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Hockey stick furniture turns rink trash into cash for LAW student
By Brian Fitzgerald
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Dan Ronan (COM'99, LAW'05) Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
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It's been four years since Dan Ronan last played for the BU hockey team, but the former assistant captain still can deftly handle a hockey stick — in his woodworking shop.
When Ronan (COM'99, LAW'05) grabs a hockey stick these days, he is more likely to be building a piece of furniture than scoring a goal. Ronan constructs and sells chairs, coffee tables, coatracks, and bar stools made from the broken shafts and blades that players normally throw away. And what started out as a quirky hobby has blossomed into a lucrative business venture.
“It all started freshman year at BU, when my brother, Keith, asked me to bring home broken sticks from practice, and he built a table out of them,” Ronan says. Naturally, members of the team wanted to know what he was doing with all the shattered and splintered wood he was collecting. “I brought a chair to school, and a bunch of guys on the team liked it,” he says. Then he showed off his own “stickwork” skills, making a stool for equipment manager Mike DiMella — the legs from broken shafts, the seat from the broad blades of goaltenders' sticks. The players were amazed, especially as he continued to turn trash to treasure and make other furniture from the debris.
The Ronan brothers got busy with handsaws, screwdrivers, and wood screws, turning the basement of their family home in Woburn, Mass., into a small furniture factory. When they graduated to using table saws and clamps, and began making fancy Adirondack chairs — and people started buying them — they realized that there was a market for their products: hockey furniture for hockey nuts.
When WBZ-TV aired a segment about the brothers and their hockey stick furniture during the 1999 Beanpot tournament, they were ecstatic, not only because Ronan went on to win his fourth straight Beanpot trophy, but also because of the publicity surrounding their stick “recycling” efforts. “People started calling us from everywhere,” Ronan says.
The business grew. In fact, it eventually became too large for the Ronans' basement. “Last year we opened a 4,000-square-foot facility in Saugus,” he says. “We have other people helping us build the furniture now. We had to learn how to ship and box the stuff.” Now known as Sports Furniture Unlimited, the company advertises the furniture as ideal Christmas and end-of-the-season gifts for hockey coaches and players. Their customers have included NHL Hall-of-Famer Bobby Orr, Boston Bruins goaltender Steve Shields, and of course, several of Ronan's old Terrier teammates, among them Mike Grier (CAS'97) of the Washington Capitals, and the New York Islanders' Shawn Bates (MET'97), who each bought bar stools.
The brothers' products are now considered less gag gifts than works of art. They're not cheap: a hope chest, which is built from 120 regular sticks, costs $325, and an entertainment center, made from 30 goalie sticks, costs $175. But for those who live and breathe hockey, a coffee table made from 36 broken Kohos, Sherwoods, and Bauers is just what they want from Santa.
Ronan also uses his skills to help causes in the BU hockey community, donating furniture to be auctioned off to raise money for the Mark Bavis Leadership Foundation and the Travis Roy Foundation. Bavis (CAS'93) was a passenger on one of the planes hijacked by terrorists and flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Roy (COM'00), Ronan's former roommate at BU, was paralyzed from the neck down 11 seconds into his first college hockey game in 1995.
So how does a full-time law school student — and intern in the New England Patriots legal department — find the time to build, sell, and ship hockey stick furniture without letting his grades suffer? “Well,” he says, “I tend to be busy every waking moment,” but he manages to get all his work done.
As an undergraduate, Ronan interned at Boston's Bob Woolf Associates, a sports and marketing agency, and decided he wanted to go to law school and become a sports agent. But he also wanted to play hockey. After graduation, he had a brief career in the minor leagues, in Fort Wayne, Ind., and New Haven, Conn.
“I pretty much figured out that I wasn't NHL material,” he says. “But being a sports agent could be my way of getting to the NHL, representing players.”
In the meantime, however, he still stays involved with sports, turning hockey garbage into green. “I didn't think the hockey stick furniture would sell as well as it has,” he says. “It's been fun, and it's been a learning experience, and I'll undoubtedly still be doing this even after I land a job."
12
December 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations