Renee Hess and hockey were never supposed to meet. But when they did, Renee’s nascent fandom inspired game changing community action, as the Black Girl Hockey Club was born.
Renee Hess and hockey were never supposed to meet. But when they did, Renee’s nascent fandom inspired game changing community action, as the Black Girl Hockey Club was born.
SHOW NOTES
Presented by Leafs Forever, Barrier Breakers is a mini-series about race, hockey and the way forward.
The show aims to celebrate Black players and fans who’ve broken barriers and helped change our game for the better.
Today’s episode tells the story of Renee Hess, the founder of Black Girl Hockey Club. It charts her journey from hockey oblivious to hockey obsessed, and then charts the creation of the BGHC. After starting out as a social group on Twitter, the BGHC has become one of the most important voices in hockey advocacy. It hosts community events. It helps cover playing costs for young Black women. And it aims to fight racism and welcome new communities into the hockey world.
In 2020, Black Girl Hockey Club launched its ‘Get Uncomfortable’ campaign, along with its anti-racism pledge. The document lays out a clear and collective direction for the sport on issues of racism, equity and inclusion.
The Toronto Maple Leafs have joined other NHL teams in signing the pledge. And we call on all of Leafs Nation to do the same. To learn more and add your name, visit Black Girl Hockey Club's website.
And to see the video Scott refers to in the episode of 11 year-old BGHC scholarship winner Canari Yonas, visit here.
This is the first episode of Barrier Breakers. Future episodes will come out every week for the next six weeks. Subscribe to Leafs Forever and please write us a review.
Producer: Katie Jensen, Vocal Fry Studios
Writer: Scott Willats & Paul Matthews
Director of Production: Shawna Morrison
Executive Producer: Michael Gelfand
Associate Producers: Renita Bangert, Emily Latimer, Erika Dreher, Savanna Hamilton
Special Thanks: Akil Augustine, Michael Bartlett, Toni Francis, Jordan Hayles, Justin Bobb
[SFX: Sounds of the inside of a hockey arena. A game is going on…. We hear food vendors and PA announcer chatter, as the sounds of puck meeting boards and stick meeting ice resound in the background. ]
Renee Hess: I'm sure if you are a person of colour, you've gone to a hockey game and you play this “Count the black folks or count the people that look like me,” and come up with like half a dozen that aren't working at the arena, right?
And so I was curious.
I took to social media, started reaching out, you know, looking for fans of colour...
… and most of the answers I got back were similar to ‘Black folks don't play hockey. Black folks don't like hockey. They don't watch hockey. They don't go to hockey games.’ And I'm like, “Well, I do. And I like it.” And there's got to be more out there, and there are. There are so many. But one thing that I noticed was we all kind of feel like we're unicorns, you know, like we're the only ones.
Scott Willats: That’s the voice of Renee Hess, the founder of Black Girl Hockey Club. And that experience she’s describing – both in the arena and then talking to people afterwards – is man, it’s super relatable for anyone of colour who happens to enjoy spending their time in rinks.
I am, of course, the in-arena host for the Toronto Maple Leafs. I’m with Renee. I love the game. Maybe even a little bit too much. But, like Renee, I’ve spent moments in my life looking around arenas and thinking “Hm, why?”
I mean, since I was a kid I’ve heard that same thing told: ‘Black Folks don’t like hockey.
They don’t watch hockey.
They don’t play it’.
It’s kind of a chicken or egg scenario. Does the lack of diversity in the stands or on the ice at most hockey games create the assumption that this game is a white game? Or … vice versa? In truth, it’s a vicious cycle. And one that we need to break.
This is the understatement of the year to say that our sport has been faced with some tough questions over the past 10 months. And it’s not just because COVID-19 has shuttered youth hockey programs and forced the NHL to play in empty arenas. No, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and way, way too many others have pushed issues of racial injustice and social inequity into sharp focus.
And the larger cultural conversations have - inevitably - spilled into hockey. After major allegations of racism in hockey at both grassroots and pro levels and the formation of the Hockey Diversity Alliance in the NHL, we are finally starting to talk about access to the game, representation, and how our most hallowed spaces are sometimes perceived by marginalized groups.
