Ian Kennedy | The hockey News
Women and girls have historically been excluded from hockey. For more than a century, women have been barred from rinks, kicked off teams, and forced out of leagues. Girls have been given leftover ice times in the middle of the night, or early hours; and they’ve worn equipment not made for their bodies, faced ridicule and discrimination, and despite it all, continued to play the game of hockey.
The barriers are obvious, and it’s why Hockey Canada and a special steering committee aimed at solving these problems for women and girls, have released the first phase of their plan, a paper titled “building the future of women’s and girls’ hockey.”
Leading the charge is three-time Olympic gold medalist and three-time World Champion Gillian Apps. Apps is a member of Hockey Canada’s new board of directors and the lead of Hockey Canada’s Women’s and Girls’ Steering Committee.
Apps knows change has been slow, but feels that the new group, alongside HockeyN Canada are committed to opening opportunities for women and girls.
“It was very clear how Hockey Canada is committed to this,” Apps told The Hockey News.
“It is a testament to say, women and girls hockey matters to everyone involved in this paper, and the steering committee when people were asked to be a part of this, no one hesitated. People truly believe in, ‘how do we make women’s and girls’ hockey in Canada better.’ We have our paper but really trying to understand how Canadians are interacting with the game from coast-to-coast and put strategies in place to try to make it a really great experience, keep women in the game, have new Canadians start hockey and have that be an easy experience. Even for a 30-year-old, 40-year-old woman who has never played hockey before, how can she get involved in a learn to play?”
“It’s an exciting project, it’s an enormous project. We’re trying to get the voice of the country from coast to coast. It’s something that obviously matters a lot to me and something I’m really excited about.”
Apps grew up playing in an all-girls program in Markham-Stouffville, and she recognizes she was one of the lucky ones. She also saw the bulk of her career played without fanfare. After a collegiate career at Dartmouth, which included her first World Championship and Olympic golds, Apps went on to play in the CWHL with the Brampton Thunder.
While the stands would be packed for international tournaments, despite the fact the CWHL features the same national team stars, players, teams, and the league received almost no recognition. It’s why Apps believes visibility in media coverage, and through the PWHL are crucial to the next step for women and girls in hockey.
“Visibility and celebration is a really important thing,” Apps said. “The PWHL for example, for people to be able to watch those games, we’ve been fighting for so long in women’s hockey to be able to just have people in the rinks. I can’t tell you how many times when I was playing in, long ago, the CWHL and we had probably combined between the two teams 20 Olympians on the ice and we were at a rink in Brampton and no one was there except our parents.”
“It’s funny to think it because we were like ‘wow, I’m sure people would love to see this’, and then we’d play at the Air Canada Centre and it would be sold out. It’s juts the visibility and the ability for people to come watch and watch on TV and young girls to watch and young boys to watch.”
Ice time is another recognized gap as organizations have historically allocated ice to boys programs, men’s recreational leagues, and all other user groups before women and gils. Apps also recognizes that a barrier to participation and retention in Ontario will be different than the barriers in Prince Edward Island, or Northern Canada.
That’s why the next step in Hockey Canada’s process, in collaboration with IMI International, is to conduct surveys and interviews with all stakeholders, from parents to players, coaches and staff, and those who have left the game altogether to “try to figure out how we can really come up with strategies that can help people have a better experience and help people stay in hockey,” as Apps says.
The data collection phase, as Apps stated, is important “to have a pulse on underrepresented communities, new Canadians, the BIPOC community, people that have played hockey but then have since quit, understanding ‘why did you leave the game?’ and ‘can we get you back?'”
When they’ve collected the data, Apps and her steering committee, which also includes Jayna Hefford, Angela James, Mary-Kay Messier, Therese Brisson, Kim St. Pierre, Katherine Henderson, Marion Jacko, Allison Sandmeyer-Graves, Pierre Arsenault, Cassie Campbell-Pascall, Debra Gassewitz, Rob Knesaurek, Anne Merklinger, and Brad Morris, will look at developing and applying strategies in partnership with Hockey Canada to enact change.
“We’ll have some time where we’re just in pure data collection mode and then coming together and figuring out what are the insights from that, and really after that it’s the idea of how do we think through these difficult problems and come up with strategies and then put them into place,” Apps Said. How can Hockey Canada put them into place across the country so that we address these barriers…and make people’s experience better.”
In the end, it’s about removing barriers, and creating a better experience that promotes inclusion and lifelong participation in all communities in Canada, that has Apps and Hockey Canada optimistic.
“I hope that it makes peoples love for the game stronger and their experience better. There are always going to be things that are hard…but I think that overall if we can really make women’s and girls hockey across the country for everyone, something that it is more enjoyable than it is today, that is more accessible than it is today, that gives women and girls the opportunity that if you want to be an elite hockey player it’s up to you, that you are given all the resources that you need and you can choose whether you do that or not,” said Apps.
“It’s the idea of making this better, it’s a really hard problem to solve, and some of these barriers in order to fix, it doesn’t hap