Will Baldwin spent 15 years as a high-level hockey goalie and goalie coach and is now in his final year at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism.
When I was growing up in the late 2000s, I played hockey. There wasn’t a question that I would: It is, and has long been, a rite of passage for young Canadian boys. I played other sports growing up, but none of them felt as Canadian as hockey. Every Saturday night, my family would turn on Hockey Night in Canada and I’d dream of being one of the players who made it to The Show.
Some of the great lessons of my life came from playing the sport. Many of the best memories and friendships of my youth were fostered in a rink; I’ve never felt more patriotic than when I watch Team Canada take the ice. I’ll never forget watching Sidney Crosby score the golden goal at the Vancouver Olympics.
But then I got older, and as I advanced in my playing career, I saw more and more of what hockey’s culture was cultivating. I saw registrations among young Canadian boys declining: While significant strides have been made in girls’ hockey, total registrations by Canadian boys have gone down every year since 2014. And the more I saw of hockey’s realities, the more I felt uneasy – and worried about the state of the game I felt I was born to love.
It starts with hockey’s financial cost. I’ll never forget my dad’s reaction in first-year atom (now called U-10) when we went to buy a new stick – it was well over $100. My dad swallowed hard and paid for it, but it was impossible to not remember the face he made when he saw how much it was, particularly when it broke just a couple of months later.
Certain things your parents do and say stick with you forever; that was one of those moments. From then on, I couldn’t ignore how playing hockey and one’s experiences within the sport could be dictated by one’s family’s income.
This is in large part owing to the customs of the game. If you wanted to be good, the newest and best gear was a need, not just a nice-to-have. Everyone who’s played has heard the classic lines of trash talk about equipment: that players had “Walmart” gear, or that they were “dust” because of their equipment.
One of those standby sayings you’ll hear in the dressing room is “look good, feel good, play good.” Coincidentally, this never seems to apply to the kids with old gear.
Hockey’s exorbitant expenses don’t just end with the gear required to play, however: there’s also the costs of registrations, tournaments, ice time and potential payments to billet families or boarding schools that can cost thousands of dollars more.
A 2019 Bank of Nova Scotia survey of 1,000 Canadian and American hockey parents found nearly 60 per cent of the parents spent more than $5,000 a year to fund the sport, with 41 per cent of them spending between $5,000 and $10,000 a season.
When accounting for all the costs associated with the game, it isn’t surprising that, looking back on the make-up of the locker rooms of teams I played on, I was one of the lower-income members, even though both my parents were well-established high-school educators. I was lucky enough to have parents willing and able to pour much of their money into me playing a sport, but many Canadians aren’t so lucky. That luck shouldn’t be a prerequisite to play our country’s sport.
Hockey has a long way to go in other crucial off-ice areas, as well. In recent years, professional hockey has had a kind of reckoning with racism and sexism. Akim Aliu spoke out about his former NHL coach’s alleged use of a racist slur, as well as the other epithets he had to endure over the course of his career as a Black hockey player; Brock McGillis, the first openly gay professional hockey player, was among those criticizing former Washington Capitals forward Brendan Leipsic when transcripts of his misogynistic group chat were leaked.
Such hatred doesn’t just exist at those highest of levels, of course. In my eight-plus years of minor hockey, I heard just about every homophobic, racial or otherwise offensive slur on the ice. I’ve heard conversations that echo Mr. Leipsic’s degrading messages about women in the locker room; the only difference is that he got caught outside the “safety net” that is the confines of a dressing room.
No one who’s been around the game and is honest with themselves should’ve been surprised to hear what Mr. Aliu and Mr. McGillis had to say. Indeed, elite hockey had already “reckoned” with this in 2014, when the Ontario Hockey League suspended two players whose sexist remarks were published on social media. In just over a year, high-profile broadcasters Mike Milbury, Jeremy Roenick and Don Cherry were fired – Mr. Milbury and Mr. Roenick for making degrading comments about women, and Mr. Cherry for another screed against communities of colour. And in June of last year, two former Canadian Hockey League players launched a class-action lawsuit with allegations of “violent hazing, physical and sexual assault and psychological trauma”; more players have since joined that effort.
I, like so many Canadians, love hockey. However, as presently constructed, the game simply doesn’t afford everyone the same opportunity to have that love reflected back. And as Canada becomes more diverse, the sport we have come to define ourselves by is in need of a big cultural shift if it hopes to remain the rite of passage for the country’s male youth.
Otherwise, hockey will continue to be the rich, white, straight man’s game it currently is, alienating itself from future generations. And if it does, fewer and fewer Canadians will grow up the way I and so many others did, dreaming of one day playing the game we love in The Show. Now, it’s time for the game itself to show up.
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