Look, when you sign your kid up for ice hockey, you expect a few things. Skating lessons. Maybe a missing tooth. The occasional scrap when they’re teenagers and full of hormones.
What you don’t expect is your eight-year-old dropping gloves and throwing haymakers during halftime at a professional game while 10,000 people watch.
But that’s exactly what happened during a Hershey Bears AHL game in Pennsylvania, when a “Mites on Ice” scrimmage—meant to be a cute exhibition of tiny children playing hockey—turned into an absolute bloodbath.
The footage is genuinely unhinged. Kids throwing punches. Cross-checks from behind. A goaltender—a GOALTENDER, the one position where you’re explicitly supposed to stay out of fights—charging across the ice to get involved. These children have watched too much NHL.
The video went nuclear. 16 million views. Barstool’s hockey podcast shared it. Sports pages around the world picked it up. Everyone had the same reaction: “What the hell did I just watch?”
Here’s where it gets messier. Investigators initially suspected the fight was staged—that coaches had put the kids up to it for laughs. The kids’ team, the Central Penn Panthers, denied this emphatically. Their explanation? The players are a “close-knit group” who got caught up in “show time” mentality in front of the big crowd.
Translation: nobody told them to fight, but nobody told them not to, and eight-year-olds are not known for their impulse control.
The trigger was apparently a slash from one player. Then someone retaliated. Then someone else jumped in. Then the goalie thought “fuck it, I’m not missing this,” and it was on.
The Hershey Bears released a statement saying the incident “did not reflect the values of the sport.” USA Hockey launched an investigation. The Panthers promised “accountability in a manner appropriate to their age and development.”
What does accountability look like for an eight-year-old who threw punches on national television? A stern talking-to? Extra skating drills? Being told they can’t have dessert?
Miraculously, no one was injured. Which is fortunate, because explaining to a hospital that your child was concussed in an unsanctioned intermission brawl between third-graders would be a conversation nobody wants to have.
The kids have been “made explicitly aware that their actions were unacceptable, dangerous, and have no place in youth hockey.”
Something tells me they already knew that. They just didn’t care. Because they’re eight. And it was show time.
Source: Washington Post
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