Simply the best: Wickenheiser’s new Leaf role no token gesture
On Thursday, when Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas announced the hiring of Hayley Wickenheiser as the team’s assistant director of player development, he did his best to downplay the significance of the moment. The GM wanted to emphasize that Wickenheiser, the greatest player in the history of women’s hockey, wasn’t brought aboard in a token nod to gender diversity. Wickenheiser was hired, Dubas pointed out, on account of her undeniable competency.
“We’re looking for the best people, period,” Dubas said.
And given the 40-year-old Wickenheiser’s vast experience as an athletic lifer and a lifelong learner — along with being one of a handful of Canadians to play in both the Winter and Summer Olympics (the latter in soft- ball), she’s currently studying medicine at the University of Calgary — it’s impossible to make a case against the impressiveness of her resumé. While it’s true she never played in the NHL, few more accomplished people on the planet have spent more time in the on-ice company of highly skilled pros. Wickenheiser played professionally in men’s leagues in Finland and Sweden. Back in 1998 she attended the first of a couple of rookie camps with the Philadelphia Flyers.
As Roger Neilson, the late Flyers coach, said at the time in an attempt to put her abilities in perspective for reporters: “Once they’re out there with their helmets on, you wouldn’t know the difference.”
When a woman gets a job in pro sports, mind you, people notice the difference. While the past handful of years have seen some pioneering hires — the NBA, for instance, employs one referee and a couple of full-time assistant coaches who happen to be women — the major North American leagues remain bastions of male dominance.
Not that there aren’t some exceptions. Front-office support staffs are populated by plenty of women, as are league offices. And a few NHL teams have hired women as skating coaches — the Maple Leafs, who’ve long employed Barb Underhill, among them. Still, as Dubas acknowledged on Thursday, the NHL is more male than not: a cosy world where friends often hire friends, men hire men.
Just a few months into his tenure as Leafs GM, Dubas, 32, has made it clear he’s an independent-thinking contrarian unafraid of bucking the game’s norms. Earlier this summer Dubas named Dr. Meg Popovic to the newly created position of director of athlete well-being and performance. And Wickenheiser’s appointment came alongside news that the club had hired Noelle Needham as an amateur scout in the U.S. Midwest — the first set of female eyes among the team’s vast scouting contingent. Counting Underhill, that’s four women directly involved in either player procurement or athlete development. It goes without saying that’s a high-water mark in franchise history.
“Research shows that the more diverse your organiza- tion, the better your decision making, the better your operation in general,” Dubas said. “I just think if you’re only hiring white males — and I’m saying that as a white male — you’re probably leaving a lot on the table in terms of where your organization can go, and how it can think, and how it can evolve and develop.”
Dubas is not the first executive at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment who has seen the value in thinking beyond a sport’s age-old customs. Raptors president Masai Ujiri has long insisted that one of the keys to his franchise’s recent success has been its willingness to give prominent roles to women, most notably Teresa Resch, the team’s vice-president of basketball operations. Ujiri, of course, has taken many of his managerial cues from the San Antonio Spurs, who in 2014 hired Becky Hammon as the NBA’s first full-time assistant coach.
The Maple Leafs haven’t always spoken such language. Longtime owner Harold Ballard was infamous for his unabashed chauvinism, once going on the CBC to denounce the idea of a woman hosting a radio show as “a joke.” Under Ballard’s watch, the Maple Leafs were the last team in the NHL to allow female reporters into the dressing room. And Ballard, don’t forget, owned the team until his death in 1990.
All these years later, of course, plenty of doors have been opened to girls and women, in hockey and other sports. But it’s important to Wickenheiser that, in her work as a trailblazer, she walks through them on account of her skills.
“The biggest reason why I was intrigued about this role was that Kyle was interested in me, not to hire a woman, but to hire somebody who can do the job,” Wickenheiser said.
The only question is how she’ll fit it all in. Along with flying from her Calgary home to Toronto two or three times a month to work with various Leafs and Marlies, she’ll also be in charge of the development of the team’s handful of Western Hockey League prospects. Oh, and she’ll also continue studying to become a doctor. If that seems daunting, there’s a chance it’s a lighter load than she shouldered as a player.
“When I was a player, I was a full-time student doing a masters degree, raising a son and managing business stuff on the side,” she said. “So I’m very, very used to multitasking and time management is not a problem for me … I think I’ll be able to blend the two nicely.
Wickenheiser was asked which career path is more likely: The NHL or medicine?
“I think one will complement the other,” Wickenheiser said. “I don’t have to make that decision at this point.”
That she’s put herself in a position where she might eventually have to make that decision — it’ll be a testament to her knack for time management, and to hockey’s slowly changing times.