 5,000 were registered with the Stars’ for-profit adult, house and high school hockey leagues, membership data from midway through the 2024-25 season show – 37%. The players themselves don’t cast votes; a Stars representative casts votes on their behalf.
Roughly 2,800 more players – another 20% – registered with travel clubs that rent Stars ice or played in the Dallas Stars Travel Hockey League, which used Stars rinks for tournaments and games. Voting against the NHL team’s interests comes with the implicit risk that the Stars could stop selling them ice or oust them from the league.
Until recently, Stars employees held four of the 11 Texas Amateur Hockey Association voting board seats, including president and secretary. That changed after a USA TODAY investigation in March revealed that President Lucas Reid and Secretary Brad Buckland – both of whom served as Stars executives – used their positions for personal gain.
For years, Reid, Buckland and Stars vice president Damon Boettcher organized Stars tournaments that required out-of-town participants to book minimum three-night stays at select hotels – or risk their teams being kicked out of the tournaments without a refund. At the same time, the three executives ran their own for-profit company that took a cut of the revenue from each hotel booking.
Parents who were forced to pay hundreds of dollars for hotel stays they did not always want or need were outraged to learn that their money had enriched the very people who were supposed to be acting in their best interests.
Reid and Buckland did not respond to multiple requests for comment from USA TODAY. Boettcher acknowledged the arrangement but denied any wrongdoing. Steven Stapleton, an attorney representing the association, denied that the arrangement violated conflict-of-interest policies.
None of the three employees still work in the Stars’ front office. Stuchal declined to comment on the arrangement.
“They’re no longer employed with the club, so I’m not really going to speak to their actions, since I really didn’t have any direct knowledge of the situation that they were involved with,” he said.
After USA TODAY’s investigation, USA Hockey’s national governing body launched an ethics investigation into Reid and Buckland, according to two sources with direct knowledge who are not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
USA Hockey senior director of communications Dave Fischer did not respond to multiple requests for comment from USA TODAY.
Buckland resigned as the association’s secretary days after the investigation published. Yet Reid, who started as president in 2019, remains on the board. Although he did not seek reelection when his term expired in June, the nonprofit’s bylaws reserve a board seat for the immediate past president.
During Reid and Buckland’s tenure as president and secretary, the affiliate rarely held meetings. Mark Servaes, who succeeded Reid as president in June, said the only minutes he has found are from the association’s 2024 and 2025 annual meetings.
Rather than advocate for families’ interests, the board largely preserved the status quo.
Healthy capitalism or illegal monopoly?
There’s nothing illegal about being a monopoly, said Luke Hasskamp, an antitrust attorney with Bona Law, which has offices in Dallas, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York and San Diego – as long as the firm uses legal means to achieve and protect its dominant market position.
A firm’s ability to raise prices by 5% or more without losing business is a hallmark of a monopoly, he said. But raising prices and ruthlessly competing for business isn’t illegal, either.
Monopolies can face legal problems, Hasskamp said, when they start winning business based on anything except the merits of their services. Some of the Stars’ business practices, he said, may have crept into that territory.
For example, locking cities into 20- to 30-year leases can create significant barriers for potential competitors trying to enter the rink market – a key factor in determining whether a monopoly has engaged in anticompetitive conduct.
Threatening and retaliating against parents and coaches who use non-Stars-run rinks, Hasskamp said, could also run afoul of antitrust laws.
Perhaps the clearest example of possible anticompetitive conduct is the Stars’ use of stay-to-play tournament requirements. By “tying” their power in the ice rink market to another market, they effectively force families to buy a product they don’t want – hotels – to get the one they do want – tournaments.
Because the Stars’ stay-to-play requirements involved multiple third parties – Reid, Buckland and Boettcher, their company, the hotels, and the Texas Amateur Hockey Association – the affected families could argue that the Stars engaged in an agreement to illegally restrain trade, Hasskamp said, in violation of the Sherman Act.
A similar issue emerged in an antitrust lawsuit against Varsity, a company that required participants at its cheerleading competitions to stay at specific hotels from which it received kickbacks. Varsity agreed to limit its stay-to-play policies as part of its settlement of that lawsuit.
Yet stay-to-play arrangements remain common across youth sports, and the Stars continue to use them. Although they no longer work with Reid, Buckland and Boettcher’s company, Stuchal said the Stars will work with a new stay-to-play hotel booking provider for upcoming tournaments, adding that they will be “loosening” the policies.
“The vast majority of our participating teams – they welcome the service and are happy to pay for that service and the convenience that comes with it,” he said.
Days after USA TODAY’s investigation in March, a group of travel clubs in Texas and Oklahoma withdrew from the Dallas Stars Travel Hockey League and started their own league, the Texas Hockey League. By banding together, the league’s leaders hope to push back on some of the Stars’ less savory practices, like stay-to-play requirements.
The Stars, they acknowledge, still hold the power.
“We want to be partners with them, but they get to determine their partnership with us,” said Mike Salekin, a founding Texas Hockey League board member.
“Ice is gold, and they control the ice.”
With at least one new rink in the works, the Stars are doubling down on their multi-million-dollar youth-sports bet.
In fact, the $2 billion NHL franchise is expanding its empire to encompass another youth sport: volleyball.
Kenny Jacoby is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY who covers college and youth sports. Follow him on X @kennyjacoby and on Bluesky @kennyjacoby.bsky.social. Email him at kjacoby@usatoday.com.
This post appeared first on USA TODAY