Hockey, the game we love, sometimes feels like a game everyone can love. And it’s time to do something about it.
On Barrier Breakers, we’re celebrating people of colour who have helped change the game - who’ve broken barriers, changed perceptions and pushed the needle. Today, we wanted to acknowledge the contribution of somebody who doesn’t even know how to skate. Well, not yet.
Since forming Black Girl Hockey Club a mere two years ago, Renee has had a larger impact on the game than almost anyone else I can think of.
After starting out as a social group on Twitter, the BGHC has become one of the most important voices in hockey advocacy. It hosts community events. It helps cover playing costs for young Black women. It aims to fight racism and it brings a welcoming community into the hockey world. I mean, it’s a big deal.
This month the Leafs became another NHL team to sign the BGHC’s ‘Get Uncomfortable Pledge.’ It’s a document that has laid out a clear and collective direction for the sport on issues of racism, equity and inclusion. Renee and her group are literally changing the game. And the coolest thing is that she’s doing it all from the stands (or, you know, I guess in this new COVID reality... her couch). She is proof that fans have just as much ownership of hockey as the players, coaches and management do.
One of the coolest things about BGHC is that, in a lot of ways, its founder and the sport of hockey, they weren’t supposed to meet. Renee is a mixed race woman from Southern California - not exactly what you’d call traditional Hockey Country.
She has an MA in English Literature. And she’s a professor at La Sierra University. She publishes poetry. And before 2017, she would never have described herself as ‘a sports person.’ And yet, not too long ago, Renee found herself at a Las Vegas tattoo parlour, getting her love for the game inked down her arm.
[SFX: Sound of the buzz of a tattoo machine]
Here I am thinking I’m the only mixed-race fan with a hockey tattoo. Turns out I was completely wrong.
Renee Hess: I have a couple hockey girlfriends and we take hockey vacations. We call them our hockey holidays. And one of these weekends we were in Las Vegas going to see the Penguins play the Knights. And we had another one of our girlfriends who couldn't make the trip, but she had drawn some really beautiful artwork that we had been eyeing for a really long time.
And we asked her if we could use it for a tattoo. It's actually a hockey stick with flowers wrapped around it. They look like begonias and there's no color, so it's just the green ink and skin. And we all three got it. So we have original hockey artwork made by one of our friends somewhere on our body. Mine's on my arm, because I want to be able to see it whenever I can. And my other girls, they got theirs in various spots.
And every time now we say, ‘OK, so when are we going to add to this tattoo?’ Next time we get together, we're going to add to this tattoo. We'll see when that happens, sometime hopefully in the future.
Scott Willats: Okay but, how do you go from what Renee describes as “100 percent Hockey Oblivious” to running this kind of campaign? Well, in her case, it was all just chance.
She’s on the east coast for work. One night, she runs into some hockey fans on the street. They are fired up. They’re on the way back from a game.
[SFX: Sound of bustling street noise]
And there was something about their passion that just lit a spark in Renee.
As soon as she got home, she jumped on the computer.
[SFX: Sound of a computer powering up]
Looked, searched, and found the hockey bug.
Renee Hess: You know, it's interesting because hockey doesn't have a lot of entry points for people of colour, right? You know, for the majority of us, our communities are not engaged in the sport. It's something that we are aware of as kind of like a culture.
And so when I discovered hockey, it was really outside of my comfort zone. There was nobody in my family or my friend group that was a hockey fan. And what I did was I reached out on social media and I started looking for hockey fans. And when I found out that one of my friends who, we have a mutual pop culture love, she was a hockey fan. I asked her, you know, I'm kind of interested in this sport. Can you kind of tell me a little bit more about it? And she did.
[SFX: Sound of reading, flipping pages, clicking around online]
And she kind of gave me a starter pack of things I should be looking for, teams I should follow where I could find information and I started listening to games. I'm a reader, I'm a writer, and so words mean a lot to me. And I would listen to these amazing games with the colour commentary by people like Daryl Reaugh, the Razor Reaugh, who does it for Dallas, the Dallas Stars. Or, you know, I would listen to the Penguins commentators and smile like a butcher's dog.
