Former Amity High Hockey Standout Officiates Championship Game

Editor's note: This article was originally published on Fair Lawn-Saddle Brook Patch in New Jersey.

Nearly every weekend from October through March, former Orange resident Bryan Hicks is on the road.

The Fair Lawn High School business teacher finishes class on Friday, hops in his car and drives off to Dartmouth College or Cornell University or one of the other 10 schools in the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference to spend that night and the following day officiating college hockey games.

Hicks, who's also the director of officiating for World Team Tennis, began refereeing college hockey in 2007.

"I had worked men’s hockey until 2009, when I started working both the men’s league and the women’s league," he said. "It’s just been kind of luck of the draw as to which weekend I’m going on the men’s, which weekend I’ve been on women’s side."

For the past two seasons, Hicks has been selected to work deep into the NCAA women's league playoffs. Last year he officiated the women's Frozen Four in Duluth, Minn. and this year he worked the women's quarterfinals, semifinals and national championship in Minneapolis between the University of Minnesota and Boston University.

"It was very exciting," Hicks said of officiating the national championship, which Minnesota won 6-3 to cap an undefeated season. "It was a proud experience that all the hard work really did pay off for 19 years or 20 years on the ice. It makes you pretty proud going out there and representing your league and all of the other people who have helped you out along the way."

Hicks grew up playing hockey in Orange, Conn., where he starred as an all-state goalie at Amity High School, but ultimately gave up netminding to focus on officiating in college.

He credits his playing experience with helping him move up the refereeing ranks.

"It really taught me a lot about feeling for the game and determining when a penalty was a penalty and when it wasn’t — what was the impact on the game," Hicks said. "Being a player I can put myself in their shoes where emotions do get high and know that it is more the yelling at the jersey than it is the person."

When Hicks isn't refereeing hockey games, teaching business law and web design or supervising professional tennis officials, he's an assistant coach with the Fair Lawn High School hockey team. 

"I’m lucky enough to have pretty good time management skills and to balance everything," he said, adding that his wife and 2-year-old son often attend local games.

In the future, Hicks said he'd like to referee more NCAA men's games and make another Frozen Four run.

"Every year you want to work the last game of the season," he said. "Only one team in the country wins their last game, everybody else loses their last game. Being on that scoresheet on that last game of the season is the referee’s goal too."

In addition to showing up on the scoresheet for this year's women's national championship game, Hicks also appears on the scoresheet — and in the record books — for officiating the longest men's college hockey game in NCAA history between Quinnipiac and Union College in March 2010.

"That’s the only way I was ever going to get into an NCAA record book," Hicks laughed. "Not being a player, that's always noted. I can look at that and say that’s my record."