skip navigation

The Bandy / Softball Sport Exchange and the Origins of Bandy in the USA

By Chris Middlebrook, 12/05/20, 10:45PM CST

Share

In 1972 Don Porter, the Executive Director of the American Softball Association, was working to have Softball added as a sport to the Summer Olympic Games. At the same time The Soviet Union was striving for the winter ice sport of Bandy, or Russian Ice Hockey as the Soviets called it, to be added as a sport to the Winter Olympic Games. Both Don Porter and the Soviet sports leaders understood that it was necessary that more countries play softball and bandy respectively for either to have a shot at being an Olympic sport. The International Federation of Sports was meeting that summer of 1972 in Oklahoma City. Porter invited the Soviet bandy leaders to the meeting to discuss a sport exchange. The introduction of softball into the Soviet Union. The introduction of bandy into the United States. But bandy required an ice sheet the size of a soccer field and a winter climate to create and maintain the ice. Where could this occur in the United States? Porter's question was answered in 1973 when he met with the ASA Softball Commissioner for Minnesota, Bob Kojetin. Kojetin also was working for the Parks and Recreation Department for the Minneapolis suburb of Edina. Although Kojetin did not play hockey, he was an athlete. A 1951 graduate of Washburn High School he was a 3 sport student (football, wrestling and track) and was named the outstanding athlete in the senior class. After high school Kojetin joined the army and served in Korea during the Korean War, where he suffered permanent hearing loss. Upon returning home to Minnesota Kojetin ultimately became a top level softball player. Kojetin told Porter that Minnesota had the ideal winter climate for bandy, both for weather cold enough to make the ice necessary for the soccer sized field of ice and consistency of the cold. During a typical Minnesota winter of that era the temperature would stay below freezing for 2 to 3 months at a time. 

In March 1976 the wheels of the bandy/softball sport exchange began to meaningfully turn. Jukka Suominen, Secretary General of the Finnish Bandy Association, came to Minnesota to meet with Kojetin to discuss with him the building of a bandy rink in the city of Edina. In July 1976 Kojetin attended the International Bandy Federation's summer meeting in Moscow and a plan was drawn up on how to introduce bandy into the US and softball into the Soviet Union and the nordic bandy countries of Finland, Sweden and  Norway. In December 1976 Finnish bandy coach Klaus Berner put on the first bandy clinics in the US, at Braemar Arena in Edina. In May and June 1977 Kojetin and two others, Ida Jean Hopkins and George Linnehan, put on softball clinics in the Soviet Union, Finland, Sweden and Norway. In the summer of 1977 Kojetin was appointed Director of the Edina Parks and Recreation Department. This would prove key to the establishment of bandy in the US as Kojetin now had the power and ability to build and maintain a natural ice bandy rink in Edina. In December 1977 Soviets Viktor Hototjkin, Mikael Osintsev and Viacheslav Solovjev, together with Swede Walter Jagbrant and a number of bandy players from Sweden, came to the US to put on bandy clinics in Edina, Duluth, Minnesota and Detroit, Michigan. While in Edina they planned to run the clinic at the newly created bandy sized ice rink at Lewis Park. Unfortunately, the weather did not initially cooperate and the clinics were again held at Braemar Arena. Included was a rink bandy game between the visiting instructors and the Edina Midget hockey team.  But on their final day in Minnesota the temperature dropped and the Lewis Park ice was skateable. Thus the very first big ice bandy match ever in the US took place, again between the visiting instructors, with a couple of local skaters, and the Edina Midget hockey team.  The following winter Kojetin again flooded Lewis Park to create the bandy sized ice skating surface. In December 1979 two bandy teams from Sweden came to Edina, the Swedish Junior National Team and Brobergs, a team from the Swedish elite league. They played an exhibition game at Lewis Park and also went to Boston where they played rink bandy. It was the following December, 1980, that a US  bandy league was started, formed from current and former Minnesota hockey players, when Kojetin accepted with open arms Sweden sending a bandy instructor and organizer, the Swedish Bandy Missionary Gunnar Fast, to Edina. The rest, the next 40 years of bandy in the US, is as they say history.

Bob Kojetin can truly be called the father of US Bandy. Not only was the key to introducing bandy into the US, his building and maintaining of the bandy rink at Lewis Park in Edina, which included lighting for night games and the best outdoor natural ice in the state of Minnesota, was essential to the forming of the US bandy league, the recruitment of players and the expansion of the number of teams. Fair to say, more than 40 years after he built the Lewis Park bandy rink, that without Bob Kojetin there would never have been bandy in the US. Not surprising that when The USA Bandy Hall of Fame's initial induction took place in 2014 that Bob Kojetin was the first person inducted.