GNASH Honors Henry Hine

Henry Hine came up with the name for the Greater Nashville Area Scholastic Hockey League in 1999.

Now, the league is naming its Blue Division championship trophy the Henry Hine Cup after the Brentwood pharmacist, who is one of the league founders.

"It's a huge honor," Hine said. "I'm so humbled that people still remember me. I put a lot of time and energy into creating high school hockey, and it's still out there. I guess I did something good."

The GNASH League started one year after the Nashville Predators made their NHL debut in 1998. Gnash is the Predators' saber-toothed tiger mascot, so Hine came up the GNASH acronym to match the furry feline.

Hine will present the cup to the winner of the Blue Division championship between Franklin and Hillsboro/Hillwood on Wednesday night at Centennial Sportsplex in Nashville.

Hine, 56, approached the Predators about starting a state tournament in 2000, and the franchise liked the idea. For the past eight years, the state tournament has been at the Sommet Center as teams from the Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville areas battle for the Predators Cup.

There are 20 teams from Middle Tennessee in the GNASH League, but there were only four when the league started: Brentwood, Centennial, Montgomery Bell Academy and Mt. Juliet.

"The year after that it doubled, and we had eight high schools on the ice," Hine said. "The year after that, we had another four show up. It was amazing."

League Breaks Away
The league began as part of the Nashville Youth Hockey League before breaking off on its own in 2001.

"We broke away because we didn't want to be tied to one ice rink," Hine said. "We needed to be able to negotiate with more than one rink, so we incorporated. We got by-laws, we got this huge handbook that they still use. It's 50 or 60 pages."

One of the youth coaches called Hine the father of high school hockey in the Nashville area. Hine was involved with the hockey league for six years in a variety of roles such as league chairman, member on the board of directors and Brentwood assistant coach.

"He led the charge to put the high school league together," GNASH president Greg Barnes of Brentwood said.

"We probably still use 90 percent of the original by-laws and guidelines that he put together. He blazed the trail."

Not everyone was wild about the idea of high school hockey when Hine approached the school administrators.

"The administrations took two or three approaches," Hine said. "One was they saw fights and blood in their mind. And liability issues. Or they are going, 'You can let them skate, but they can't use our colors or our name. That happened with Father Ryan for the first year or two. Different schools had different attitudes depending on the principal or the athletic director."

Brentwood was an easy sell because Bruins boys basketball coach Dennis King had a son who played hockey and he loved the idea, giving the new league a friend on the inside.

Hine's sons, Charley and Kirt, played for Brentwood during the early years of the league.