There is a particular sound a Minnesota high school rink makes in late February when the Section playoffs arrive: the buzzer at the end of a period, the scrape of a shovel between shifts, the metallic clatter of a stick rack, and somewhere above it all, the rapid tap of a laptop keyboard in a working press box. For more than two decades, that keyboard belonged to David La Vaque. He died this month at 50, according to Pioneer Press, and the Minnesota prep hockey community he spent his adult life chronicling is now adjusting to the unfamiliar silence in a press box he refused to leave.
A beat built on rinks, not box scores
La Vaque had been the lead high school hockey writer for the Minnesota Star Tribune since 2010, and a reporter on the prep beat for years before that, covering more than 20 winters of section tournaments, charter buses, and small-arena storylines. His editor, Paul Klauda, used to marvel at the math. In the course of four days (of the tournament) he probably had 25-30 bylines, and that might be undercounting it a little bit,
Klauda told KARE 11 earlier this year.
That volume was not the product of a desk assignment. It was the product of a man who understood how a hockey story is built, not from a stat sheet, but from a handshake at the door of a visiting locker room in Brainerd or a conversation with a parent in a Bemidji lobby on a Wednesday night in February. La Vaque's coverage was, in the truest sense, deployed: he showed up, he stayed, and he filed.
The book that became the archive
In 2020, with the high school tournament in doubt because of the pandemic, La Vaque co-authored Tourney Time with fellow journalist L.R. Nelson, a Minnesota Historical Society Press project that pulled together the tournament's most enduring storylines. A revised edition followed in 2024. The book functioned as a working manual of Minnesota hockey memory, with La Vaque writing about Mounds View's 1976 quarterfinal loss to Richfield one week and about the Seamus Regan overtime goal another. He was a Tourney Time teaser writer for the Legacy Hockey site for years, in pieces that often read like oral history transcribed by a man who had been listening all along.
Two years with Benilde-St. Margaret's
If there is a single stretch that defined his relationship to the beat, it was the 2011-12 and 2012-13 seasons, when he embedded with the Benilde-St. Margaret's program after teammate Jack Jablonski was paralyzed during a game. That assignment is the kind of reporting a desk assigns once and then watches carefully, because the line between observation and intrusion in a high school locker room is real. La Vaque did not cross it.
BHSM coach Ken Pauly told KARE 11 that La Vaque's instinct was to move forward with Jack, not move away from him.
That is the same instinct, Pauly said, that the community tried to apply when La Vaque himself got sick: He just advocated for the kids and the game and his absence... it's felt, it really is.
The diagnosis that ended the bylines
La Vaque's coverage of last year's state tournament, filed in March 2024, would be among his last substantial work. Within roughly a week of the tournament's conclusion, he was admitted to a hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with leukodystrophy, a rare neurological disease that progressively destroys motor function, speech, and the ability to swallow.
His daughter, Michaela LaVaque, described the trajectory plainly to KARE 11: You lose motor function, you lose the ability to walk, the ability to speak and then you lose the ability to swallow, chew and eat. Just everyday life things that I think we all take for granted are what you lose.
The diagnosis forced him into an early retirement from the Star Tribune, ending one of the longest tenures any reporter has held the Minnesota high school hockey beat.
The rinks that came back to him
What happened next is the part of the story that a sportswriter in La Vaque's position would have recognized as a story worth telling. As word spread through the prep hockey grapevine, the community La Vaque had covered for two decades began showing up for him the way he had once shown up for them. A GoFundMe for his medical costs drew contributions from coaches, parents, and alumni he had written about. Benilde-St. Margaret's, the program he had spent two years with after Jablonski's injury, hosted a David La Vaque Night
on Jan. 27, 2026, before a game that doubled as a homecoming. Northern Lakes, the program he had covered during its 1A tournament run, named him an honorary captain; he entered the locker room, gave the kids a fist pump, and sent them to the ice.
On a Friday during the most recent state tournament, a group that included his long-time friend Eric Whisler brought him back to the Xcel Energy Center. The reaction was immediate. You can't go five feet without running into a face that David has interacted with,
Whisler told KARE 11. Even when we checked in a lady said, 'Oh, he interviewed my son for the book.'
What the beat inherits
There is a tendency, in obituaries of regional sportswriters, to flatten the work into he loved the kids
and leave it there. La Vaque's reporting resisted that. He wrote tournament previews that took the seeding of a Class A bracket as seriously as a Stanley Cup playoff matchup. He treated a 1,200-seat community rink in northern Minnesota with the same spatial and tactical literacy he brought to the X. That, more than any single byline, is what a successor to his beat will have to relearn.
The Star Tribune has not yet named a replacement, and the practical challenges of the job are real. The Minnesota high school hockey season is a logistical object: it spans November through March, requires a reporter who can be in Moorhead on a Tuesday and in Edina on a Thursday, and demands a working knowledge of generations of programs. The state tournament alone, four days, sixteen teams, produces a volume of copy that Klauda said La Vaque handled without ever seeming to break a sweat.
What is harder to replace, and what the community response made clear, is the relational layer underneath. La Vaque was not a parachuting columnist. He was a press-box fixture, a locker-room regular, and a man whose notebook, his colleagues said, was less important than his willingness to remember the name of an assistant coach's kid.
Forward implication
The Minnesota high school hockey state tournament begins, as it always has, in a few months, and for the first time in a generation there will be no La Vaque filing from the working press box at the X. The Pioneer Press headline that announced his death, pulled from a tribute, captured the part the prep community will lean on: He cared deeply about high school sports.
That is true, and it is also underspecified. He cared about them in the way a beat reporter cares: by going, by staying, and by writing the story down so that the next generation of Section finalists and small-town coaches could find themselves on the page.
There will be a moment this winter, probably during a first-round game between two programs that almost no one outside their towns has heard of, when a coach will pause near the bench and mutter something to an assistant about how La Vaque would have wanted to see this one. That is the sort of thing a beat reporter leaves behind, and it is the part of his legacy that no hire can manufacture. It has to be earned, rink by rink, byline by byline, the way he earned it.
Sources
These sources formed the evidence pack for this article. Links open the original publisher; inclusion does not imply endorsement.
- yardbarker.com original
- David La Vaque original
- legacy.hockey original
- kare11.com original
- prowly.com original
- Matt Dean original
- Jace Frederick | [email protected] | Pioneer Press original