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Liu Qian, 15 practices shooting during a training session with Chinese coach Fu Lei at an ice rink in Beijing, China on July 1st, 2015.Adam Dean

For a few minutes on a weekday morning, the iCool! arena is a summertime playground on ice. Two women glide hand-in-hand. A young girl zips along in white figure skates and pink elbow pads.

Then Fu Lei hauls a line of plastic barriers onto the ice and blocks off one-third of the rink. For the rest of the day, this area will be devoted not to fun, but to the very serious work of hockey. Soon, pucks are clanging off boards and crossbars, and Mr. Fu, a former Chinese national team player, is issuing commands to the two young men he is training. "Keep your head up," he says, as Liu Qian, 15, directs wrist shots at the top right corner.

It is a refrain from a thousand small-town Canadian rinks, but this time it's ringing out in Chinese across an arena on the fourth floor of a Beijing shopping mall.

And if that wasn't enough to compel sharper performance, Mr. Fu now has two even more potent words he can use: Andong Song, the name of an 18-year-old picked last week by the New York Islanders. He is the first Chinese-born player drafted to the NHL.

The small but growing Chinese hockey community erupted in cheers at his selection. In his elevation, other players, parents and coaches suddenly saw a new path to greatness in a sport that, when Mr. Song started shooting pucks, had perhaps 50 Chinese participants in Beijing.

Hockey has now swelled to more than 2,000 players in the city, amid a nationwide arena-building binge that has made the smack of a puck an increasingly familiar sound in China. But Mr. Song's drafting echoes louder than any slap shot, stirring excitement for a sport that sees in China major potential for growth.

Mr. Song's future in the NHL is far from certain – he was drafted 172 out of 211, raising suspicions he was chosen not for his talent, but for what he represents. The Islanders are owned by Shanghai-born Charles Wang.

But a Chinese symbol may be just what hockey needs as it reaches a pivotal moment in China. Teams such as the Toronto Maple Leafs see the country's swelling middle class as their best shot at international growth, and are already minting millions from relationships with Chinese companies. China itself stands poised for a bigger hockey appetite, with a bid for a 2022 Winter Olympics that stands to direct new national attention to the building of winter sports. Some are even hopeful Mr. Song's drafting will prove helpful to China in winning the Games.

"Andong's success has proven one thing to the International Olympic Committee and to the world: that Chinese do have the desire to play hockey well," said Feng Fei, a Beijing rink owner and vice-president of the Beijing Ice Hockey Association.

Perhaps more important is the boost Mr. Song provides a country that holds some promise as a lucrative hockey frontier. In cities as distant as Chengdu – where average January temperatures are 9 degrees – developers are building rinks as mall entertainment and providing skating opportunities to a generation seeking new thrills. Mr. Song's success legitimizes their ambitions.

The young Chinese man has already been a trailblazer. He is among the country's first "ice hockey immigrants," as Mr. Feng calls them, leaving for Canada when he was 10, then to New Jersey. Some 40 Chinese students are now in North America playing hockey – and few people were more inspired than they were by this year's NHL draft.

"I was really pumped and excited" about Mr. Song's selection, said Liu Qian, the 15-year-old. He moved to the U.S. five years ago and has played for the Connecticut Wolf Pack, a local elite club. He travels back to China in the summer. In China, "we have only just gotten interested in ice hockey, so we thought there was no chance for us to get into the NHL."

Now, his Beijing coach, Mr. Fu – who also coached Mr. Song – can rattle off a handful of other promising Chinese players who may one day have a shot at the big leagues.

China could naturally be a hockey country – its northern parts have the requisite temperatures for months of outdoor shinny, and people have played at least since the Communist Revolution in 1949. In 1958, Mr. Fu's own father, Fu Yingkui, joined the first municipal team in Jiamusi, a Chinese city in the far northeast that borders Russia. They were taught by the Russians, and the sport flourished for a brief period in the late 1950s, when at least 50 cities had professional teams, recalled the elder Mr. Fu, 72.

"We admired the Russian hockey teams – they had some famous players and coaches," he said.

