Members of Matt Patterson's league hockey team rest before their next shift during a league hockey game, in Toronto, on Nov. 26.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
The things Blake Holtsbaum saw and heard in the locker room of his Calgary hockey team effectively killed his love of the game.
He was 15 and playing at the under-18 level when his inexperienced father took over coaching duties. “He took a police-yourselves kind of approach. He wasn’t in the dressing room a lot,” said Mr. Holtsbaum, now 29.
Inside the unchecked locker room, the young men frequently bragged about degrading their sexual partners in bed. “Women were purely objects,” he said. “The language was always ‘bitch’ and ‘whore’ and ‘slut.’” Teammates demeaned women they’d had sex with as “loose” and detailed how they manipulated them afterward.
For the teenage boys dominating these conversations – about a third of the team, Mr. Holtsbaum estimated – the talk served as a bonding exercise. Among the rest, nobody spoke up beyond the odd, “Ah, dude, gross, too far.”
Besides the misogyny, Mr. Holtsbaum recalled bouts of hazing and “cage rages,” vicious punching matches in the locker room. As one of the youngest players on his team, he was quiet, trying not to attract attention. “It made me completely hate coming to the rink,” said Mr. Holtsbaum, who now works with a women’s empowerment organization helping refugees displaced by conflict and persecution.
He made a point of cultivating friends and interests outside the game, including history and theatre. Ultimately, he left competitive hockey after that season when he was 15, and sensed he was lucky: “I felt it was an environment where people just get hurt.”
Blake Holtsbaum at age 15, in the fall of 2008 in Calgary.Handout
Those who run and play hockey are finally reckoning with the harmful culture Mr. Holtsbaum and others live through as young athletes. Revelations that Hockey Canada had for years paid out sexual-assault lawsuits in secret, without proper investigation, have led to a mass exodus of sponsors and supporters, angering parents whose registration fees were quietly used to fund settlements.
But even as new leadership is set to be voted on this month at Hockey Canada, some inside the sport emphasize the problem doesn’t only exist at the top: For many young players, damaging behaviours continue being reinforced at rinks and inside locker rooms – including recklessness, violence, a glorification of pain, pernicious power dynamics and narrow notions of masculinity. They are destructive ways of being that recur in some athletes’ encounters out in the world, those pushing for change argue.
People long involved in hockey who’ve been publicly critical of its abusive undertones love the game itself, but want the surrounding culture to evolve. Still, many underscore hockey’s cultural inertia isn’t simple to solve. The Globe and Mail spoke to coaches, parents and sports and masculinity researchers about why change has been slow to take root in the game, as well as their thoughts on tangible directions forward.
Many stressed the current moment shouldn’t be a punitive rejection of the sport, but a movement to help young men in hockey be better, for everyone’s sake.
In Alliston, Ont., Travis Chapman coaches young men ages 16 to 21, and sees major problems in the way hockey culture is perpetuated in the junior league.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Amid outrage that Hockey Canada failed to be transparent about allegations of sexual assault against a number of world junior players, Travis Chapman, head coach of the Alliston Hornets Jr. C team in Ontario, said he felt embarrassed.
“You think, ‘Do people think this about me? I’ve played. Do people think this way about the players I coach?’” said Mr. Chapman, who competed for two decades in the Ontario Hockey League, at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and overseas in Europe.
He believes this can be a moment of accountability for Canada’s game. “Hockey, the players, those inside it, need to stop having their backs up that people are attacking their game and accept that we can make this a better environment for everybody,” said Mr. Chapman, who also helps train his daughters, 6 and 8. “You can’t bury your head in the sand and pretend these issues don’t exist.”
In Alliston, Mr. Chapman coaches young men ages 16 to 21. He sees major problems in the way junior hockey players are pressed “to be an alpha,” a culture passed down from older to younger athletes. On top of that, they’re treated like untouchable stars.
“It’s really easy for young guys to get an inflated sense of their status and what people should do for them,” he said. “It’s the same sort of mentality that ends up where you’re out, you’re at a bar and you’re a big deal. Somebody saying ‘no’ or not being interested, that’s a foreign thing.”
