Lord of the Rinks. Meet the hockey CEO cashing in on your kid's team

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.

Those changes are also raising deeper questions: whether nonprofit teams are being used to feed private businesses, whether families are being forced into buying bundled services they don’t want, and whether one company now has outsized control over who gets access to the sport and at what price.

“We’re all paying so much money, and each year, they take away more and more,” said Stephanie Kurzweil, a New Jersey hockey parent who in 2023 paid $4,600 for her 9-year-old son’s spot on a Black Bear team. That doesn’t include hundreds more for hotels, travel, uniforms, equipment and a $175 tryout fee.

“They are in it for the money,” she said. “There is no thought for the kids.”

Led by Gunty, Black Bear in less than a decade grew into the single largest owner-operator of ice rinks in the U.S., with 47 facilities across 11 states. It owns not only rinks but hundreds of youth teams inside them; the leagues, tournaments and showcases they compete in; even the streaming software parents use to watch their kids’ games – and it bills families separately for each.

Gunty defended his company in a 90-minute interview with USA TODAY, dismissing many criticisms as coming from a vocal minority of customers. He said Black Bear has saved struggling ice rinks, grown participation in the sport faster than the national average and made hockey more fun and accessible. To be sure, many of its rinks were in dire financial straits when Black Bear purchased them and might not have stayed open otherwise.

“I just hope everybody knows that I come from a really good place in trying to deliver a great experience for our families,” said Gunty, who frequently answered questions by pivoting to his company's accomplishments. His relaxed, friendly demeanor contrasted at times with that of his crisis communications consultant, Evan Nierman, who sat nearby.

“I believe that the vast majority of our customers love our coaches. They love what we’re doing in our buildings. They love the people they associate with,” Gunty said. “If they don’t like what we’re doing, they can leave.”

Gunty demonstrated a pattern of unethical business practices over a private-equity career spanning three decades, USA TODAY’s investigation found. His and his companies' alleged conflicts of interest, self-dealing and refusal to cooperate with a government recall of dangerous cribs prompted two federal agencies to rebuke him and his companies. The findings call into question the extent to which Black Bear's leaders have prioritized profits over kids' and families' interests.

The same day Gunty spoke to USA TODAY on April 28, multiple Michigan news outlets reported that the state attorney general’s corporate oversight division launched an investigation into potential anticompetitive business practices in youth hockey, with a focus on Black Bear. Michigan Department of Attorney General spokesperson Danny Wimmer said the office is "looking into this matter out of concern for the risk of consumer harm – including higher prices and reduced service quality – that can arise from diminished access to community and recreational services."

In an emailed statement addressing the state investigation, Nierman pointed to Black Bear's ownership of less than 10% of Michigan rinks, ice rental contracts with third parties and participation growth as evidence that families have choices and are choosing Black Bear.

At a time of increasing corporatization of youth sports nationally, Black Bear stands out as particularly troubling even among its peers buying up sectors of an estimated $40 billion-a-year industry, said Katherine Van Dyck, a senior legal fellow with the American Economic Liberties Project.

Van Dyck testified about private investment firms’ intrusion into youth sports at a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee meeting in December 2025 on the modern crises facing young athletes. Of all the companies mentioned in her testimony, she said, Black Bear concerns her the most.

“Black Bear has its fingers in almost everything,” Van Dyck told USA TODAY. “The degree of vertical integration that they have achieved allows them to build a moat around hockey that keeps any other competitors from coming in.”

The effect on families: Pay more or quit.

Days after USA TODAY asked to interview him, Gunty on March 16 announced his resignation as CEO of Black Bear, citing health and family reasons.

Gunty’s investment firm, however, remains in charge.

Blackstreet Capital Holdings, of which Gunty is CEO, still owns Black Bear.

Black Bear's new CEO, Kevin Kuby, is a Blackstreet executive.

'Hostile takeover’

When Black Bear comes to town, the effects reach beyond families’ wallets. In a western Pennsylvania suburb, the company crushed a beloved community institution.

