For these NJ Devils fans, their fandom started long before this magical season

For Trudy Stetter, it all started with a walk inside Meadowlands Arena around 1990.

That’s when she and her late husband, Ed Bogaert — both longtime fans of the New Jersey Devils — stumbled upon a table for the Devils Fan Club on the arena’s concourse. The couple, both season ticket holders with retirement in mind, would soon have more time on their hands. So, it didn’t take much convincing: they quickly joined the fan club and never looked back.

“He and I joined the board and got totally involved, as he and I are prone to do,” said Stetter. “Although he's long since deceased, I've stayed with it in helping our members to run the organization.”

Three decades later, Stetter is now the club’s sitting president, a role once held by Bogaert, for what has been a surprising season for their beloved team. The Devils are tied 2-2 in a best-of-seven series against their bitter rivals, the New York Rangers in the fight for the Stanley Cup. Game 5 of the series is scheduled for Thursday.

But even after that final buzzer blows, the work is year-round for fans of the club.

The Devils Fan Club is about more than fandom, its members say.

Devils shrines

The nonprofit formed the same year the Devils relocated from Colorado in 1982. The group organizes annual trips and watch parties, conducts monthly membership meetings featuring high-profile speakers and engages in a variety of charitable endeavors. The club also has a monthly newsletter that publishes year-round, with the exception of July and August. The club also raises money for youth hockey, in what some consider its most important task.

The club hosts raffles, where members may donate a part of their “Devils Shrines” to be auctioned off to raise money for youth hockey players, said Stetter. Proceeds can fund expenses like uniforms, trophies or ice time. Fan club members have also volunteered at youth tournaments, helping with timing of games, scoring, penalty box control and similar tasks.

“It's a lot of volunteering,” Stetter said. “But, as you might know, volunteering is extremely satisfying especially if you feel you're really doing some good and making a difference.”

The Devils Fan Club is one of several NHL Booster Clubs and has long been considered one of the leagues’ largest. It had nearly 2,500 members in the late 1990s — what Stetter likens to its “heyday.” Today, membership sits around 300, which is “a low” and partly the result of the lingering effects of the COVID pandemic, Stetter said. There were also drops in membership in the wake of other catastrophic events, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2008 recession.

During its heyday, the club was organizing anywhere from 15 to 18 trips per year.

That included anything from day trips to Albany, New York, to weeklong trips to the West Coast or western Canada to catch Devils away games. Just before the pandemic, the club even organized a 44-member weekend trip to Columbus, Ohio, according to Stetter. This year, the group organized two trips to Seattle and Las Vegas.

Series: How to bet Rangers vs. Devils playoff series, plus our big prediction

'My home state had a team'

The trips were one reason David Jurman, a longtime fan of the Devils, joined the fan club in 2020.

Jurman, a hockey fanatic since childhood, fell in love with the Devils as soon as they moved to New Jersey "just because of the fact that my home state had a team," he said. "Immediately, I gravitated to the team. There was something special.”

He recounted seeing them play during their first month at Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford against the Philadelphia Flyers. “Just the energy in the arena that night and this fresh new team coming to New Jersey, I immediately became a fan,” he said.

Jurman was always aware of the fan club and their presence on the concourse, which continues now that the team plays at Prudential Center in Newark. Because he joined in 2020, he couldn’t immediately take advantage of the club’s group trips because of the pandemic — but he did organize the club’s first-ever virtual Devils trivia night at the height of the COVID-19 crisis.

The camaraderie among members of the fan club is also a reason Jurman stays. He credits Stetter, the club’s president, for that.

“She's almost like a Mrs. Devil, if you will. If Ken Daneyko was Mr. Devil, she's Mrs. Devil," Jurman said. "She's such a wonderful president of the club and just a great supporter of the team.”

'Mrs. Devil'

If you ask Stetter, who in a previous life was a research engineer at Bell Laboratories, why she does what she does, she will tell you it’s because she loves to give back.

“This is all volunteer, and the return I get is the friendships, the help that we can do, especially in youth hockey,” she said. It’s “for the younger kids, their coaches that still come to games as individuals, or their kids [who] are long since grown up.”

Though hockey season is nearing a close, the work continues for the Devils Fan Club. The monthly newsletters will continue. The monthly membership meetings — and the speakers who attend them — continue. And as soon as next year’s NHL schedule drops, Stetter’s phone will start to ring.

“As soon as that happens, we jump on it,” Stetter said, laughing. “I get a lot of emails from people or phone calls: ‘Have you considered this trip or that trip? Or are you going to do a trip here or there?' And so on. That's all part of the fun, as well. It ends up being year-round.”

Because the fan club does not have a designated area for members to sit in the stands — the club tried to set that up but the logistics proved too complicated — Stetter directs fan club members to their designated table on the concourse.

That's where members of the club may be conducting official business, like renewing their membership or asking how they could contribute to the next newsletter. They may be signing up for a future trip, or just saying hello to their club friends.

It’s at that table where Stetter runs into fans turned friends, or youth hockey players and coaches the fan club has helped.

Bonding with the Cardiff Devils of Wales

The reach extends beyond the Garden State. Sometimes, those fans come from as far as the United Kingdom, like fans of the Welsh ice hockey team, the Cardiff Devils. Those fans, Stetter said, feel a connection to their fellow Devils from New Jersey.

There are sometimes fans from Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Austria, Russia and Japan. Occasionally, a fan from South America. Usually, there are fans from Canada.

“I credit and thank the Devils all the time for allowing us to have our table on the concourse — not every other Booster Club does that,” Stetter said. “It becomes a social hub — and I expect us to continue that for as long as the team can manage to stay in the playoffs.”

The table will, of course, be there next year. And every season after.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ Devils Fan Club to love team long after series vs. Rangers