SAN JOSE — In more than a decade as an amateur hockey player, Tony Sanchez has taken a few hits. But at the age of 80, he’s not complaining.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Sanchez, a Sunnyvale resident known as “Pops” to his teammates and friends in the San Jose Sharks Ice Adult Hockey League. With a broad grin, he added: “I have my aches and pains, but I don’t have to share them with everybody.”

Sanchez is the oldest of more than 3,700 players in the coed recreational league, which includes men and women ages 18 and up. And though silver-haired, he’s quite spry. An affable, longtime local real estate broker — who still spends time in his Milpitas office — Sanchez works out several times a week at a local gym, where he alternates between kickboxing, Zumba and aerobics.

While he loves being on the ice, Sanchez said, his favorite thing about playing hockey is the camaraderie of his teammates, who call themselves the Ice Monkeys. The five-time grandfather celebrated his 80th birthday recently by attending a party with family, friends and teammates at the Sharks Ice skating complex near Spartan Stadium and then playing in a regularly scheduled game with the team.

“That’s the joy of it,” said Sanchez. “They give me a lot of encouragement. They say I’m an inspiration to them, but they’re an inspiration to me.”

The affection is mutual. “Pops is a great guy,” said Ice Monkeys team captain Clay Fiske, a 40-year-old network engineer, who adds, “There are a lot of teams that are super-competitive, but what we really want is just a group that can have fun together. There are no jerks allowed.”

On the ice, Fiske added, Sanchez is “pretty solid. He’s not going to win the foot race, but he gets out there and does his thing. He surprises people sometimes, when they think they can skate past him with the puck. He’ll take his swing and whack it away from them.”

Sanchez, who usually plays forward, is the first to admit he may not have the moves of a younger player. “But the important thing is he’s having fun,” said his son, also named Tony Sanchez, who recruited his father into skating 14 years ago.

The younger Sanchez, now 45, also skates with the Ice Monkeys and explains, “I just thought it would be fun to hang out with my dad. And it’s been great, getting to bond with him.”

Though they both liked to ski and dabbled in other athletic pursuits, father and son were strangers to the ice until the 1990s, when the Sharks — as in the National Hockey League Sharks — began playing in San Jose. The younger Sanchez joined some friends in learning roller hockey first then moved to the ice and told his father, “Dad, you’ve got to try this.”

The elder Sanchez said he roller-skated a few times as a boy. But as the son of migrant workers, he didn’t have many chances to play team sports while growing up. Sanchez said his real passion for exercise began about 35 years ago, when his then-toddler daughter made an innocent remark about his then-growing midsection. That’s when he started going to a gym.

Today, according to Fiske, Sanchez is one of few players older than 70 in the Sharks Ice league. But their numbers may be growing, said John Gustafson, vice president of Sharks Ice, which oversees the San Jose complex and rinks in Oakland and Fremont.

“I promise you that you’re going to see more older players in the future, in part because people are living longer,” said Gustafson, a former NHL goalie, who calls hockey “a cradle-to-grave sport. If you can walk, you can skate. It’s a great way to work out and meet people because it’s such a team sport.”

While hockey’s also known as a contact sport, players in the recreational league wear full padding and helmets. The league also doesn’t allow body-checking, although accidental impacts occur.

In fact at a recent game, Sanchez relished the contact in scrums as he battled for loose pucks. He was part of the regular line changes the entire game, and just about the only concession to his age came when he used the door along the bench to enter and exit the ice, instead of hopping over the half-boards like younger teammates. And the smile never left his face despite a hard-fought 5-3 loss.

The younger Sanchez conceded that his mother and two sisters sometimes worry about his father getting hurt. But the player known as Pops says he’s having too much fun to quit.

“It’s a joy ride,” he said. “Every day above ground is a great day.”

Staff writer Mark Emmons contributed to this report. Contact Brandon Bailey at 408-920-5022 or follow him at Twitter.com/BrandonBailey.