Christine George, president of the nonprofit North Hills Amateur Hockey Association, knew little about Black Bear in May 2021 when it bought Pittsburgh Ice Arena, the home rink of the association’s youth teams.

During a meeting with parents, Black Bear rink manager Scott Branovan assured families that little at the rink would change, George recalled.

“He straight-up lied to their faces,” she told USA TODAY.

The first year went relatively normally. Then in 2022, Black Bear approached the association’s parent-run board with a proposal to buy its teams for $1.

Branovan pitched the idea as a boon for players, who would benefit from Black Bear’s professional coaches and marketing support, multiple board members told USA TODAY.

Giving control of the region’s oldest youth hockey organization, founded in 1964, to a for-profit company was a nonstarter, said Amanda Rose, a board member. But as she and other parents learned, the proposal wasn’t so much an offer as a demand.

After the board refused to sell to Black Bear, Branovan in December 2022 told parents that the rink would no longer rent ice time to most of the association’s teams.

Its five elite Tier I teams – the top level of youth competition – could stay. But players on its lower-level teams, called the Pittsburgh Vipers, would have to either join Black Bear’s new in-house teams or find another rink.

“It was almost like a hostile takeover,” Rose said. “You don't just go in and take out an organization that has been a staple in the Pittsburgh area for so many years.”

There was nowhere to go. Throughout the 2023-24 season, parents on the association’s board scrambled to buy whatever ice slots they could find at the few other nearby rinks, including late on weeknights. It wasn’t sustainable.

In February 2024, the board voted to fold the Vipers after 60 years.

Gunty described the Vipers as a failing organization to whom he tried to lend a “helping hand.” He said they didn’t survive because they were a “very, very difficult organization” that “didn’t want to work with us.”

Documents George shared with USA TODAY, however, show that the association proposed a compromise to Black Bear, in which its teams would remain nonprofit in exchange for hiring some Black Bear employees to its staff. Black Bear rejected that counterproposal.

“We don't place any value on the Vipers,” Gunty told USA TODAY. “We don't think it's worth anything, and so we just went ahead and started our own.”

Branovan declined to comment through a Black Bear spokesperson. Nierman said that Black Bear made significant investments to address infrastructure problems at the rink and that it needed a growing hockey program to stay economically viable. He said the Vipers’ participation rates had been declining.  

Hundreds of alumni attended the Vipers’ final game in March 2024. They shared hugs, took photos and told stories. After the game, George said, no one wanted to leave.

“It was heartbreaking,” she said. “All we wanted to do is keep these kids on the ice, give them something to do, keep them out of trouble.

“They just don’t care. This was their plan.”

Pattern of unethical practices

Long before he started Black Bear, Gunty developed a reputation in the finance world for using unethical practices to get ahead.

As a graduate student at Harvard Business School in 1992, his classmates caught him tampering with votes to help elect himself president of a prestigious student organization, the Finance Club.

"Guntygate," as the campus newspaper that broke the ethics scandal called it, prompted national headlines and calls for his expulsion. Instead, Gunty wrote in a public apology letter that he had convinced administrators to, among other things, let him author an ethics case study to be used in the school's curriculum.

“It was unethical and, no matter my intentions, was inappropriate behavior,” his April 1992 letter said. “I sacrificed almost everything in order to be successful.”

The finance world suited him.

After graduating from Harvard, Gunty landed jobs with The Blackstone Group, a New York investment bank and other private equity firms before starting his own in 2002. He started two private-equity funds and an advisory firm, which he headed, that managed the funds. He called his firm Blackstreet Capital Management.

Blackstreet Capital Management focused on buying companies on the brink of financial collapse, injecting them with short-term cash, slashing costs and streamlining operations before flipping them to bigger firms at a profit. It bought a struggling tile maker, Mexican and Italian restaurant chains, Papa John’s pizza franchises, long-term care facilities, rehab clinics, daycares, makers of popcorn tins and pumpkin-carving kits, and the high-end Christmas ornament brand, Christopher Radko.

Twice, its shrewd business practices caught federal regulators’ attention.

In August 2008, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission urged parents and caregivers to immediately stop using a line of Simplicity-brand bassinets connected to the deaths of two babies.

