Kraken teach hockey to Seattle-area kids
Her long, black hair is tinged with purple streaks. She’s wearing cargo pants and black boots. The young girl with the stick in her hands doesn’t fit the traditional image of a hockey player.
Neither does the boy with red bushy hair in a yellow shirt, or the young girl demonstrating stickhandling from her wheelchair.
In this case, these children are two-dimensional characters inside an educational document that is the brainchild of Kyle Boyd, the Seattle Kraken’s director of youth and community development. His dream is to expose the widest possible audience in Seattle and beyond to the game of hockey, with the idea of appealing to kids of different genders, sizes and abilities while growing the fledgling team’s fanbase.
“The characters kind of become great avatars and the way of saying, ‘Hey, this is a sport that anyone can get into,’ ” Boyd said. “And then we want to make sure that we provide those pathways for everyone to get into it.”
Before the Kraken take the ice for their first NHL season this fall, Boyd and the team have already started introducing the basics of hockey to schools and youth programs in the area. But they’re doing it differently from what other teams have done in the past.
A former elementary and high school history teacher, Boyd went searching for a school-based ball hockey program the Kraken could build around to introduce the game in physical education classes. There was none that met elementary school physical education standards, so Boyd set about creating one that did while trying to help launch other parts of the franchise.
He partnered with SHAPE America, a national organization that helps create the standards for K-12 physical education, to make sure the program checked all the boxes for educational requirements. He used a local artist to create characters representative of kids of all sizes, ethnicities and abilities to illustrate the skills being taught like stickhandling, passing and shooting.
SHAPE America said it’s believed to be the first ball hockey program created by an NHL team that meets elementary educational standards. The Kraken have already done some outreach programs with local youth programs this summer and hope to implement the curriculum with partner schools during the current school year.
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