More NHL offseason: | | | | You always hear that ice hockey runs through the veins of every Canadian, it's the national sport and you half expect that every Canadian you meet will be mi sing a front tooth or have some cool scar to show you from their puck Gary Payton II Jersey days.Maybe things are a changing. A recent survey commi sioned by Hockey Canada and Bauer Hockey resulted in a rather astonishing finding: 90 percent of Canadian families are choosing not to have their kids play hockey. Of the 875 families surveyed in Ontario and Nova Scotia, the top reasons they gave were that it's not fun, too time consuming then concerns over safety finally followed by it being too expensive.With images of kids skating on backyard rinks or on the local ponds in most people's consciousne s, it's an eye-opener, especially for Mark Me sier ( ). What in the name of Wayne Gretzky is going on, anyway? I would understand it if it was just about money, hockey isn't cheap, but the game is not fun? Coming from Canada that's almost sacrilegious.Understanding hockey is not for everybody, that still seems like a pretty steep drop of participation in the country's sport. The trick now will be to find ways to try and help the i sue, make things more fun for kids again. A big help would be to go to smaller rinks for kids, just the same as smaller baseball fields or soccer fields are the norm in youth sports, it should be something we see in hockey. Reduce the size of the rink and things get more interesting, every player is more involved instead of spending so much time trying to skate to position. USA Hockey has been implementing that idea and the numbers as the youth level in the US have been on the rise over the past three years.It's not as if overall interest is declining, it's just participation it seems. Of those families who said they don't have kids playing hockey, 40 percent said they would consider it down the line. Still, this makes that supposed "goalie crisis" look like a much smaller problem.Or maybe it's just that Canadian kids are going to play tennis instead (s/t to ). Rui Hachimura Jersey