The infants had slipped through a gap between the mattress and a side rail. The gap was wide enough to fit their bodies but narrow enough to trap their heads, causing them to fall through, hang and asphyxiate.

A Blackstreet Capital Management subsidiary called SFCA, Inc. had purchased Simplicity’s assets at an April 2008 public auction. But as the federal agency worked to recall the bassinets from homes and store shelves, the company refused to help.

According to the government’s notice, SFCA claimed it was not responsible for products manufactured before the acquisition, even as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago Tribune investigation found it continued to distribute them to retailers.

Gunty was Blackstreet Capital Management’s managing partner at the time, court filings and website archives show. Business filings listed Lawrence Berger, the firm’s chief investment officer, as SFCA’s president.

Berger, who left the company in 2017 to start Ames Watson, the private equity firm that bought the hat store Lids, declined to comment.

By August 2009, SFCA had stopped responding to customer complaints and was no longer conducting day-to-day operations, the federal agency said in an updated notice. Meanwhile, two more babies died.

Gunty said that the incident was "a long time ago" and he could respond later with more information.

"I think it went out of business," Gunty said. "We owned it for a very short period of time."

Nierman, the Black Bear spokesperson, later said that Gunty's firm closed SFCA five months after buying it when "it became clear prior ownership issues were more extensive than disclosed." He said the company "fully cooperated" with the federal agency, sharing information on model numbers, retailers and shipping information.

An unrelated U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation in 2016 found Gunty misled his private equity funds’ investors.

Federal investigators found Gunty responsible for cutting deals for himself instead of investors, billing the funds hundreds of thousands of dollars in undisclosed management fees and using the funds for unauthorized expenses, including a luxury suite at the stadium where the National Hockey League’s Washington Capitals play.

Blackstreet Capital Management, which denied all wrongdoing, settled with the federal agency in June 2016. Gunty and his firm agreed to pay $2.6 million to the SEC, return $500,000 to investors, revise their policies and stop charging “oversight” fees.

Gunty declined to comment on the SEC investigation and Harvard controversy.

“I'm not here to talk about issues that have long since been resolved,” he told USA TODAY.

Amid the SEC probe, Gunty eyed a new business venture: His son's hockey team.

Profiting off his son's team

Days before coaching his son’s nonprofit youth hockey team to a league title in February 2016, Gunty closed the first in a series of business deals with the man who ran it.

In short order, he used Blackstreet Capital Holdings, his firm for long-term investments, to transform the youth hockey club into a vehicle for college recruitment – and a revenue stream for his business.

In youth hockey, the coveted Tier 1 division is reserved for the best of the best players. In Maryland, where Gunty lived with his wife and three kids, only two boys' clubs are sanctioned by USA Hockey, the sport’s national governing body, to play at that level. One is called Team Maryland.

Gunty’s younger son, Miles Gunty, made Team Maryland as an 11-year-old in 2015. So did Micah Berger, the son of Blackstreet’s then-chief investment officer. Gunty was one of three coaches of their 12-and-under team.

Amid their 2015-16 title run, Blackstreet and Team Maryland president Robert Weiss formed a for-profit company together. Their first acquisition: a struggling ice rink in Odenton, Maryland, about 30 miles from Gunty’s 13,000-square-foot Bethesda home.

Blackstreet and Weiss’ company paid $2.5 million to take over a local company's lease with Anne Arundel County, which owns the land on which Piney Orchard Ice Arena sits, county contracts show. The lease gave Blackstreet and Weiss’ company, Piney Ice LLC, the right to run the rink rent-free through 2070, with options to extend it until 2116.

Blackstreet spent about $700,000 putting in new flooring, plumbing, glass and skate shop areas at the rink, which Weiss managed. That October, Blackstreet and Weiss bought a second nearby rink for $2.7 million.

In 2018, Team Maryland and Black Bear Sports Group – Blackstreet’s newly named youth sports arm – announced a dramatic expansion.

Together, Black Bear and Weiss acquired franchises in two junior hockey leagues, the North American Hockey League and Eastern Hockey League, from which college scouts frequently recruit 16- to 21-year-old players.

