Minor hockey: Time for a lockdown reckoning?
NHL player Akim Aliu’s message about hockey also applies to all levels of the sport
A friend recently wrote to me about her life in lockdown, with its much-improved work-life balance. She said her husband would probably never go back to full-time office work.
Another friend has noticed such an improvement in one of her teenaged daughters — who has ADHD, ASD and anxiety — that she’s considering homeschooling from now on. Her family has started going on walks together every morning. They’re getting a dog — something she and her husband had resisted for years.
For many of us, COVID-19 has created a reckoning about our priorities; a kind of pandemic zeitgeist is pushing many of us to question the old paradigms.
I thought about this as I read last month’s article by Akim Aliu in The Players’ Tribune, “Hockey Is Not For Everyone.” Aliu pushes back against the ideological slogan of the NHL’s diversity campaign (“Hockey is for everyone”) by writing about the racism and abuse he’s suffered in the “hockey machine.” Canadian hockey, he argues, is a power structure — a “system” — that “pummels” players who are anything but the prototypical hockey “type,” the white hetero male. And, he argues, all the reasons for being outcast, including gender and sexuality, “deserve attention.”
When my daughter, a defenceman, started playing rep hockey at age 8, there was usually one other girl on the opposing team, but as the years wore on, she was the only girl at the entire tournament, and then the only girl in the whole division.
We were warned that when she moved up to bantam level and full contact, many other players would either go out of their way to hit her or to avoid her, so she switched to girls’ AA hockey. Spring tryouts, we quickly learned, were merely window-dressing, as most coaches had selected their teams by Christmas based on scouting in the late fall. (This is what Aliu means when he talks about the fear of being an outcast: even in minor hockey, it’s all about who you know, so a code of silence emerges. Very few dare to make waves.)
I scrambled around trying to get coaches to come see her play in her last few games of the season, and she got on a team that typically sat near the bottom of the standings.
She asked if she could play on a house league team too, so that she could practice being a forward. We agreed. She was, of course, the only girl in the division.
Her experience on the girls’ team might be best summed up with the following: at a tournament, over the course of two games in one day, her team was scored against 13 times.
My daughter was on the ice for exactly two of those goals against, and in both cases, she had her man. She was doing her job. She was working hard. Late in the second game, she made two passes that weren’t completed, and when she came off the ice, her coach told her, in front of the whole bench, that her play was “f---ing embarrassing.” The next day, he benched her for 10 shifts in one game without telling her why. Though well-accustomed to coaches’ temper tantrums and verbal abuse, and pretty unflappable in general, she called home after this particular game, in tears, asking me to come and pick her up.
Her house league team regularly faced an opposing player who went after because she was “just a f---ing girl.” After coming out of the penalty box for slashing her, he crowed that it was “totally worth it.” In one particular shift, he tripped her, slashed her, and checked her from behind. She came home and said she wasn’t even playing hockey anymore: she was just out there trying to protect herself from getting hurt. Everyone saw what was going on — the coaches, the players, and the refs. But her dad and I were the ones who had to insist that this misogynist, abusive 14-year-old and his parent be warned about his behaviour. The targeting never went away completely, but my daughter remained her team’s top scorer. I wonder how many more goals she would have scored if she hadn’t needed to be so vigilant about protecting herself from physical violence.
Is the disjuncture of last season’s ending — the fizzling-out with neither championships nor tryouts — an opportunity for a bit of reckoning? Now, in this cultural moment, when we are reassessing so much about our lives, is the exact right time for Aliu’s article, and it’s the exact right time for us to ask how hockey persists as a place where this kind of thing happens; and believe me when I say that it happens a lot. The verbal abuse, the intolerance for difference, and the code of silence … they start early, and they persist.