Minorities and Diversity in Hockey

[nickerjones]

Hi all,

My podcast, Beer League Talk, just did an interview with Damon Kwame Mason. You can hear it here : http://bit.ly/SoulOnIce. Mr. Mason made a documentary called Soul on Ice: Past, Present, and Future. The documentary is about the history and contribution of black athletes in hockey. Once learning about the movie, it piqued my curiosity on the subject. This is why I reached out to Mr. Mason to interview him about his project. I wasn't raised in a place that that much diversity in hockey. Calgary has quite a bit more diversity so has anyone hear had any experiences with being a minority playing hockey? Any thoughts or good/bad experiences you'd care to share?

I'd also appreciate if you gave this episode of the podcast a listen and a share. Thanks everyone!

[_Q_]

Growing up in the 90s, I remember playing on the outdoor rink with all the white kids, but there were hardly any minorities like myself that were into the sport back then. Even when I joined minor hockey later in my childhood, I can probably count on one hand the number of non-white kids that I played with.

Fast-forward a few decades, my beer league team made up of mostly Lebanese and Palestinian Canadians with a few Asian and white guys sprinkled in for good measure have just won our third provincial championship in a row. I'm extremely proud of the guys on my team and what we've accomplished the last few years.

[Lubicon]

Speaking of diversity in the NHL, the number of Canadian players in the league has finally dipped below 50% for the first time.

http://www.quanthockey.com/TS/TS_Pla...ionalities.php

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by _Q_

Growing up in the 90s, I remember playing on the outdoor rink with all the white kids, but there were hardly any minorities like myself that were into the sport back then. Even when I joined minor hockey later in my childhood, I can probably count on one hand the number of non-white kids that I played with.

Fast-forward a few decades, my beer league team made up of mostly Lebanese and Palestinian Canadians with a few Asian and white guys sprinkled in for good measure have just won our third provincial championship in a row. I'm extremely proud of the guys on my team and what we've accomplished the last few years.

Q how many are new Canadians and how many are born here?

[Bill Bumface]

In my beer league there is a ton of visible minorities, mostly of Asian descent. No clue how many are immigrants, but it seems like a large amount.

I play hockey really poorly, so it make sense that adults new to the sport would be the type I encounter. I love that people who grew up without the sport take to it when they move here.

[bc-chris]

we've got an east indian guy on my men's hockey team - he's one of the few original members from when i started the team 7 or 8 years ago.

i think in all the time he's played on my team there has only been one incident that was racially inappropriate..... and it ended in a line brawl becuz the guys on my team didn't appreciate the stuff the guys on the other team were saying.

thankfully, the league i'm in doesn't tolerate crap like that. the other team had one of their guys tossed from the league, another guy was tossed for about half the season and a third guy was tossed for the better part of a month.

[manwiches]

Growing up (early/mid 90s), my cousin and I were the only Asians I knew that played minor hockey. We had one East Indian guy on our team, and the rest were Caucasian. There were never any issues with any of us. We all were just kids and friends.

Beer league now (at least when I was in Calgary), My team was 50% Asian, and 50% Caucasian. In the end, I'm just happy that some of my closest friends are all guys I played beer league with in Calgary, didn't matter the diversity. We did love laughing at the fact that we could ice an entire Asian line up, including our goalie.

Almost every one of us played minor hockey growing up too. My cousin and I were just a few years older than the next guys on our beer league team now.

Speaking on 'stereo-types' when playing, I do find that Asian and brown guys (I mean this in no offensive way by the way for you sensitive folk) more easy to set off than my Caucasian counterparts. I find the ones that are ball hockey wonders that just picked up ice hockey, are the easiest to set off, as they think their skills should be transferable to ice hockey. Yes, they are demons on the boards, but the hacking and slashing is a little much.

Asian guys I tend to find suffer from small man complex on the ice.

I find ethnic players have a bit more lip to them, and elevate the trash talk to a point where it's almost personal.

For the record, I'm a 6'1" Chinese guy (humble brag. haha). I think I'm in a position to comment on ethnic beer league players.

[_Q_]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Q how many are new Canadians and how many are born here?

I believe all of us were either born in Canada or spent most of our childhoods here.

What's awesome, however, is we'll get relatives of some players coming out to games that don't speak a word of English and have been in Calgary for less than a month or so. It's special for them to just hang out with us in the dressing room before a game and then cheer us on from the stands.

[manwiches]

A small story, I organized a University league team when I was going to school, and we had a couple guys from Egypt who had never played hockey in their life, but wanted to try. They went out and brought all new equipment, and our entire team welcomed them with open arms. We taught them to play, and game results didn't even matter in the end, as almost every game was just us trying to feed them the puck or teach them what to do, so they were having fun. By the end of the first season, they loved the game so much and were so happy just to be included.

[Coach]

There's a pretty healthy sprinkling of minorities at the youth levels as well. I'd say the largest increase is from Middle-Eastern kids and Asian kids. Black kids play as well but I wouldn't say there's much of an increase over from when I was a kid.

Honestly, the racism types of issues seem to be almost non-existent. A lot of kids don't even know racial slurs for minorities (outside of the obvious ones, but I can't say I've ever seen a 14 year old call another a n*****). But it's tough to know what is said to each other on the ice. I had a kid call me a redskin once because my face was red from being outside. I had to explain to him why he can't say that, which is a good thing. It shows that parents aren't teaching their kids that crap, because there's not really anywhere else they can pick it up from.

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by _Q_

I believe all of us were either born in Canada or spent most of our childhoods here.

What's awesome, however, is we'll get relatives of some players coming out to games that don't speak a word of English and have been in Calgary for less than a month or so. It's special for them to just hang out with us in the dressing room before a game and then cheer us on from the stands.

