“Whoever wanted to come, it was first come, first served,” Fried said. “We had a pretty good wait-list by the end of it.”
With the interest there, Fried still needed to find the money. Hockey camps typically cost $350 to $400 a week because of ice time, insurance and mass mailings. Fried was trying to do this free of charge for everyone. Fortunately, he applied for and received a grant through the Harvard Club of Boston. In addition to this initial funding, Harvard hockey alumni and other private citizens also donated money to the camp.
But that didn’t take care of all the costs. Fried still needed to find proper equipment for the campers at little or no cost to them. Since new skates are in the neighborhood of $300 to $350, and goalie pads up to $1,000, members of both the Harvard men’s and women’s hockey teams donated old equipment from their basements. Fried then took the used equipment to Play It Again Sports and exchanged it for youth sizes and sold them to the kids for essentially nothing. Five bucks for skates, two for shin pads.
In the end, Fried had enough money for nine time slots on Friday nights and enrolled 90 kids, divided into three sessions of 30 players. The camp counseling, facilitated by 11 current and former Harvard players, proved to be the easiest part.
“Ninety percent of the work was off the ice, getting insurance and all of that stuff,” Fried said. “It was great when Friday night rolled around and we actually met the kids.”
Those nine Friday nights were the reward for everyone involved.
“Their eyes lit up when we got to the rink,” said Smith, one of the counselors. “To see the kids excited and the parents excited was a great feeling for all of us. You know those experiences at a young age mean a lot.”
And all of it—right down to the shoelaces on the used size-five Tacks—came courtesy of Fried. You could say he was the founder, president, CEO, CFO, general manager and head coach of this outfit. In fact, the Crimson City Hockey Clinic might become a non-profit organization in the official sense. Yesterday Fried filed paperwork with the IRS in hopes of achieving tax-exempt status.
Fried is planning for the clinic’s future, and hopes junior Rob Flynn and others will help keep the camp going this summer.
“It’s extremely important to get role models in front of the kids,” Fried said. “Everyone has some older kid they met at a camp that made them want to pursue their dream.”
Meanwhile, Fried has continued to live his college hockey dream and played arguably his best game of the season in Friday’s comeback win at Yale. That night, Mazzoleni said the Crimson’s sizeable second line (Fried, Dennis Packard and Brendan Bernakevitch) “absolutely manhandled” the Elis.
Fried is down to six more regular-season games at Harvard. You can bet he’ll play them like the 116 before. “One hundred miles per hour,” Smith said, “all the time.
“Anything he undertakes—school, hockey, the charity work he does—he goes all out, all the time,” Smith continued. “He’s just that type of kid. You want him on your team, in your business. Anything you do in life, you want him on your side.”
Mazzoleni calls Fried “one of the finest individuals that represents Harvard as a student-athlete.” That’s lofty praise considering his peers, but there are 90 kids in town who would probably tell you the same thing.
—Staff writer Jon Paul Morosi can be reached at morosi@fas.harvard.edu.