Color of Hockey: Montgomery matriarch of inner-city game in Twin Cities

William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog for the past nine years. Douglas joined NHL.com in March 2019 and writes about people of color in the sport. Today, as part of the NHL's celebration of Black History Month, he profiles Debbie Montgomery, a co-founder of the Mariucci Inner City Hockey Starter Association.

Debbie Montgomery said she was tired of hearing the racist slurs being directed toward her sons, who were among the few Black kids playing hockey in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in the 1980s.
"The things they were saying was unconscionable," Montgomery said. "I told my sons, 'If you're going to play this sport in the State of Hockey, you all have to be good because I can't be standing up here in the stands hollering at people.'"

So in 1985, when an opportunity came to help create a program to produce more Black players, Montgomery pounced on it.
She became a co-founder of the Mariucci Inner City Hockey Starter Association, a program in St. Paul designed to expose urban youngsters to the sport.
The program is named for John Mariucci, who played and coached at the University of Minnesota, and also played five NHL seasons with the Chicago Black Hawks in the 1940s.
Montgomery became a fixture in the local hockey scene, rubbing elbows with Minnesota legends like Herb Brooks, who coached the U.S. Olympic men's hockey team to a gold medal in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, longtime University of Minnesota coach Doug Woog and Ken Yackel, who played professional hockey for eight seasons, including one with the Boston Bruins in 1958-59.
"Herb Brooks, Ken Yackel, all of them came out and said, 'We need to get more young African-American kids into hockey,'" she said.

Montgomery is the hockey matriarch of her family, a community and much more. She became the first woman officer of the St. Paul police department in 1975 and rose to the rank of senior commander.
She was the first Black woman elected to the St. Paul city council in 2004. At 17, she was the youngest member to serve on the national board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A segment of one of St. Paul's streets was named Debbie Montgomery Avenue in her honor in 2014.
"She is the first everything," said St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, a Mariucci Inner City Hockey Starter Association alum who still plays hockey. "She's a retired police officer; my father is a retired police officer as well, so I grew up seeing her in those circles. I grew up seeing her on the ice with Mariucci. I grew up seeing her all over the place."
Montgomery wasn't a stranger to ice, having been an elite level speed skater. But she didn't know anything about hockey when one of her three sons, Robbie, said he wanted to join a friend on a Catholic school team.
Montgomery said she drove to the coach's house with her son to ask what she needed to do to get her son into the sport.
"He looks at us and says, 'Well, you know, you all have weak ankles,'" she said.
After a sporting goods store owner assured her the coach's assertion was an old stereotype, Montgomery became more determined to get her sons into hockey.
"I would be driving all over the Twin Cities, mainly in St, Paul, to find these different places where they were having weekend hockey camps, special schools, things like that," she said.

She put more miles on the family car driving around the state looking for a college where her eldest son, Matthew, could play hockey. He landed at St. Mary's College -- now called St. Mary's University of Minnesota -- where he became an All-American defenseman and was inducted into the NCAA Division III school's athletic hall of fame in 2003.
His son,
Bryce Montgomery
, is continuing the family's hockey legacy. The 19-year-old defenseman for London of the Ontario Hockey League was selected by the Carolina Hurricanes in the sixth round (No. 170) of the 2021 NHL Draft.
Kyle Peterson, a former University of Minnesota hockey player, heard about Debbie Montgomery's efforts in navigating her sons through the sport and reached out to her in 1985 to ask if she would help in getting more Black children interested in hockey.
"I'm not bragging, but everybody up here knows me, so he kept dragging me around saying, 'Come on, I need you to help me try to recruit these kids,'" she said. "I'd gone to rec centers and schools to see if children or parents would be interested in getting into the program. Kyle would go out and find sponsors and stuff to pay for the equipment and stuff like that."

The program soon gained traction. Minnesota North Stars players, including Tony McKegney, the first Black player to score 40 goals in an NHL season (1987-88 with the St. Louis Blues), occasionally would skate with a growing number of kids.
Former President George H.W. Bush singled out the program on June 20, 1993, as part of his daily "Points of Light" campaign that honored volunteerism in America.
The Mariucci program built a bond between Debbie Montgomery and Brooks, who eagerly volunteered to help, fascinated by the potential of what a growth of Black talent could do for hockey.
"He and Kyle [Peterson], in a handful of rinks in St. Paul in the inner city, they were tying skates for these kids," said Dan Brooks, the late coach's son. "I remember him telling me, 'Can you imagine if you had Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan coming down on you on a 2-on-1?' He just wanted to give these kids the opportunity to play hockey. A lot of them were great athletes playing football and basketball, and he wanted them to use their raw athletic ability for the game of hockey."

Debbie Montgomery isn't as involved in youth hockey as she once was, but she's still passionate about the sport. She's a huge Minnesota Wild fan and performed the team's ceremonial "Let's Play Hockey" call before a game last season wearing her home Matt Dumba Wild jersey.
She said she's "super happy" seeing the influx of Black players at all levels of hockey and looks forward to the day when she can root for her grandson Bryce in the NHL.
"I'm hoping and praying that whenever he gets a chance to play for an NHL team that I will be alive and able to get to a game,' the 75-year-old hockey matriarch said with a laugh. "I kept telling him, 'Couldn't you have gotten drafted by Chicago or some place that's a little closer than North Carolina?'"
Photos: Roberta Taylor Hill, Mayor Melvin Carter, Matthew Montgomery