A 9/11 reflection from 4Check Hockey
There are two rooms I know better than almost anywhere else in the world: a firehouse and a locker room.
Before I built 4Check Hockey, I lived in both worlds. I started playing hockey as soon as I could walk, and I did not stop until I was 30 years old. I grew up in Hermantown, Minnesota, then played through college at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and professionally for several years after that. When my playing career finally ended, I spent the next ten years as a firefighter. On the surface, a rink and a firehouse don't have much in common. One smells like tape and skate sharpening, the other like turnout gear and diesel exhaust. But underneath, they run on the same fuel: people who show up for each other, who put on equipment and go do something hard because somebody has to, and who understand that the person next to them might be the reason they make it through the day.
That's what I think about every September 11th.
Twenty-five years ago, close to 3,000 people didn't come home, and hundreds of firefighters, police officers, and paramedics ran into buildings that everyone else was running out of. I never worked that day and I'll never claim to fully understand what it took. But I've worn the gear. I've heard the tones drop and felt my body move before my brain finished processing what was happening. I know what it means to trust that the person next to you will do their job so you can do yours. That's the culture 9/11 asks us to remember, and it's the same culture I try to build into every program we run at 4Check Hockey.
Ten years on the job is long enough to lose any illusion that safety is guaranteed. You answer calls on someone's worst day. You see what a family looks like in the exact moment they realize nothing will be the same again. That kind of perspective does not leave you. It follows you onto the ice, into a boardroom, into every ordinary Tuesday afterward. So when I talk about gratitude for playing hockey in a free country, I am not speaking in the abstract. I have seen how fast people can lose everything, and I know firsthand what it costs to keep something as simple as youth sports running in a community.
Sports don't happen by accident
We talk a lot in hockey about toughness: finishing your check, playing through soreness, competing every shift. It's easy to treat that as just a game. But the freedom to even have that conversation, to lace up skates on a Tuesday night instead of worrying about whether the rink will still be standing, isn't something every kid on earth gets to take for granted. It's paid for. Some of that price was paid by people in fire gear and uniforms on a Tuesday morning in September 2001, and some of it is paid every day by people who still do that job right now.
I've stood in both places: the ones who run toward danger, and the ones who get to play a game for a living because other people made that possible. Not many people get to see both sides of that coin, and it changed how I think about what we're actually building with 4Check Hockey. It was never just about training harder hits or building better athletes. It's about building kids, coaches, and programs that understand the ice they're standing on is a privilege, not a given.
What we owe the game
Every rep in a 4Check program, every drill designed to protect a kid's body and brain, comes from the same instinct that got me through fire training: take care of the person next to you, because someone is counting on you to. That's not a coincidence. It's the same lesson, just wearing different gear.
So this week, before puck drop and before practice, I'd ask our whole 4Check community to take thirty seconds. Think about the firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and everyday people who ran toward the fire twenty-five years ago. Think about the freedoms that let your kid play travel hockey, that let a small business like ours exist, that let all of us disagree, compete, and still shake hands at center ice afterward.
Then go play like it matters. Because it does, and because someone made sure you'd get the chance.
Jon Francisco, Founder & CEO, 4Check Hockey