The junior teams – one of which is called the Maryland Black Bears – gave Team Maryland players a direct pipeline to college hockey.

At the same time, Team Maryland announced that its junior teams and some of its youth teams would move into Piney Orchard Ice Arena – making Blackstreet and Weiss’ company their landlord.

Despite having a 15% ownership stake in the rink, Weiss and his son, Michael Weiss, continued running Team Maryland as a separate nonprofit, tax returns show, with them as its sole officers.

Only it wasn’t separate at all. A nonprofit expert told USA TODAY the arrangement could violate federal laws for charitable organizations.

As Team Maryland’s revenue and expenses doubled from 2018 to 2024, the share of that money that flowed directly to Blackstreet’s and the Weisses’ for-profit ventures ballooned, tax returns analyzed by USA TODAY show.

Black Bear took over Team Maryland entirely in 2023, signing a long-term lease to run its youth and junior teams. Blackstreet chief financial officer Robert Dragonette joined Team Maryland’s board as its principal officer, giving Gunty’s investment firm full supervision of the youth hockey nonprofit’s operations.

Companies owned by Blackstreet and the Weisses billed Team Maryland at least $595,000 over the next year, its 2024 tax filing shows. That included costs for ice rental, coaching fees and $145,000 to Black Bear for management fees.

Federal laws prohibit nonprofits from diverting charitable dollars to enrich insiders or their companies, said Laurie Styron, executive director of Charity Watch, a nonprofit that investigates other nonprofits.

If the Internal Revenue Service was to find that an outside entity got better than fair-market value for the service it provided, Styron said, it could strip the nonprofit of its tax-exempt status, penalize its officers and force entities that improperly received funds to pay them back.

“This is a glaring conflict of interest,” Styron told USA TODAY. “The way these arrangements are currently structured removes all the checks and balances that would otherwise ensure that the nonprofit’s interests are prioritized and protected.”

Robert Weiss, a regional director of arena operations for Black Bear as of April 2026, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from USA TODAY. Michael Weiss quickly ended a call from a reporter and did not respond to further requests for comment.

Dragonette declined to comment through a Black Bear spokesperson.

Gunty said he did not view Black Bear employees and business partners serving on Team Maryland’s board as conflicts of interest, noting that similar arrangements exist across the sport. Nierman said that the transactions were legal under Maryland law because they were “fair and reasonable” and properly disclosed.

“I feel very comfortable with what we're doing with Team Maryland,” Gunty said. “We manage that club to try and create a great hockey outlet for kids. We think we've done a wonderful job in growing that program and giving kids opportunities to move on to the next level.”

The arrangements paid dividends for Miles Gunty.

After playing for Team Maryland through his age 16 season, Gunty's son spent parts of two years with the Maryland Black Bears and three with the Youngstown Phantoms, a top junior team in Ohio in which Black Bear in 2018 bought a partial ownership stake.

In 2024, he joined the NCAA Division I hockey team at Princeton University.

Miles Gunty declined to comment. Gunty told USA TODAY he would not discuss family matters.

A talented player in high school who earned Rookie of the Week honors his freshman year at Princeton, Miles Gunty might have made an Ivy League hockey team without the help of his father’s investment firm.

But while Blackstreet's investments all but guaranteed its CEO's son's team a stepping stone to the next level, Gunty sold others the same dream.

Building an empire

The relative ease with which Black Bear became youth hockey’s most dominant player reflects the sport’s particular vulnerability to corporate capture.

Unlike baseball and soccer fields, which are ubiquitous in public parks and schools, only about 3,000 ice rinks exist across the nation – fewer than one per U.S. county – largely because they are so expensive to build and maintain.

Other companies, including the Dallas Stars in Texas, years ago cracked the code to profiting off the youth sport: owning the ice. By controlling the one scarce resource hockey teams need to play, they could act as its gatekeeper, dictating who can access it and the terms of their use.

Gunty didn’t invent that strategy. But the scale and speed at which he executed it is unprecedented.

