Sledge hockey for the masses
Kevin Rempel is dedicated to promoting the game he played
He’d been officially retired for fewer than 24 hours when his Twitter account sprang to life. The Canadian national team was facing the Americans in the championship of the World Sledge Hockey Challenge and he was clearly living and dying with every goal.
American successes were met with terse, often one-word posts. Canadian rallies were followed by online cries of encouragement. You could feel each ebb and flows of the game through his words.
It was a far cry from last year when he didn’t even bother watching the final.
“Last time I didn’t want anything to do with it,” Kevin Rempel says.
The Dundas native — who’d found the sport after suffering a severe spinal injury in a motorbike accident in 2006, a story he tells in detail in his new autobiography, Still Standing — had been a member of Canada’s national team since 2010. In 79 international games wearing the Maple Leaf, he’d collected 64 points, won a Paralympic bronze medal in Sochi and gold at the worlds.
Yet prior to last season, he was cut from Team Canada. By his own account he showed up at training camp with a bad attitude which was reflected in his play. So when he was called into the coaches’ office and told he wasn’t going to be part of the team, he wasn’t shocked. Still, it was a sour moment. But why the attitude? With a bunch of changes the team was making, his heart wasn’t really into it. More than that though, the 34-year-old says he’d realized by camp that he had other things he wanted to do with his
life. The trouble was, he was too scared to simply retire on his own and get on with them. “The real world is scary,” he says. And what was it he so badly wanted to do? Sledge hockey, mainly.
It turns out Rempel wasn’t tired of the game itself. To the contrary, he has such a deep passion for it that he was already thinking ahead to making a bigger impact on it than he could as a member of the national team. Even before going to Sochi, he was thinking of ways to grow the game.
Time after time he’d be talking to someone who’d ask about his sport. They’d inevitably ask him how they could try it. “I didn’t have an answer,” he says. People just don’t have sleds and sticks in their garage. Arenas don’t have supplies of them on hand for curious people eager to try. There aren’t even public sledge hockey hours available at most rinks. He dreams of the day equipment will be for sale next at every sports store but that’s not the reality yet.
The frustration of this was eating at him.
“How is a sport supposed to grow when nobody can play?”
So when he was cut from the national team, it was a kind of freedom. The difficult decision to leave had been made for him. Now he could go buy a trailer and enough equipment to cover two full teams. Then drive around to whatever rink wants him to give people a taste of the sport. You’d hire him and he’d bring the game to you. Which is exactly what he did. Here’s the twist, though. His target isn’t the demographic traditionally associated with the game. Meaning he’s not exclusively trying to expose it to people with disabilities.
“When an able-bodied person gets on the ice for sledge hockey it’s a level playing field,” Rempel says. “Every single person is exactly at par.”
He’s gone into debt to make this business happen. He’s had sleepless nights feeling almost sick to his stomach worrying about whether it would work. Even had his trailer broken into and $5,000 worth of gear stolen just last week. But the Sledge Hockey Experience was born. His chance to make a longterm, significant impact on the sport was finally in his hands.
And when companies put their able-bodied employees on sleds for a team-building exercise and turn them into sledge hockey players?
“They don’t want to get off the ice,” Rempel says.
It’s tough (ahem) sledding. Still, he’s committed to his plan. Even though it means he can’t be playing for Canada. And couldn’t be on the ice on Saturday when his old mates — some of them, anyway — lost the final 5-2. Even from a distance now, he admits he’s pretty tired of watching the Americans win gold after gold. Which almost sounds like he wishes he’d been out there to do something about it?
“No,” he corrects. There’s simply too much work to do growing the game to have time for that.