But Mao Zedong's China soon became unkind to sports, and the country's professional teams were all cancelled in 1963.

Five years later, China opened its first indoor ice rink inside Beijing's Capital Indoor Stadium. In 1970, professional hockey teams were allowed to reconstitute, and China invited a team from the University of British Columbia to help develop local hockey skills. When they arrived in 1974, the Canadians were pitted against seven Chinese teams and outscored them, in aggregate, 56-5.

But Capital Indoor Stadium did not open its doors to the public until the late 1980s; a few years later, hockey began its modern revival. The renaissance was stoked, in part, by Gervais Lavoie, a Montrealer and entrepreneur then selling Canadian fruit juice to China. He started a hockey school as a Canuck-themed marketing effort.

The early joiners had little knowledge of the sport. "Some wanted to lose weight, some had been told to spend more time in cold air to help their asthma," said the younger Mr. Fu.

Even today, practical reasons often prevail. "It is not very realistic to do outdoor sports in Beijing. The air," said Guo Chunhua, who first put her 4 1/2-year-old son, Han Tianxiao, on skates a year ago. She's already thinking about sending him abroad – and worrying he might not stack up. "I don't know if he will be as strong as the Canadian kids when it comes to hitting," she said, as she watched her son confidently stickhandle a puck wrapped in Canadian-flag tape.

There is a certain irony to that worry. In China, the local game can be more brutish than beautiful. Ray Plummer, a Canadian who was one of hockey's modern pioneers in Beijing, once had a police officer on an opposing team who "Bruce Lee drop-kicked me in the chest and landed on his feet. Amazing."

Mr. Plummer is not optimistic about hockey's prospects in China.

It's a country whose sport agenda is driven by "economics of medals," he said. Train an entire hockey team, and China can at best net one medal. "Train one speed skater and they could come home with a bucket."

The country's record in other elite sports offers further reason for caution. Yao Ming's basketball stardom put Houston Rockets' jerseys on millions of Chinese kids – but virtually none have followed him into the sport. More Montenegrins have played in the NBA than Chinese.

In soccer, too, China has proven a dismal failure, famously scoring no goals in its only men's World Cup appearance. The five Chinese men who have played in the Premier League together scored just four goals.

China's current training practices aren't helping hockey much, either. Players often train individually with private coaches, a practice that makes the sport the purview of the wealthy – Mr. Liu attends Choate Rosemary Hall in the U.S., where boarding-school tuition is $53,510 (U.S.) a year – and emphasizes individual skill over gameplay.

"The whole spirit of playing on a hockey team is lost," said Mr. Lavoie. "They do not understand the game itself."

The best hockey opportunity in China, then, may lie not in its players but in its television viewers. Chinese national broadcaster CCTV has aired the past two seasons of the NHL, and teams such as the Maple Leafs are looking at ways to capitalize.

This past year, Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. – whose properties include the Leafs as well as the Raptors – saw its Chinese business double to $5-million. The company hopes to grow that a further four-fold or five-fold over the next decade, making it a big chunk of a current sponsorship business worth more than $100-million. For now, the $5-million a year comes from Chinese companies advertising to Canadian audiences. The next step is to use court-side and rink-side advertising to reach Chinese viewers, which MLSE has already tried during Raptors-Rockets games.

Professional hockey remains well behind other major sports competitors in China, however. The NFL, by comparison, "sponsors equipment and trains coaches and referees for free. They are doing enormous fundamental work in Chinese market," Mr. Feng said. "But the NHL hasn't started working on that yet."

The league also has not staged a major game in China, despite interest from teams such as the Leafs.

And though MLSE has made China its chief area of international focus, it says one Chinese player won't be enough. "Andong Song – we can't describe him as a can't-miss prospect yet," said MLSE chief commercial officer Dave Hopkinson. Still, he is hopeful another player will surface soon with the talent to lodge hockey in Chinese hearts.

"I don't think we're ready to see the Yao Ming effect yet," he said. "But I think we can see the Yao effect from here."

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