The coach added, “It becomes really hard to unlearn.”
Hockey coach Travis Chapman believes that in light of the Hockey Canada controversies, this can be a moment of accountability for Canada’s game.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Over seven years, he and the team’s general manager have made several changes to establish a less aggressive, hierarchical culture.
They’ve prohibited hazing, making it clear that rookies are to be treated like everyone else – so they feel safe and don’t perpetuate hazing themselves.
“The guys we have on our team now have gone their entire junior hockey time without that power dynamic being part of our dressing room,” Mr. Chapman said. “If the players learn to treat themselves and each other with respect, they’ll hopefully treat all those around them the same way.”
In the Alliston locker room, a half-wall divides the players from the coaches’ area, allowing for more adult supervision. Parties among rookies ages 16 and 17 have also been banned. At the start of the year, coaching staff, management and players talk about their treatment of women.
“It’s a continual conversation with guys,” Mr. Chapman said. “This is something that, when you hear it, you discuss it. You deal with it again, and again, and again.”
He speaks to players about respecting the people they interact with, about the trauma of sexual violence, about actions following them later in life. They talk about consent, group sexual assault and the non-consensual sharing of sexual partners’ nude selfies. Beyond a violation of trust, “you’re engaging in child pornography if she’s under 18,” Mr. Chapman tells his players; they often seem stunned by the concept, he says. To drive the point home, the coach draws on his day job as a parole officer: “I’m dealing with people serving sentences for sex offences all the time.”
Aside from ethical guidance, Mr. Chapman said he tries to build the young men’s self-esteem. He speaks weekly to each player, their conversations often veering away from hockey to career advice, issues at home and mental health.
“This was never the circumstance when I was a player,” Mr. Chapman said. “My coach in junior was miserable and he made life very miserable when you were at the rink.”
He’d like people with experience in hockey to return as mentors – particularly those who want to help change the culture. “We have to stop thinking of junior hockey as a business. We have to start looking at these guys as young kids who are not adults,” he said. ”We’re trying to help them with the grander scheme of life here.”
He’s optimistic about his boys: “I want these players to leave a better group of kids than we probably were when we left the game. And I think they are.”
Jake Stika, executive director of Next Gen Men, an organization that educates young men about healthy masculinity.Gloria Wong/Handout
Hockey coaches in particular have the power to set a positive tone with adolescent and teenage athletes, according to Jake Stika, executive director of Next Gen Men, an organization that educates young men about healthy masculinity. Following the fallout at Hockey Canada, the group is working with coaches and administrators at regional hockey teams across the country.
Mr. Stika cautions that there still exist old guard coaches who might encourage hits, fights, playing through an injury or “‘manning up’ – that your feelings, emotions, experiences don’t matter.”
“Those are all small signals throughout your life that you absorb,” Mr. Stika said. “When you get into an intimate situation … you don’t have the emotional maturity to understand it. That’s not to excuse this. But we have to understand the path these men get on from a very young age.”
He believes the current crisis has left male hockey players feeling vilified. He feels slap-on-the-wrist policing – “This behaviour is wrong, these words are wrong, don’t do that, don’t say that” – doesn’t do enough and only leaves men feeling embittered, be it the locker room, boardroom or work site.
“When there’s sexual assault or harassment, they bring in someone and everyone’s got their arms crossed: ‘Some knucklehead did this and now we all have to listen to this.’”
And while some men’s attitudes may shift during a workshop on masculinity, consent or bystander intervention training, their behaviour often remains unchanged once they’re back in the locker room, Mr. Stika explained.
That inertia gets worse, he said, when workshops are treated like one-off exercises in damage control that even coaches don’t buy into. When it feels like this type of education is happening to men and not for their own sake, the message falls flat, Mr. Stika said. “How are we moving upstream to get them to care and think differently about what it is to be a man, have a healthy relationship and think about mental health and well-being in the settings we embed ourselves in?”
