It's early on a fall morning. The streets of Skaneateles are still dark, save for a handful of headlights winding their way toward the Community Center. Inside the rink, the soundtrack of winter has already begun: the scrape of freshly sharpened skates, pucks smacking against the boards, parents clutching coffee from Byrne Dairy while seated on cold metal stands.

For most communities, it's just another youth hockey practice. In Skaneateles, it's where a tradition is quietly honed. 

Legions of girls’ and boys’ championship banners hang from the rafters. Winning has become part of the story here. 

The Laker girls have captured three New York State championships (2014, 2017 and 2022) and the Laker boys have won seven (1983, 1989, 2015, 2019, 2023, 2024 and 2025) including a recent threepeat, the first team to ever do so in New York State history. These are remarkable accomplishments for any hockey club, let alone one representing a town of roughly 7,000 people. But the more interesting question isn't how many championships they've won.

It's why.

Why does this little corner of the Finger Lakes keep producing championship teams generation after generation while schools many times its size struggle to do it once?

The answer isn't found in a single coach, a single player, or even a single championship season.

It's found in culture.

Walk into the rink any time during the year and you'll feel it immediately. Children learning to skate almost as soon as they can walk. High school players taking the time to chat with starry-eyed Mites. Parents who have spent years driving to far-flung tournaments without complaint. Grandparents sitting in the same seats they've occupied for decades. Volunteers dutifully manning the penalty box and the clock. Elementary-aged kids lining up to slap high school players’ hands before they take the ice on game day. 

In many towns, the hockey team belongs to the school. Here, it belongs to the community.

The strength of today’s program traces all the way back to 1969. That year, William G. Allyn, captain of the 1925 Skaneateles High School boys hockey team, generously offered to fund half of the cost of constructing the village’s first permanent outdoor rink. New York State agreed to fund the remainder and in 1971, the first Allyn Arena, an outdoor refrigerated rink in Austin Park, debuted. Before it was built, hockey players could only skate when Mother Nature’s natural conditions allowed. Now the community could establish a longer and more reliable hockey season.

30 years later, in 2001, the newly built Skaneateles Community Center replaced the outdoor rink as its primary hockey venue boasting two year-round indoor sheets of ice (the William G. Allyn Ice Arena and the Duke Schneider Ice Arena, named after a long-time hockey team manager who gave his entire estate to the hockey program upon his passing in 2007). 

Once again, the Allyn family played a catalytic role bringing the Community Center project to life with William G. Allyn’s son, also named William, championing the project personally. 

In addition to its extraordinary facilities for a town the size of Skaneateles, strong programs require strong leadership. 

Until last year, and for the 25 years prior, that leadership for the high school boys’ hockey team was provided by Coach Mitch Major. Far beyond his formal coaching duties, through skill development programs like Major Skills and community activities like Skate with Santa, Coach Major cultivated a hockey program steeped in tradition, respect, hard-work, discipline and the magic of small-town culture. 

After shaping Skaneateles hockey for decades, and knowing how to go out on top, Coach Major retired from his head coaching role after winning the 2025 New York State Championship threepeat in Buffalo, New York. With continuity in mind, Coach Major seamlessly transitioned the head coaching role to his long-time assistant coach, Jeff Bobbett, who led the boys to the Section Championship final in his first year.  

As another school year begins, the strength of Skaneateles' hockey tradition is perhaps best captured by one remarkable fact: all four varsity boys' hockey captains have fathers who once served as Laker captains themselves. 

Luke Bobbett, Jack Tank and Nolan Kennedy’s fathers were all varsity hockey captains in their day. Braedan Taggert’s father, Chase, was a multi-sport captain for lacrosse and soccer and his mother, Heather, was also an accomplished Laker athlete captaining her soccer and lacrosse teams.  

Is it just a coincidence? Or is it a reflection of the something more? 

Culture and championships don’t happen automatically. They are nurtured with intention and a deep sense of collective purpose over time. Each generation inherits them, reshapes them and passes them forward. 

Ask former players what they remember most about Laker hockey, and most won't start with their winning record.

They'll remember bus rides. Locker room debacles. Practices that seemed impossibly early at the time. The coach who demanded one more sprint. The teammate who picked them up after a bad game.

Those moments rarely make newspaper headlines. But they're the moments that build championship teams. They're also the moments that build people.

Championships eventually fade into record books. The banners become part of the background. Scores are forgotten. Culture isn't.

On another early morning, a new youth hockey group will step onto the ice wearing jerseys that hang a little too long past their elbows. They'll chase pucks with more enthusiasm than precision. They'll glance toward those championship banners overhead before racing off to join the next drill.

They won't be thinking about history. But history will already be shaping them. In the end, that's what makes the Skaneateles Lakers special.

101 years after William G. Allyn first wore the captain's "C" for Skaneateles High School, like their fathers did before them, Luke, Braedan, Jack and Nolan now wear it themselves.

Someday, another group of wide-eyed players will look up at them from the stands, not realizing they're watching the next chapter of a story that began long before. That's the remarkable thing about traditions like ours. We don't simply inherit championships. We inherit the responsibility to leave the program we love a little stronger than we found it.

Perhaps all of this is why hockey occupies such a unique place in Skaneateles. The hockey program has become one of the threads that stitches generations together. And maybe that's the greatest achievement of all.