In its first four years, Black Bear bought 14 rinks in Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, in most cases for less than $5 million each, county property records show.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person events across the country, crippling the ice rink industry, Black Bear’s acquisition pace accelerated. It scooped up 33 more rinks in the next six years, more than doubling its footprint.

Some rinks were deep in debt or in foreclosure. Others were profitable businesses in established hockey markets. Many rink operators were more than willing to sell.

In his 25 years in the industry, no one had ever offered to buy Mark Schaffer’s two ice rinks in the Detroit suburbs, he told USA TODAY. So when Gunty called in 2023, he said he had to listen.

Even in a hockey hotbed, running an ice rink was difficult work – a largely seasonal business with high energy, maintenance, labor, tax and insurance costs. He wasn't sure another buyer would come along.

Schaffer wondered how a Maryland company would fare managing the daily demands of ice rinks in Michigan. But he didn’t ask many questions during his and Gunty’s 20-minute meeting in the lobby of his rink, he said – nor did Gunty.

“I had a feeling it probably wasn’t going to go well,” Schaffer said.

Schaffer sold one of his two rinks, Kensington Valley Ice House, to Black Bear in February 2024. The deed doesn’t list the sale price, which Schaffer declined to say. But a Black Bear affiliate in 2025 took out a $12.6 million mortgage on it and three of its other Michigan rinks, property records show.

Soon after taking over, Black Bear raised its hourly ice rates on Kensington Valley Hockey Association, the youth nonprofit that has rented ice time from the rink for years, from $320 to $370 an hour, said Caryn Michalak, a board member – a 15% jump.

Black Bear threatened to raise that price even higher, she said, unless the association agreed to switch to its official apparel provider, from which Black Bear receives kickbacks. Black Bear – which denied making such a threat – also required the association to affix the logo of its corporate sponsor, Biggby Coffee, to players’ jerseys, contracts show.

Despite the nonprofit spending $925,000 on ice rental during the 2025-26 season, conditions at the rink deteriorated under Black Bear, said Michalak, who briefly worked at the rink after Black Bear bought it. In addition to frequent plumbing and electricity issues, the building didn't have heat for several months during the frigid Michigan winter, leaving families freezing during their kids’ games and practices.

In February 2026, Black Bear offered to buy Kensington Valley Hockey Association’s teams for $1, a copy of the proposal reviewed by USA TODAY shows. If the board doesn’t accept, Michalak fears Black Bear will kick the nonprofit’s teams out.

“We push all their programs, we put their names on their jerseys, and it still isn’t enough,” Michalak said.

Gunty told USA TODAY that Black Bear will not boot the association’s teams from its rink. He said his company tries to raise prices in line with the U.S. inflation rate – 2.7% in 2025 – but that many rising costs, such as utilities and insurance, are beyond its control. He said he believes the heating issues were fixed within weeks, not months.

“I felt terrible, and we tried to jump on it as quickly as we could,” he said. “We feel bad that people were cold in that rink, but that problem has been resolved.”

Schaffer said he regrets selling to Black Bear.

“Unfortunately,” Schaffer said, “I think parents and kids are paying the price.”

'They see dollar signs'

What concerns antitrust experts about Black Bear isn’t so much its consolidation of ice rinks. It’s the way the company used its dominance in the rink market to gain an unfair advantage in other markets critical to the sport’s infrastructure.

As Black Bear bought rinks, it also took control of many of the teams inside them. Some it purchased outright. Other longstanding local organizations it squeezed out and replaced with in-house, for-profit teams.

Once it controlled enough teams, Black Bear withdrew them from many of the community-based leagues they had long competed in and started its own for-profit leagues, which those teams joined. The depleted competition in the old leagues led even non-Black Bear teams to follow suit.

Black Bear also started its own line of showcases and a tournament company, Defender Hockey Tournaments, whose events take place almost exclusively at Black Bear rinks. It requires teams in its leagues to enter as many as six tournaments and showcases a year and steers them to its own.