Tim Skuce, an associate professor in education at Brandon University, studies how the institution of elite-level ice hockey shapes players' understanding and performance of what it is to be and to become a boy/man.Gavin John/The Globe and Mail
Tim Skuce, an associate professor in education at Manitoba’s Brandon University who studies what boys and men learn about masculinity through hockey, saw much regret when he and his colleagues recently interviewed 21 male hockey players, ages 20 to 57.
Some former players – who participated at all levels, some up to the NHL – felt guilt recalling how they tried to live up to coaches’ expectations, including with fights that left their opponents crumpled on the ice.
“We know that these men have suffered – things have been asked of them that they’re not proud of,” Prof. Skuce said. “It comes later on in life when they think, ‘I injured people. I maimed people. My successes come at the price and sacrifice of other bodies.’”
Some players regretted not pushing back when teammates or coaches cracked jokes about hitting women and abortion. Many now have families themselves, and were beginning to question how these experiences shaped them as husbands and fathers.
At the same time, many of these former athletes didn’t criticize hockey, lambasting themselves instead. “They don’t say, ‘What’s being asked of me is unethical.’ They say, ‘I don’t have what it takes to live up to these hyper-masculine ideals,’” Prof. Skuce said.
Some hope did come, however, from three former NHL players who remembered captains carrying themselves differently – captains who apologized on the ice, or were “gentlemen,” as the players themselves put it. “It’s important to watch other men – and you respect these people – behaving in ways you wish you could,” Prof. Skuce said.
The researcher played competitive hockey himself, at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, N.S. He said he remembered feeling troubled about the culture of hockey as young as 11, pointing to a mentality of violence and domination instilled in boys early on: “‘Who should I respect? Who can I manipulate? How do I impose my will so they fear me?’ I had a former NHL player say to me that by the time he was 9, he knew how to do this,” said Prof. Skuce, adding they are modes some players bring into the rest of their lives.
Despite these concerns, Prof. Skuce’s 10-year-old son plays hockey – albeit with a questioning stand partly instilled by his father. Already, the boy doesn’t like the idea of trash talk or on-ice fights. At home, they talk about how he might speak up at the rink, and what worries him about doing so. Last year, when his son’s team rotated its captain on a weekly basis, they spoke about what it means to be a thoughtful leader.
Changing hockey culture, Prof. Skuce said, means answering a crucial question: “How will we make these ethical choices to live well within a context of a team?”
Emboldening witnesses to speak up in the face of violence and abuse is at the root of bystander intervention training, work Julie Lalonde has done for years, including with junior high-school boys who play hockey.
“The power of bystander intervention is culture shift,” Ms. Lalonde said from Ottawa.
Still, she worries that opportunities to bolster bystanders were missed in the nineties and 2000s, when hockey was under scrutiny for abusive initiation practices, which include sexual violence. “We didn’t fully address the root causes of hazing: the idea that suffering builds character, that you have to prove not just your allegiance to the team but that you’re man enough to be a part of that environment.”
Julie Lalonde's work as a women's rights educator includes bystander intervention training, which she says may embolden witnesses to speak up in the face of sexual abuse.Shelby Lisk/The Globe and Mail
There are reasons young hockey players find it difficult to challenge their teammates. A 2016 University of New Hampshire study found that while women will intervene whether they know a perpetrator or not, men often won’t call out men they know. Young athletes fear being derided, ostracized or physically hurt for speaking out, Ms. Lalonde said.
“You need to create space for young men to be honest about why they haven’t been intervening thus far. You have to ask them about their concerns and then go through each concern and come up with a strategy.”
Some players worry intervention means going chest to chest with teammates, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Ms. Lalonde trains bystanders instead to use the “five D’s” model. They can directly intervene, but they can also distract the perpetrator, delegate help to others, delay leaving to check in with a victim after the fact, or document what they witnessed.
Ms. Lalonde tries to desexualize these conversations to make them less fraught. Moments of realization come to the young men when she asks them whether they’d let their sisters or women they care about party with their teammates. If the answer is no, they get into that.
