Next weekend the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association (PWHPA) will kick off its Dream Gap Tour in Toronto, Ontario. The Dream Gap refers to the fact that little boys can dream of being a professional hockey player but little girls have no such equivalent dream to chase. In the PWHPA’s press release for the tour,…
As part of my postdoctoral work on LGBTQ inclusion in hockey at the University of Alberta, I had the opportunity to interview six former National Hockey League (NHL) players. This is part of the same study in the context of which I wrote a post about openly gay competitive ice hockey players. My goal was…
I first learned about the platform, Twitch, six years ago from a student when I was TA’ing a second-year Media and Popular Cultures class. He tried to explain to me that Twitch was a site where you watched people play video games. The concept was completely lost on me at the time. However, with the…
Another year, another camp. That’s what it looks like on paper. But in reality, the Ouellette-Poulin Adult Hockey Camp has very quickly become the axis around which my hockey calendar (as well as my teammates and friends’ calendars) revolves. We spend half the year getting amped for two days on the ice in Montreal and…
Guest post by Lali Toor My name is Lali Toor and I am the Founder/President of Apna Hockey, the very first South Asian based ice hockey network. With the help of our co-founder and former professional South Asian hockey player Dampy Brar we have focused on establishing working relationships within the South Asian hockey community…
I had the privilege of watching the documentary Willie recently, which premiered at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival in April. Willie, tells the life story of Willie O’Ree from his early days when he couldn’t quite decide between baseball or hockey, to his career threatening eye-injury and his NHL call-up, and concludes with the day he finds…
Guest post by Shan Dhaliwal. Shan is a student at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) completing his Bachelor of Business Administration with a major in Marketing. He is also attending the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) for graphic design. Shan works at the South Asian Studies Institute at UFV as a Marketing…
Today’s the NHL Entry Draft – even more than the Men’s World Juniors, it’s the event on the hockey calendar that makes me most uncomfortable with the ethos of the NHL. The NHL draft, since it’s played on paper and not on the ice, is pure ideology for NHL general managers. Skill seems to become…
Guest Post by Peter Donnelly Peter Donnelly is a Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at University of Toronto and Director of the Centre for Sport Policy Studies. His research interests include sport and gender policy, athlete labour, and sport and social change. This article is republished from The Conversation under a…
By Mark Norman This is the first of what I hope will be a handful of reviews of hockey podcasts that focus or touch on themes of interest to Hockey in Society. I begin by reviewing the hockey podcast which most obviously aligns with many of this blog’s various interests: Changing on the Fly. This…
Co-Authored by Brett Pardy and Courtney Szto. Mainstream (sports) media has no idea what to do with well-spoken and educated women. If they also excel at sports the confusion is compounded. This likely has a lot to do with the fact that 90% of sports editors, 70% of assistant sports editors, 83% of columnists, 89%…
By Mark Norman Two weeks ago, popular, and sometimes controversial, Vancouver Canucks journalist Jason Botchford passed away suddenly from heart failure. Botchford (or Botch, as he was affectionately called in the Vancouver marketplace) was 48 years old, and is survived by his wife and three young children. His untimely death led to an outpouring of…
