- More than 35 goalies ages 7 to 17 skated at the first Bernie Parent Memorial Camp outside Philadelphia
- Flyers Charities and Ed Snider Youth Hockey built the camp and a goalie program in the late Hall of Famer’s name
- Read below for what Snider Hockey said Parent would have made of the scene
More than 35 young goalies took over the ice at the Flyers Training Center last week for the inaugural Bernie Parent Memorial Camp.
Jan Koziara, the executive vice president and chief operating officer at Ed Snider Youth Hockey & Education, was asked what Parent would have made of the scene. He reached for the late goalie’s own catchphrase, as told to William Douglas of NHL.com.
“I’d like to think that he’d say, ‘It’s a beautiful thing.’ He was a Snider Hockey ambassador who was so giving with his time, always had a smile on his face.”
The camp ran three days, Aug. 17-19, for kids who came from across the Philadelphia area and were bused to the Flyers practice facility in Voorhees, New Jersey.
Parent died on Sept. 21, 2025 at age 80. He won the Stanley Cup twice with Philadelphia in 1974 and 1975 and took the Conn Smythe Trophy both years, shared the Vezina with Tony Esposito in 1974 and won it outright in 1975, and was named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players during the league’s centennial in 2017.
Martin Brodeur was one of the goalies who spoke up the day Parent died:
Campers heard from Parent’s wife, Gini, former Flyers forward and current radio analyst Todd Fedoruk, ex-Philadelphia goalie Robert Esche, and Carson Bjarnason, the Flyers’ 2023 second-round pick who played 32 games with Lehigh Valley of the AHL last season.
Esche, now the president of AHL Utica, said the sessions went past technique and into the mental side of the position, and that the youngest kids asked as many sharp questions as the teenagers did.
Plenty of the campers knew Parent less for the Cups than for the fishing. Dylan Brown, a goalie on Snider Hockey’s Under-16 team, met him at the Bernie Parent Family Fishing Day on the Jersey Shore.
“I didn’t catch any fish, though. But Bernie was fun.”
Philadelphia held a celebration of life for him at Xfinity Mobile Arena last November. Watch the ceremony:
The goalie development program behind the camp launched in November with a $50,000 donation from Flyers Charities, matched by Ed Snider’s children. Snider Hockey president and CEO Scott Tharp explained why it finally got built.
“The one area that we felt in our player development of Snider Hockey is we never really had a dedicated goalie development program. It was on the back burner for maybe the past year or so and, with Bernie’s passing, it moved it to the front burner.”
Tharp still misses the phone call Parent made to him every Sunday morning.
“He probably would have personally wanted to take part in it as much as he could. I think he would think it was the most fitting way that he’s been honored.”
Parent’s No. 1 hangs in the rafters in Philadelphia. His name now sits on a program for kids learning the position he changed.
