from Cam Cole of the Vancouver Sun,

Absorbed by Postmedia colleague Michael Traikos’s series on the new epidemic of hockey academies for children of the very rich or soon-to-be poor, here was my take-away from the revelations it contained:

Hockey, if it isn’t already, is in danger of becoming an illness in Canada, possibly untreatable.

We mock Americans for their obsessive love of football’s ingrained brutality and the cavalier way fans and parents and league administrators shrug off all of that sport’s accompanying detritus, but do we ever look in the mirror?

Our national winter sport has become terrifyingly expensive, dangerously elitist, and is slowly but surely hacking away at the roots of what made the possibility of greatness accessible, albeit at greater or lesser odds, to any kid with talent and a dream.

Now it also takes money, and plenty of it.

continued

If you missed the four part feature from Traikos, here is part four with links to the previous articles too...