As is increasingly standard practice across youth sports, Defender tournaments have strict “stay-to-play” rules, which require participants who live more than 60 or 75 miles from the host rinks to book rooms at designated hotels from which the company receives kickbacks. Those who flout Defender’s rules face disqualification from the events without a refund, its hotel policy shows.

Family members who don’t wish to travel can pay extra to watch their kids play through Black Bear’s proprietary live streaming service, Black Bear TV. The price: $14.99 per game or up to $320 for an annual subscription, plus additional fees to stream junior league games.

A behemoth three-day tournament in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in January 2026 called the Blizzard Cup reflected the company’s enormous influence over the sport in the region. Black Bear runs the tournament company, all six rinks that hosted games and 76 of the 114 participating teams.

“It just feels like Black Bear is slowly becoming a monopoly,” said Chris Boughman, whose 14-year-old son’s team played in the tournament. “It shouldn’t be at the expense of kids.”

The costs aren’t purely financial.

The demanding schedules in Black Bear leagues – roughly 50 games over six months – force players to specialize at a young age, which medical experts say contributes to overuse injuries and burnout. Boughman’s son used to play football as a quarterback, he said, but quit to focus on hockey.

Known as “tying” and “self-preferencing,” the tactics Black Bear uses to control the supply chain, dominate kids’ playing experiences and force families to buy its products draw straight from the monopolist playbook, said Van Dyck, the antitrust attorney.

Whereas other rinks, teams, leagues, tournaments and streaming services must compete for customers by offering higher quality or lower prices, Black Bear’s companies don’t have to compete. They win business because Black Bear affiliates will deal with them over third-party competitors every time, even when other products are better.

The result: fewer choices and higher prices.

Gunty said Black Bear is not a monopoly. He said the company only buys rinks in areas where there are competing rinks within a 30-minute drive and reinvests "almost all" of its profits back into its business.

“We are a small piece of the overall hockey market in the United States,” Gunty said. “We are required every single year to deliver a great product to our customers, and we have been fortunate that we are growing in states where hockey is declining.”

The hallmark of a monopoly is a company’s ability to raise prices without losing many of its customers. That’s exactly what Black Bear did last summer.

From the 2024-25 to 2025-26 season, Black Bear raised prices for 142 out of 209 in-house teams whose prices it posted on its website, a USA TODAY analysis found. The hikes, usually increases of $100 to $400 per player for a full season, were highest for some of its youngest clients: 9- to 12-year-olds.

All those costs add up for families like Dan Keel’s. He said he paid close to $5,000 in tuition alone for his 8-year-old son’s season with the Mercer Chiefs, a Black Bear-owned team, plus hundreds more for travel, hotels, equipment, league fees and Black Bear TV.

“They don’t care about the kids and their development,” Keel said. “They see dollar signs.”

‘Everything just collapsed’

Gunty’s journey from hockey father to overlord came full circle in April 2024, when he became commissioner of a junior hockey league whose goal is to match aspiring athletes with college offers.

But when some players’ teams collapsed midyear, leaving them in unstable living conditions with little to show for the thousands of dollars they had spent, Gunty did little to help them.

In junior hockey, teens and young adults leave home to play full-time with traveling teams, hoping college or pro scouts will notice them. Many junior players live in group housing or with billet families – local families who host players – often paying their own way in hopes it pays off with an NCAA Division I scholarship.

The United States Premier Hockey League, a for-profit junior league founded in 2012, bills itself as “Your Pathway to College Hockey.” Several Black Bear teams already played in the league when Gunty took it over.

In his two years as commissioner, Gunty rapidly expanded. He made Black Bear TV the league's exclusive streaming partner. He admitted several new teams, collecting franchise and league fees from each new owner and player.

Had Gunty vetted the new owners, he would have seen that two of them, a husband and wife named Christopher and Rhea Reaves, had been taken to court more than three dozen times in their home state of North Carolina, accused of shortchanging clients, contractors, banks and homeowners associations as part of a series of failed real estate investments. Many of the cases were voluntarily dismissed; several resulted in judgments against the Reaves.

Despite having no experience running hockey teams, press releases show the Reaves bought at least eight junior hockey teams under Gunty’s leadership.

They, too, failed.