She also asks how they keep watch over buddies who get black-out drunk. All of them tell her they’d never let a teammate drive home drunk, but the line grows fuzzier when she asks them if they’d let the same drunk friend pull an inebriated girl into a room at a party; the boys worry this is overstepping. Ms. Lalonde unpacks that with the teenagers, too.
They are exchanges that allow boys to see that most people privately want to do the right thing – that they’re not alone in their urge to intervene. “How can we make it so that when someone speaks out, we recognize they’re not trying to ruin someone else’s life – they’re trying to do the right thing and take care of someone?” Ms. Lalonde said.
She wants to see hockey coaches integrate bystander training into existing programs on mentorship, confidence and team building. “When the coach takes it seriously, so do the players.”
Having played for years himself, Matt Patterson, 56, is also a trainer on his son’s AA team in Toronto. He wants to see more diversity in youth hockey.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
Hockey dad Matt Patterson believes the game needs to expand past stereotypes and welcome in a broader array of people than those who have traditionally dominated – “the boys’ club,” as he puts it. Mr. Patterson, 56, is a trainer on his son’s AA team in Toronto, having played for years himself. He’s also a registered nurse, and said the boys’ minds are blown when he tells them what he does for a living.
“I’m a good nurse and I know what I’m doing. I tell them, ‘If you’re hurt, let me know because I can probably help you,’” he said. “They’re like, ‘You’re a nurse? Okay, wow. I didn’t think guys were nurses.’ You break down those perceptions.”
Mr. Patterson currently plays on a mixed league, and believes more women should be involved at all levels of the game. He also wants to see more diversity in youth hockey, which could be helped in part by lowering costs, or creating subsidies.
He thinks it could help change the tenor of the locker room, where banter can be sexist, racist and homophobic – toxic for many different kinds of people. He’d also like to see more diversity at the top: “You need to inject a younger, more diverse group of people into an organization like Hockey Canada so you get more accountability.”
The crisis at Hockey Canada has sparked conversations with his son, a 16-year-old goalie, about calling teammates out; Mr. Patterson cautions his son that inaction enables some guys “to take the next step.” He said his son has spoken up against racist comments. “You can do this in a way where you’re not being judgmental,” Mr. Patterson told the teenage boy about intervening. “You can still be buddies. There’s always room for people to learn and grow.”
Owen Leonard-Ford, 5, practices holding his hockey stick with mom Polly Leonard and dad Ian Ford at the Glooscap Arena in Canning, Nova Scotia. Even though Ms. Leonard loves the game, she harbours some fears about her son continuing hockey into adolescence.Megan Hirons Mahon/The Globe and Mail
Polly Leonard and her husband Ian Ford made a conscious decision that she should help coach their five-year-old son’s co-ed under-5 minor league hockey team in Kentville, N.S. Ms. Leonard played competitive hockey and ringette for more than a decade since the age of 9, and the couple wanted both the boys and the girls to see her command on the ice.
“It’s important so the little boys can see women can do everything that men can do, so they can respect them as leaders and coaches involved in hockey in the same way that men are,” said Ms. Leonard, a 39-year-old social worker.
Even though Ms. Leonard loves the game, she harbours some dread about her son continuing hockey into teenage hood. “I did always think, ‘Oh, you just pull them out at 12,’” she said, pointing to fights on the ice, and in later years, postgame parties.
“Culture shift takes a long time,” she said.
For now, she and her husband are waiting to see if Hockey Nova Scotia will adopt the “two-deep” rule – two adults supervising players. “To have two people there in the locker room, you have more accountability and you have a better chance for somebody to speak up and set the right tone.”
She’s heartened by what she sees on her son’s team. “The coach we have now is super charismatic, supportive and engaging. He shows what hockey can be.”
Ms. Leonard wants to see more meaningful education – the kind fostered by White Ribbon and other organizations focused on supporting positive masculinity – that normalizes “a full spectrum of emotions so boys don’t just have to be angry.”
“The men right now are not happy,” she says. “Men are hurt. And hurting men are acting horribly to other people.”
Zosia Bielski