Sun. Beach. Ocean. Hockey. One of these things is not like the other, right?

But if you think hockey can’t find a home in the sun-soaked Caribbean tropics, you’re wrong.

Welcome to hockey—inline, not ice—in the decidedly non-hockey environs of Turks and Caicos, where the only ice is usually found in a cocktail glass.

Provo Hockey League

The island paradise embraced Canada’s proudest athletic product about eight years ago when a group of parents formed the Provo Hockey League.

“A lot of people can’t believe there’s hockey here,” says Alan Larkin, league commissioner and dad of a player in the league “But there is.”

And it is huge, hockey is now one of the most popular sports (second only to soccer) on Providenciales, the most populated island in Turks and Caicos—where the average daily temperature reaches about 29 degrees Celsius.

Come to the Graceway Sports Centre on any Saturday from October through March, and you’ll find the place jammed with players and their families cheering them on.

The Sport That Stuck

One of the dads, Oneal Delancy, brandished a small plastic horn the day I visited, for yelling his encouragement to the kids. (Those annoying air horns were mercifully abolished).

He has a son and daughter in the league.

“This is the fifth year for my kids; it’s a sport that really stuck,” Delancy said between toots on his horn. “They do other sports but by far, hockey is their favorite.”

How the Provo Hockey League Started

Many Canadians live in Provo, and their love for their native sport ignited the hockey fever on the island. The game is played with a hard plastic puck, not the vulcanized rubber one used in ice hockey.

The Canadian men on the island started playing shinny—well, not the sort of shinny on a pond.

“We were a bunch of men playing ball hockey on a beat-up tennis court at an abandoned hotel,” says Gilles Diotte, a Canadian native and volunteer ref in the Provo Hockey League.

Kids got involved and the sports center was created. Diotte’s wife, Marie-Claude, says “We saw a need for the kids to have hockey, so a bunch of moms got together and started a group for four-year-olds.”

The non-profit league now flourishes, with about 100 kids in all taking part. They pay $350 for a season, which includes one practice and a game each week.

This is Hockey

The day I visited, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face as I watched the melting pot of native, Canadian, American and European kids, a neat ethnic mix of smiling black and white faces in helmets,

As Marie-Claude laughingly called it, this place is “the United Nations of hockey.”

And make no mistake, sports fans, this is hockey—albeit played on floor and not ice, and with roller blades, not skates.

Kids ages up to 17 play in three divisions and take it quite seriously.

“I had been to a game one year in Miami and liked it,” says soft-spoken Rashan Munnings, a local lad of Bahamian and Turks and Caicos parents. “Then we moved here and I asked my mom if I could play.”

He entered the league’s learn-to-skate program and five years later is one of its top guns, the leading scorer on his team. He says he practices his stick handling with a ball in his house. Ever break anything?

“Well,” he smiles shyly, “a little.”

Need more proof that the sport is catching on? Several of the boys have moved to the U.S. to pursue the sport.

One of them transitioned to ice hockey so well he’s at an Atlanta prep school, and is in the youth system of the NHL team Atlanta Thrashers.

Good Hockey Sense

The smaller ones fumble and fall more than the older kids, who have benefited from experience and exhibit a graceful familiarity with the sport.

But all of them, both boys and girls, play with the genuine passion and sheer joy that makes the sport such a delight to play and watch.

Larkin, a Canadian who played ice hockey and came to Turks and Caicos to be a contractor, says many of the players have what he calls good hockey sense.

“And you just can’t coach hockey sense, they either have it or they don’t.”

On his particular day, it’s crystal clear they do indeed have it. Teams with fearsome-sounding names like the Surge, Dragons and Sharks bolt around the rink.

I immediately notice the sharp auditory difference between this and the ice version, the thumping thunder of wheels on boards replacing the slashing sound of skates cutting ice.

“It’s amazing, a lot of the local kids had never heard of hockey and they just picked it up so naturally,” says Diotte of the natives who comprise about 40 per cent of the league’s players.

Mike O’Connell is a former junior ice hockey player from Canada who now coaches in the Provo Hockey League. He doesn’t have kids in the league but volunteers to give back to the community and stay close to his favorite sport.

“These kids are just amazing,” O’Connell says. “They’ve just embraced the sport.”

As much, it would seem, as the sport has embraced the island.