Josiah Castaneda, 21, moved from north Texas to Jacksonville, Florida, in summer 2025 to pursue his college hockey dream. He paid $7,000 to join the Bold City Battalion, which the Reaves had purchased a few months earlier.

His tuition was supposed to cover a 40-game schedule, training, billet housing, two meals a day and transportation to and from games, he said.

Almost none of it materialized.

Instead of billet housing, Castaneda and his teammates bounced around from one Airbnb to the next, sleeping on couches, pull-out mattresses or the kitchen floor. Twice, their coaches told them they had to move out and into new housing on short notice.

Almost no food was provided, Castaneda said. He quickly burned through his savings buying groceries and takeout. Team buses didn’t show up to take them to the few games they played, so players piled into rental vans.

Six weeks in, the team's coaches told players that the Battalion was folding. The season was canceled. In disbelief, Castaneda returned to Texas empty-handed.

“It left me questioning why I still play hockey,” he told USA TODAY. “I was super excited for the season, then everything just collapsed.”

Under USA Hockey rules, junior players are entitled to refunds if their teams drop them mid-season. But the United States Premier Hockey League is not sanctioned by USA Hockey, so those rules didn't apply.

The United States Premier Hockey League’s bylaws, which USA TODAY obtained, offer no recourse to players whose teams don’t deliver on their promises.

Castaneda’s mother, Mimi Nakamoto-Castaneda, requested a refund from Rhea Reaves, emails she shared with USA TODAY show. She didn’t get one.

Nakamoto-Castaneda also asked the league's director, Mark Kumpel, to refund $328.50 she had paid in league fees that year, emails show. But the league did not issue a refund or help get her $7,000 back from the Battalion.

Kumpel explained the league’s position on refunding fees paid to teams in an August 2025 email to Nakamoto-Castaneda: “The league does not interfere or get involved with contracts between a team and its players."

"I don’t think anyone has cared,” Nakamoto-Castaneda said. “It’s not about the kids at all.”

Kumpel and Rhea Reaves did not respond to requests for comment from USA TODAY. Christopher Reaves blamed others for the failed season, including the team’s head coach, some players for not paying, and Gunty. Reaves told USA TODAY that most players received refunds but deflected when asked about Castaneda, saying he would check in three or four weeks. He did not.

Reaves said he lost more than $1 million on his failed teams and planned to sue the league and others. He said Gunty convinced him to buy franchises for $150,000 to $250,000 each despite knowing there were not enough players to fill them.

The league takes “a whole series of steps” to vet potential new franchise owners, Gunty told USA TODAY. But he said he had been unaware of the dozens of lawsuits against the Reaves in North Carolina.

“The guy wrote a really big check to us that cleared in 48 hours, and so he proved himself in our league to be a capable guy with resources,” Gunty said. “There were no red flags in the beginning with him about his ability to perform.”

Gunty said that the league’s rules gave its leaders little power to intervene when they saw the "awful situation" unfolding and that they tried to help affected players find new teams. Moving forward, he said they plan to limit the number of franchises any one person can own.

“We had one situation where we had a bad operator, and I'm terribly sorry that that happened, but I'm really proud of the other operators,” Gunty said. “We haven't had these problems with other people, and I'm just glad that Chris Reaves out of the USPHL.”

Three days after Gunty spoke to USA TODAY, the United States Premier Hockey League on May 1 announced that athletes who played on the Reaves' teams would be refunded their leagues fees. The decision, its press release said, came after a "comprehensive audit."

Gunty resigned as the United States Premier Hockey League’s commissioner on March 16, the same day he resigned as CEO of Black Bear. In a statement, he said he always viewed his role with the league as transitional and was proud to have left it “in its strongest position in its 12-year history.” Black Bear, he added, was his “proudest professional achievement.”

As with Black Bear, though, Gunty’s name may be off the league’s organizational chart, but his investment firm remains in charge.

The league’s new commissioner, Tony Zasowski, is a Black Bear co-president.

Kenny Jacoby is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY who uncovers issues in sports, higher education and law enforcement. Contact him by email at [email protected].