Florida Panthers
Introduce Floorball Program
to South Florida Youth
By Reba LaRose
The Florida Panthers of the NHL are looking
to change that common perspective through
education and exposure. Now rooted in four school
districts throughout Miami-Dade, Broward, and
Palm Beach counties, the Panthers are working to
spread their free floorball program across South
Florida.
Floorball was developed in the Lake Michigan
area in the 1960s. Since it’s rise in the Northern
United States, it has grown into a competitive
international sport over the past 50 or so years.
The sport continues to spread slowly across the
U.S. and is gradually finding popularity in the
Sunshine State.
Three years after its establishment, 200 schools
and hundreds of elementary through high school
students are learning the fundamentals of
floorball in their P.E. Classes.
Florida Panthers Youth Hockey Manager Matt
Janusz has contributed to a large part of the
success of the new program.
While floorball is very similar to ice hockey and
roller hockey, there are some key differences that
have encouraged more schools to pick up this
sport.
Unlike traditional hockey, there are no skates;
players simply run across a court, like in
basketball, which makes it safer for the nonskater,
and easier to learn.
The stick used in floorball is also lighter and
shorter than a hockey stick and is hollow –
something that Janusz says really helped to
promote the program to the school boards.
“This isn’t a program that’s forced on any school
or teacher; it’s a completely optional program
that the teachers sign up for,” Janusz said.
“The teachers come to our training, which is
about a 4-hour classroom-style training where we
go through the entire sport: its origin, the sport
“Coming across hockey in any fashion down here is difficult for a lot of kids, so we really wanted
to find a way to introduce hockey to kids somewhere where there is structured involvement like a
P.E. Class,” -Florida Panthers Youth Hockey Manager Matt Janusz
itself, the basic fundamentals, how to utilize
floorball within P.E., and obviously just playing the
traditional games and going through how to utilize
space and time and stuff like that.”
After learning the basics, P.E. Teachers finally get
to experience the game themselves. Janusz runs
the group through the same drills that they will be
teaching their students, and when they complete
training, they get to take a hockey bag full of brand
new Panthers branded floorball gear, balls, and
miniature collapsible metal nets for their students
to use.
Although quite the foreign sport to many
Floridians, students at Inlet Grove High School,
an A-rated Title I school in Riviera Beach, learned
to appreciate the sport. The high schoolers began
playing floorball in mid-October. Only a small
number of the group had ever played floor hockey
before while quite a few of them didn’t believe
hockey was played in the United States.
“When I told the students that our next unit
would be ‘hockey,’ I don’t think any of the
students believed me. They thought I was
joking,” Michael Fritz, P.E. Instructor at Inlet
Grove recalled.
Knowing that many of his students had never
played hockey before, Fritz – who believes that
every student deserves the same opportunities
to learn and experience something new – aimed
to help each one become successful at the sport.
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