HOCKEY IS STILL CANADA’S GAME. BUT WILL IT LAST?
In his new book, Sean Fitz-gerald found that hockey in this country has entrenched problems — it’s too expensive, it’s too white — and yet no one sees easy solutions on offer
TORONTO Sean Fitz-gerald tells the story of his eight-year-old son, Brendan, meeting a boy his age who had moved to the neighbourhood with his family from Vancouver. The new kid said he liked hockey; his favourite player was Brock Boeser, the young winger on the Canucks. Brendan said his was P.K. Subban. They immediately fell into a shared language, each fluent in hockey. “Now they are inseparable,” Fitz- Gerald says. The families have become close, and the two fathers play on the same beer-league team. “Maybe we find each other eventually, but hockey was that entry point,” Fitz- Gerald says.
Those bits of Canadiana are becoming increasingly rare. Fitz-gerald, a longtime sportswriter (and former colleague), set out to chronicle the challenges facing the national game, while spending a season with the oncemighty Peterborough Petes junior hockey team. What he found, as told in the new book Before the Lights Go Out, was that everyone agrees that hockey in this country has entrenched problems — it’s too expensive, it’s too white, it’s too all-consuming — and yet no one sees easy solutions on offer.
All of it raises concerns that lead to a single, somewhat unthinkable, question: Are we heading toward a world in which Canada is no longer the foremost hockey power?
Fitz-gerald, a senior writer at The Athletic with previous stints at the National Post and Toronto Star, sits down in a downtown Toronto coffee shop where, over the occasional din of grinding beans, we talk about the future of Canada’s game. The forces that have been working against broad hockey participation have been building for some time, which is one of the reasons for a book-length look at them.
The big one is money. Fitz-gerald’s day jobs had taken him to a top prospects game in Toronto a few times, one where teens hoping to be drafted into the CHL performed for scouts.
“I’m, like, ‘are they going to call the cops on me because there’s a Honda Civic in the parking lot and it’s too close to that Range Rover?’,” he says.
“It’s insane: Porsche, Lexus, Audi, BMW, Mercedes, they are all there. And those are the top-40 kids (in the area). There’s no Chevy in there.”
That competitive hockey has filtered out children of lesser means is no secret. Just this week, Scotiabank released a survey that said more than half of hockey parents spend at least $5,000 annually on the sport. More than 80 per cent of respondents said costs were higher this season than last, and significant numbers of parents said they took out debt or found additional work to offset the cost.
“People used to say it was the everyman’s game, and it’s certainly not that anymore,” Fitz- Gerald says. “Dave Keon doesn’t get down to the Maple Leafs from Rouyn-noranda unless he has a skating and skills instructor when he’s 10.”
Entering his son into hockey put some of the issues Fitz-gerald had covered professionally into sharper relief. “Once a week we had a skills instructor come out and work with the goalie and a skills instructor work with the skaters,” he says. “And we’re Tier 2. We are not leading the way on this.
“(Brendan) did a hockey camp at the end of August where he was on the ice for five hours, went to a cross-fit gym for another hour, somewhere in there he had lunch, and he did it five days and it cost me $800. For one week.”
Those rising cost pressures aren’t unique to hockey, as parents with kids in competitive soccer or basketball or swimming will quickly attest.
“But the reason we pick on hockey and the reason we did the book on hockey is because none of them were on the back of the five-dollar bill, you know?,” Fitz- Gerald says. “Hockey doesn’t like being held to a separate standard, but there’s a reason for it. It’s Roch Carrier and The Hockey Sweater and it’s Sidney Crosby and the Tim Hortons commercials. It holds that place in the broader Canadian imagination and a big part of that is that it used to be broadly accessible to everybody.”
Hockey also requires an investment of time, particularly as the level of competition rises. The new Scotiabank survey found that 80 per cent of hockey parents spent at least five hours a week at practices and games, and more than a third of them said the number was above eight hours. These aren’t all people with NHL stars in their eyes, either.
“From my experience, it’s that you just want your best for your kid. And you want your kid to be able to stay with their peer group, so if the team moves on, you want them to be able to stay with them,” Fitz-gerald says.
“And as the team, you want them to improve so they can stay competitive. So the forces are tremendous.”
Children, even at kindergarten age, can be playing year-round now. “So not only does the cost rise, which raises a barrier to entry, if you are a house-league kid joining the system at 10, which is completely reasonable, you are going to look like a newborn foal out there,” he says.
Between the dollars and time, parents who grew up with hockey have reason enough for second thoughts, to say nothing of those from different cultural backgrounds who have never been on skates.
As the country’s demographics change, so too does the number of families that instinctively think of hockey as a first option, a problem Hockey Canada has acknowledged it needs to address. Where minor-hockey registration isn’t down in this country, it tends to be flat. “The population rises every year and even if hockey stagnates — I only have a bachelor of arts, but even I know that means you are losing ground,” Fitz-gerald says.
There are ideas to address some of these problems. Equipment banks for loaner gear to offset entry cost, mentoring programs, even post-game pizza parties to try to make the experience more fun. But these are largely one-offs, and this is a big country. Hockey Canada recently made a sweeping change that saw the youngest players moved to “cross ice” games, playing across the width rather than the length of the ice.
The idea was that young kids would have more fun if they could handle the puck more, instead of chasing it across yawning gaps on the rink with their tiny legs. The change just about touched off riots in Ontario, where many officials and parents wanted to preserve the status quo. It’s an example of how hard it can be to effect broad change.
“Cross-ice (games), they had that on the books for, like, 30 years,” Fitz-gerald says, explaining that there is clear scientific evidence to support the benefits of making the switch. “It still took that long. And now they are playing catch up to other countries.”
The gains that those other countries have made have already been expressed at the game’s highest levels. Canada no longer has the dominant national women’s program, the world juniors have become a five-nation dogfight and even the men’s team was an Olympic golden goal away from an existential crisis on home ice in Vancouver. Canada’s NHL stars weren’t at the last Olympics and they might not be at the next one. Would they still be favourites in 2026? Or, as Fitz-gerald puts it: “Are we confident that a 47-yearold Sidney Crosby and whatever is left of the broken soul of Connor Mcdavid, up against an Auston Matthews and Jack Eichel and all those people, are we confident that we are going to keep churning them out at the same pace as the U.S.?” (Crosby would be 39, but, hey, creative licence.)
It’s hard to imagine, and yet it also isn’t. Without the big wins to reassert Canadian hockey supremacy, what happens? “If it’s all 2006 in Turin and not 2010 in Vancouver, that’s not a lot of fun. What does that do to how we identify internationally?,” Fitz- Gerald asks.
“So much of our identity is tied up in hockey, what happens if we are number four?”
Of course, not everyone necessarily sees any of this as a crisis. To many this sounds not unlike complaining about how music today doesn’t have enough guitar solos. Evolution happens.
“You have to embrace that Canada is changing,” says Fitz- Gerald, whose wife Caroline was born in Mumbai, came here as a kid and didn’t expect to become a hockey mom. “That’s cool, I’m not here to advocate that the sporting monoculture of Canada must remain in place.”
“But it means something,” Fitz- Gerald says of hockey, and of the country that identifies so much with it.
Their second child, Molly, begins hockey school this month.
If it’s all 2006 in Turin and not 2010 in Vancouver, that’s not a lot of fun. What does that do to how we identify internationally?, So much of our identity is tied up in hockey, what happens if we are number four?
—SEAN FITZ-GERALD