[SFX: Commentary playback, the crowd cheering, arena game sounds]
And it's just so much fun listening to some of these color commentary that I, I got kind of enamored with the sound of it. And I started watching games on TV, but nothing compares to going to a live game. And once I went to a live game, I went with my husband and his brother and we went to go see the Dallas Stars. We went to go watch them lose in Anaheim, which is the closest arena to where I am in Southern California, down in the States. And I was hooked. I had so much fun. I went back that weekend and saw a second game with my friends. And ever since then, I was hooked and I was addicted. It's so much fun to watch. It's such an exciting and fast, athletic sport. And I never really came from a background of just enjoying sports to begin with.
And I was a little surprised at my quick love of the game.
And as soon as I kind of settled into this fandom, I started looking around for other black fans. And I didn't find any. I thought I was the only one for such a long time.
You look out on the ice, you look out in the stands when you're at a game and you don't see faces that look like yourself, you know?
Scott Willats: That experience - of looking around an arena and not seeing faces that look like you. It’s tough to articulate just how surreal and isolating that experience can be. To love a thing, but question whether you’re really meant to. Whether it’s really for you.
I mean it’s North America, sports is our heritage. And speaking as a Canadian, hockey is our game. Am I right, or am I right? Sad thing is, sometimes though, the sense of isolation and alienation leads a lot of young Black hockey players to leave the sport.
But getting back to Renee. Instead of giving up; accepting that she’s the lone Black woman in the world who loves hockey, Renee refuses instead of listening to that little voice in her head that wonders, ‘Do I belong here?’ She debates it. No, no, no. She can’t be alone. There’s gotta be others like her. And that’s when Renee jumps back on the computer, and starts digging.
Renee Hess: In all honesty, I did come from the perspective of an academic, because I was like, I could write a book about this, you know, that where I initially came at it from I wanted to write about the black hockey experience. And as I started doing research, I was reading books about Herb Carnegie, and about the Nova Scotia Black Hockey League, and the Maritime League. And as I started doing this reading, I wanted to get some lived experiences.
So I was talking to women who were parents of hockey players and fans of hockey. And I realized that I needed to kind of step out of my academic bubble and get into my community service bubble, which is my other job at La Sierra University, is that I'm the assistant director of service learning. Well, my job is to connect with the community and to make a community space for our students out in the real world.
And so it kind of felt like a perfect opportunity of me being able to combine my passion, my love of hockey and my love of research and writing with my skill of community building. Once those things all kind of came together, I realized that I needed to put the writing on hold for a minute and live in this experience. It's so funny because I have my writer friends and they'll hit me up and they'll be like, ‘Oh, how's the book coming?’ I'm like, ‘Well, I'm kind of still living in the book right now.’
Scott Willats: The more Renee talked to other black fans, in particular Black women, the more she found a common experience and a shared desire to connect.
Renee Hess: One thing that I noticed was we all kind of feel like we're unicorns, you know, like we're the only ones. And so, you know, the need for community and kind of building a place where we could all get together and get to know one another. It was really important to me that that be a place because it was something that I know, when I came into hockey, that I needed, that I wanted.
And so my development of Black Girl Hockey Club really just came out of this desire to not only have a community space for myself, but have something in place so that when new fans can come into the game, and they're of colour, they're marginalized, they feel that there's not a space for them in this very white sport. Black Girl Hockey Club could be that space for them.
Scott Willats: So, she decided to schedule a meet-up. A chance to bring that community into the arena.
Renee Hess: We did it in Washington, D.C. at the end of 2018, and we were at a Capitals game because at the time, they had two Black players Devante Smith-Pelly and Madison Bowey, right? And they have two Black minority owners, Sheila Johnson and Earl Stafford… And so we thought let's do DC. They just won the cup. And the East Coast seems to have more fans of colour, anyways than the West Coast, at least from what I've seen, and so we decided we were going to do a game in D.C.
