As a hockey dad, Murry Gunty saw how money and access can determine which kids make it to the sport’s highest levels.
As an investor, he built a business around it.
A nine-month USA TODAY investigation found that Gunty, founder of Blackstreet Capital Holdings, used his private investment firm’s youth sports arm, Black Bear Sports Group, to rapidly buy up ice rinks and teams across the Northeast and Midwest and then leveraged that control to steer families into its own costly ecosystem of leagues, tournaments and fees.
The result: higher prices, fewer choices and growing concern from legal experts that one company is consolidating power over a sport long rooted in local nonprofits, turning youth hockey into a pay-to-play pipeline where families must spend hundreds more each year or risk being shut out.
USA TODAY’s reporting — based on interviews with more than 80 parents, players, coaches, rink operators and current and former employees, along with thousands of pages of records — found that Black Bear’s business model is reshaping youth hockey from a network of community-based nonprofits into a vertically integrated, for-profit system with fewer checks on how money flows.
