Making Hockey for Everyone

The racial slur seared across the ice and into an 11-year-old Matt Dumba's brain. It cut deep into his core. What made that memory worse were the tears welled up in his mom's eyes as he told her what happened.
Ryan Reaves shares a similar recollection from his time playing AAA. While he didn't personally hear it, his teammate did, and immediately reported the discriminatory incident.

Unfortunately, while hockey is filled with a lifetime of positive memories, for players of color like Dumba and Reaves, there are those painful memories as well.
"It might not happen often, but it's pretty ridiculous to think it doesn't happen at all," said Dumba of discrimination within the sport. "No kid should ever feel like they can't play this game. Those feelings, those hurtful words, they can push a kid real quick out of this game. I don't want that."
The track into diversifying hockey has been slow, but steady. Willie O'Ree became the National Hockey League's first-ever black player with the Boston Bruins in 1960. Fifty-eight years later, Jordan Greenway became the first black player named to the United States Olympic men's hockey team.

Today, roughly seven percent (approximately 54 active players) are of Arab, Asian, Black, Latino or Indigenous background while the majority of those playing -- and 83.6 percent working in the game -- remain white.
But, strides have been taken, with wholesale changes in the sport really beginning to be made in 2020 following the death of George Floyd, and the subsequent formation of the Hockey Diversity Alliance.
"That video of unnecessary brutality and racism brought it all to a head where people in all walks of life had to face it head on," Reaves, then with the Vegas Golden Knights, recalls. "And this all happened while we were playing in the (playoff) bubble, and you saw all of the other sports taking a stand: WNBA, NBA, MLB.
"As a Black person, I remember it kept me up all night thinking about what to do or how to approach this. I called Flower (Marc-Andre Fleury) actually and we talked until probably one in the morning the night before a playoff game because I couldn't sleep because I didn't know how we should take a stand."
To Reaves' relief, players in the Eastern Conference bubble had already decided to stand beside their Black teammates. Dumba infamously took a knee during the National Anthem following a speech about eradicating racism from the game.

Wracked with nerves, Dumba said it was the support of his teammates, and the strength in his belief of right and wrong that propelled him to that decision to stand up for what he believed, and to show the world that hockey was looking and willing to make a change.
"It's something that takes all of us," stated Dumba. "It's not one person, two Black people, or three BIPOC people -- it takes all of us."
As the league, and the world, continues to look for solutions to grow the game and remove systemic racism, the question of how to begin is always the toughest.
"You can't start anything without a conversation," Reaves notes. "The worst thing we can do is not talk about it. We're not going to change the world overnight, but by beginning those conversations, educating ourselves, I think that's really important."
Actions speak louder than words, and between the HDA, NHL, and the grassroots affiliates, actions have been taken to initiate and encourage more diversity in the sport we love.

"You have to start with the youth for effective change," Reaves said. "That's the most important place to start. With the kids, with the parents. Going out in the communities that are not predominately white and breaking down some of those barriers of hockey, educating them on the sport and just talking to them and breaking into that community, that's the most important part."
Furthermore, it's players like Dumba, Reaves and Greenway who quite literally show diverse players that hockey is for everyone.
"The three of us, for instance, we know what it's like to maybe feel alienated and be in a sport that has mostly white players," explains Dumba. "Young players see us, people that look like them, dress like them, and they hopefully think that they can play like us in the National Hockey League someday too.
"If anything, they know that they belong at a rink. To me, that's what I want to see."
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