And we get there. We had a wonderful weekend. We got to go to the Smithsonian African-American History Museum, which was awesome. We got to hang out before the game. And then after the game, we went down to one of the locker rooms. It wasn't the Capitals locker room. It was actually the Mystic's locker room that was empty. And we got to sit down there.
We were waiting to meet some of these players. The two Black players were going to come down and Braden Holtby came down and Nic Dowd and a couple others. And we were sitting there waiting, and I'm watching these little Black boys who are with their Black moms playing ball hockey on their knees, on the floor, in the locker room and just laughing and enjoying each other's company.
I’m seeing these Black women who live in the same state introduce themselves to each other saying, “I don't know that you existed. You know, we played just a few miles from where your son plays,” and I'm watching this unfold. And as I'm sitting there, I keep getting these women who are--some of them older than me--coming up to me saying, “Thank you so much for putting this together. This means so much to me.” And it kind of hit me this needed to continue.
Scott Willats: From that first meeting in 2018 to today, the Black Girl Hockey Club has grown and grown and grown some more. Creating a wider network, more meaningful connections and friendships, finding their potent voice along the way.
Throughout that time, Renee says the response from the larger hockey world has been mostly positive. Still, there are those who suggest the group’s existence itself is somehow racist.
Renee Hess: And of course, there are people out there who say stuff like, ‘Well, why is there a Black girl hockey club? That's racist. It should be all girls or all people's hockey club.’ Very reminiscent of an all lives matter take. And, ‘What would you do if there was a white girls hockey club?’ And, you know, I just tell them, ‘Well, that's the USA national team...The whole sport is that. In the Black girl hockey club, you don't have to be Black. You don't have to be a girl to be part of our community. You just have to be cool with us. You just have to have our backs. And that's the only requirement. It's a safe space for all marginalized identities.’ And that seems to rub people the wrong way sometimes. But that's their problem.
Scott Willats: For Renee, the biggest struggle is about staying positive, and keeping her membership -- the friends she’s made in the game -- positive; believing that all the love they put into the game will be reciprocated.
Renee Hess: Probably the biggest challenge is that it sometimes feels like you love hockey and hockey doesn't love you back. And so we've developed this amazing community... and then incidents of really blatant racism happen within hockey culture. You know, K’Andre Miller gets called the N-word in a New York Rangers video meet and greet at the beginning of our lockdown. Devante Smith-Pelly, when he's playing, gets told to go back to basketball. Things like that happen all the time. And we hear about them all the time.
And so the biggest challenge is reminding these young Black women that this is a space for us, even when the rest of the hockey culture maybe isn’t and that we shouldn't give up our love of something so amazing as ice hockey because there are haters, and racists, and misogynists out there who would really like to see us go and get back to the status quo. And so that's probably the hardest thing, is seeing young Black women feeling very distraught, and put out, and feel like outsiders because they're constantly othered in the sport of ice hockey.
And I think that there's potential for a culture shift in hockey, but it's continuous work, you know, and some people don't want to put in the work, but it is, it’s a continuous thing... Anti-racism isn't just like a check box. And we're like, ‘OK, we're cool now. We've eliminated racism in hockey.’ That's not going to happen. It's going to be constant education… you know, two steps forward and a step back. That's just how anti-racism work is.
Scott Willats: For all the moments that have given Renee and BGHC discouragement, their commitment to pushing the game has never wavered. In fact, it’s just grown.
This year, the BGHC launched a series of scholarships for young Black girls in hockey. Awarding $1000 each to four girls across North America -- two in Canada and two in the States -- to help overcome the financial barriers that often keep people from sticking with the sport.
So I came across this video on Sarah Nurse’s page, and trust me, if you’re feeling a little down today, you need to check it out. It’s about this girl, 11-year-old, Canari, we’ll put the link in our show notes. This girl was nominated by her coach and mentor, Janelle Forcand. And trust me, when you see Canari’s smile and her love for the game, you’ll understand that she is a red-blooded Canadian who lives for hockey.
Canari Yonas: “I was in shock, and I was really happy that she nominated me. I want to keep playing hockey for a long time. Until I get older, a lot older.”
