BIDDEFORD — Community building is never as much fun as when men over 40 years of age check each other into walls on ice skates. Every Sunday night at the Biddeford Ice Arena, in a Clark Kent-like transformation, men enter the locker rooms as professionals and leave as athletes.

The Biddeford Adult Ice Hockey league makes it all possible by facilitating mens hockey games for the B league (men’s over 40 years-of-age league) in the early afternoon until roughly 11 p.m.

The Sunday night ritual has become a staple of some of these men’s lives for more than a decade, making the hockey league more like a family or club than an athletic competition.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. There is plenty of roughhousing, fast stick work, and the league regularly fields teams for tournaments across the country and even Canada.

The Biddeford Adult Ice Hockey league will field a team to compete in a tournament in Moncton, New Brunswick. The BAIHL regularly fields a team in the North Conway, New Hampshire over 50 years of age tournament, the Old Man of The Mountain tournament. They won in 2014 and again last year.

League President Mike DeAngelis said, “The great thing about it is we play against each other here but then we get to get together and play together in Moncton, in Conway, in Lake Placid. We get to play in the Miracle on Ice tournament. The guys go out there and they get to tour the whole facility and play on that ice. We might rough each other up out there but then we get together.”

The team names are sponsoring businesses, the league is a non-profit, and some of these gentlemen have been playing hockey together at various levels since high school or younger.

DeAngelis said, “It’s been a great networking and family type thing. We’re a non profit. The rink takes care of us and we try to take care of the rink and just try to grow what we’re trying to do here.”

These saavy skaters are also evidently financial wizards, using their nonprofit status to generate over $90,000.00 for the Biddeford Ice Arena annually. There is no admission charge to attend their games, but tipping the bartender in the upstairs Cross Bar is encouraged.

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