I learnt to play in my mid 30's. We had a United Nations, Asian Canadians, Scottish immigrant, English immigrant, Russian immigrant and born Canadians.

[troutman]

India's national team toured Canada in September:

http://www.torontosun.com/2015/09/18...ming-to-canada

About a dozen members of his team are coming to Brampton Oct. 9 to play the ECHL’s Brampton Beast.

The rest of the team will be made up of local players of Indian descent.

“I’m incredibly excited to combine Indo-Canadian hockey players from the GTA with the players coming over from India,” Sherlip said.

There are many Canadian kids whose families came from India who’ve excelled at hockey and not even just in recent years. I remember 35 years ago I played in Kanata with Sanj Kalra, who was one of the best hockey players around. As I remember, he came to Canada with his parents as a baby and took up hockey at four and turned out to be a dandy. He actually went to Ohio on a tennis scholarship, but I always thought he was certainly good enough to play in the OHL. The guy was awesome.

[troutman]

I remember going to Wranglers games in the 1980s. IIRC, Lethbridge had two Chinese players at the time. The verbal abuse hurled at them by the Calgary fans was really bad.

[dubc80]

In the men's league I'm in now, there are quite a few visible minorities particularly of Asian descent, especially in the lower divisions. I was browsing through once and noticed a Asian team called the "####-Asians" and their logo was a rooster. Pretty funny if you ask me.

I'm guessing these are mostly guys who either didn't play when they were younger, or guys who immigrated to Canada later in life and fell in love with the game.

As a visible minority who played organized hockey in the early/mid 90's I'll say that there were barely any visible minority players back then.

I remember playing against the reserve teams were always a battle. They always had a bunch of good players. You might remember guys like Wacy Rabbit and Colton Yellow Horn. Wonder what happened to them. I believe they went on to star in the WHL but nothing really past that.

[dubc80]

I look forward to the day when there is a CBC (Canadian Born Chinese) in the NHL.

Winnipeg drafted a guy (Zach Yuen) a couple years ago, but haven't heard anything about him since.

Halfers like Setoguchi and Kariya don't count!

Guess the closest is/was Richard Park but he was American Korean.

[troutman]

http://asianplayers.com/hockey/

Buffalo once drafted an imaginary Japanese player to protest the length of the draft:

http://icehockey.wikia.com/wiki/Taro_Tsujimoto

[Hockeyguy15]

I believe diversity is an old wooden ship.

[steveo]

Originally Posted by manwiches

Growing up (early/mid 90s), my cousin and I were the only Asians I knew that played minor hockey. We had one East Indian guy on our team, and the rest were Caucasian. There were never any issues with any of us. We all were just kids and friends.

Beer league now (at least when I was in Calgary), My team was 50% Asian, and 50% Caucasian. In the end, I'm just happy that some of my closest friends are all guys I played beer league with in Calgary, didn't matter the diversity. We did love laughing at the fact that we could ice an entire Asian line up, including our goalie.

Almost every one of us played minor hockey growing up too. My cousin and I were just a few years older than the next guys on our beer league team now.

Speaking on 'stereo-types' when playing, I do find that Asian and brown guys (I mean this in no offensive way by the way for you sensitive folk) more easy to set off than my Caucasian counterparts. I find the ones that are ball hockey wonders that just picked up ice hockey, are the easiest to set off, as they think their skills should be transferable to ice hockey. Yes, they are demons on the boards, but the hacking and slashing is a little much.

Asian guys I tend to find suffer from small man complex on the ice.

I find ethnic players have a bit more lip to them, and elevate the trash talk to a point where it's almost personal.

For the record, I'm a 6'1" Chinese guy (humble brag. haha). I think I'm in a position to comment on ethnic beer league players.

I think with the non-caucasian players they get set off more easy is because most of them (myself included) didn't grow up playing organized hockey and such as a kid. So we aren't as used to the type of 'contact' to expect from a 'non-contact' league.

When I play I don't mind people laying their weight on me when we are skating for a loose puck. It's part of the game to use your body to trying to get position etc. What I don't like is when players start hacking and chopping me for no reason, or laying out body checks. Then of course if they want to play like that I'll play like that too.

I may also be stereotyping here but I find a lot of Caucasian teams get pretty chippy once the all Asian/coloured people team starts winning with speed and skating. They start throwing the body, throwing cross checks and such.

Edit:
I wanted to play hockey growing up but my family didn't have the resources to put me into it. I started playing ice hockey in my mid 20s to mainly be part of a team and for exercise. I just wanna go out there and play. Sometimes it's just a bit tiresome running into beer league all stars who play like there are scouts in the arena or like they are still in some sort of triple a junior hockey.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by steveo

I may also be stereotyping here but I find a lot of Caucasian teams get pretty chippy once the all Asian/coloured people team starts winning with speed and skating. They start throwing the body, throwing cross checks and such.

I see that in basketball for sure.

[CroFlames]

Originally Posted by dubc80

In the men's league I'm in now, there are quite a few visible minorities particularly of Asian descent, especially in the lower divisions. I was browsing through once and noticed a Asian team called the "####-Asians" and their logo was a rooster. Pretty funny if you ask me.

I'm guessing these are mostly guys who either didn't play when they were younger, or guys who immigrated to Canada later in life and fell in love with the game.

As a visible minority who played organized hockey in the early/mid 90's I'll say that there were barely any visible minority players back then.

I remember playing against the reserve teams were always a battle. They always had a bunch of good players. You might remember guys like Wacy Rabbit and Colton Yellow Horn. Wonder what happened to them. I believe they went on to star in the WHL but nothing really past that.

I know that Wacey went on to have a few successful years in Europe. Was drafted 5th round by Boston I believe.