Scott Willats: In addition to the Scholarship program, the Black Girl Hockey Club has also mounted its ‘Get Uncomfortable’ campaign, a pledge to disrupt racism on and off the ice and make hockey more meaningful to everybody. Everyone from Ron Maclean, to grassroots hockey folks, to NHL clubs like the Seattle Kraken, the LA Kings, and the Washington Capitals have taken in. And as we noted off the top of the show, we are extremely proud to announce that this month, the Maple Leafs have, too.
Renee Hess: The get uncomfortable campaign is all about having those uncomfortable conversations and addressing the elephant in the room and taking notice of things that maybe ten, twenty years ago, would have been swept under the rug and ignored.
Plus, a whole population of hockey fandom feeling ignored as well. And so the get uncomfortable campaign is an advocacy campaign that really has three initial pillars: To encourage, employ and to educate. And encourage can be anything from having a virtual hangout like we do, to offering scholarships to young Black girls who are in need. And so there's a whole level of things that one can do to encourage the hockey community to make a welcoming space for Black girls.
The second one is to employ, and If you've ever heard me say anything, you've probably heard me say that we need to hire more black women in all levels of hockey. And so we really want to encourage that hockey recruit BIPOC applicants and begin diversifying at all levels. So not just on the ice and behind the bench, but in the front offices and in the C suites.
And then education, of course, coming as an educator, that's a huge part of what's important to me. And I think it's necessary for us to educate the hockey community on social justice and allyship. And it's good to see the National Hockey League and other organizations taking this to heart.
I do think that it's important that this guidance come from BIPOC leaders, that the anti-racism experts, advocates, players and fans are from the communities that we are trying to encourage and connect with. You know, time is of the essence, because, again, this isn't just a one time deal. This is a long term commitment. And a slogan like ‘Hockey is for Everyone,’ is great, but we need to see the actions backing up the words. And I do think that there are there have been steps taken and there will be continue to be steps taken towards an anti-racist culture in hockey, but everybody needs to buy in. And if they don’t, then maybe they shouldn’t be there.
Scott Willats: Renee and her organization have really pushed the game of hockey to not only make space for marginalized communities, but to take a look at how it’s been shutting doors since the beginning.
In addition to the work Renee is doing, what we here at Leafs Forever really love about her story is that it all stemmed from a genuine and undeniable love of the game, just like we all have. Everything she and BGHC have done has been motivated by a need to stake a claim. To say ‘We love hockey,’ no matter what anyone says, ‘and we deserve to have a space and a voice in this community.’
I mean, I’m so glad that her passion has produced such positive change in the sport, in such a short time. I cannot wait to see more teams and organizations in hockey sign on to the BGHC pledge.
And who knows? Maybe one day Renee will go back and write that book. Based on our chat, we think it’d be a good one.
This has been episode 1 of Barrier Breakers, our look at the Black players and fans - male and female - who have helped change our game and push it forward. The hope is these stories will inspire you, while helping us all think more deeply about where the game of hockey needs to go in the future. We’re very excited about this mini-series, and hope you’ll join us for the full journey.
If you haven’t yet, go to blackgirlhockeyclub.org and take the Get Uncomfortable Pledge. Let’s all disrupt the status quo in hockey and ensure our sport is truly for everyone.
A very big thank you to Renee for taking the time with us. Give her a follow on Twitter. And follow the BGHC – they’re always tracking the most interesting folks in the conversation around race and, well, just hockey in general.
‘Barrier Breakers’ was co-created by us here at Leafs Forever and Akil Augustine. Today's episode was written by myself and Paul Matthews, produced by Katie Jensen and Vocal Fry Studios for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment.
Further thanks to Associate Producers Jay Cockburn, Renita Bangert, Emily Latimer, Erika Dreher and Savanna Hamilton. Barrier Breakers is a weekly series, so make sure you catch us next week. If you liked this one, tell people about it. And write us a review. Your feedback is always welcome. Especially on this series. Help us think about this issue in new and interesting ways, and if you have story suggestions for the types of things we should be talking about, let us know.
I am Scott Willats. And until next time, Go Leafs Go.