Youth hockey: Crystal Ice House to honor Casey Van Damme

When Casey Van Damme discovered a rink at the Crystal Ice House would carry his name, he was humbled, yet felt it was unnecessary.

Others adamantly disagreed. They know Van Damme as a tireless volunteer, a supreme organizer and a man who basically saved the Ice House nine years ago.

“I would call him Father Hockey,” said Charlie Boyd, Van Damme’s successor as president of FireWagon Hockey Inc. and the Yellow Jackets Hockey Club. “The myth, the legend, the man. It definitely needed to be done. This is someone who dedicated a lot of time. He has a consistent system of values and didn’t waver at all.”

Van Damme, 58, will be honored at noon Sunday when the Ice House’s West Rink will be named the “Coach Casey Van Damme West Rink.” It will be part of the Yellow Jackets’ annual spring skills competition, which starts at 10 a.m. with various relays and timed events at the facility in Crystal Lake.

The ceremony will take place during the lunch break after the 11 a.m. session.

“It’s great. It’s pretty neat,” Van Damme said. “It’s been a long time. When I started this [FireWagon Hockey] in 1986, it didn’t seem like one of those things that would pick up momentum, but it has. It’s worked out extremely well here.”

Van Damme grew up in Superior, Wisconsin, playing high school and college hockey there. He is in the University of Superior’s Hall of Fame. After his college career, Van Damme went to work for Transamerica, a financial service company based out of San Francisco.

The volunteer genes were in his DNA because his father, Robert Van Damme, always was helping with hockey in Superior. Robert helped build a rink there taht would help lengthen the season for the youth players a little further into the spring, after the ponds and lakes were thawing.

Van Damme’s real first name is Keith, but sometime around the age of 4, an aunt dubbed him Casey after the song “And the Band Played On.” There were twin girls with blond hair in the neighborhood, with whom young Keith was always hanging out.

The first line of the song goes, “Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde, and the band played on.” When his aunt saw him with the girls, she would sing that line, and the name stuck.

A few years after Casey’s college playing days, he and his brothers formed FireWagon Hockey, which would put on clinics and camps in various towns. The money raised from these events would go back to local associations and to a charity in that city.

Van Damme did that in Minnesota and Wisconsin for several years, then brought FireWagon with him when he moved to Crystal Lake around 2000.

While many clubs are money-makers, and club coaches often are paid, former FireWagon vice president Jeff Bruns said that did not happen with Van Damme.

“He does everything for hockey. He asks nothing back,” Bruns said. “He never made a dime off this. Everything is volunteer, volunteer, volunteer. There’s nothing about what he personally will get out of this. It’s about what the kids will get out of this. It’s about the organization and community.”

Former Ice House owner Rich Sexton was uncertain what would happen with the building in 2007. The Leafs Hockey Club, the Ice House’s main tenant, built a rink in West Dundee and moved. Sexton called Van Damme and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

At that time, the Yellow Jackets were a spring and summer club that allowed players to then compete with other clubs the rest of the year. Van Damme and Bruns decided the Yellow Jackets, a name they picked from Van Damme’s college team, could become a year-round program and take up the ice time in the Leafs’ absence.

“I’m proud we were able to keep (youth) hockey here in Crystal Lake,” said Van Damme, who coached Prairie Ridge's high school team for four seasons. “Instead of it going away and this being a storage facility, we’ve continued to keep the program going, the hockey growing.”

The Yellow Jackets started with about 125 players and now have about 500. FireWagon Hockey purchased the Ice House from Sexton in 2010.

Van Damme retired from his job last year and stepped down as chief executive officer of FireWagon Hockey. The rest of the executive board also resigned, which was by design as it let the new board it had been grooming take over.

“With his careful planning and calculating, he took what would have been a disastrous situation for [the Ice House] and turned it into a win-win,” Boyd said. “We have great hockey, the kids are learning a lot, it’s a great family place and we try to build community with a lot of volunteering. [Van Damme] has really made quite a facility that allows people to grow in many different ways.”

Van Damme will be joined by his wife, Beth, and their four children – Brandon, Catherine, Chris and Sean – for Sunday’s celebration. He is not sure what he will do with more free time, although he skates during some “rat hockey” sessions at the rink and still coaches the Yellow Jackets Bantam team.

“I don’t know yet. We bought a place in Naples, Florida,” he said. “I’ll still be involved in some form or fashion, I just won’t be head coach or running clinics or camps. We did a great job with it. We raised a lot of money over the years. We did it for the right reasons.”