Program for young hockey players aims to change the culture of the sport

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Ahead of a Monday night practice this winter, the 13-year-old hockey players gathered at a rink in Waterloo, Ont., their attention not on the ice but on a rudimentary YouTube video of two stick figures, one offering a cup of tea, the other declining it.

“If they say ‘no thank you,’ then don’t make them tea,” the narrator said. “Don’t make them drink tea, don’t get annoyed at them for not wanting tea. They just don’t want tea.”

The tea is a metaphor for sex, the video a basic crash course on consent: what it is, what it isn’t, how people can change their mind about having tea, how no one is owed tea time every day – and why unconscious people definitely don’t want tea.

The video is part of a pilot program being tested this winter with 13-year-old athletes on three minor hockey teams in Ontario. Over three 90-minute sessions, the Waterloo Wolves U14 BB team delve into personal relationships; masculinity and individuality; what being a leader and an ally means. And consent – in the guise of tea.

“I was blown away because there were all of my players, dead focused on the screen watching this video,” the team’s coach, Craig Campbell, said. “They still talk about it.”

He urged others who work with adolescent hockey players to bring in this education: “We want our young athletes to become better people by the time we’re finished with them, and this is one of those steps.”

As Hockey Canada faces fallout over its deep mishandling of allegations of sexual violence, and with five members of Canada’s 2018 world junior team charged with sexual assault in London, Ont., a wider community is confronting the moment.

With the spotlight turned up on the sport, more athletes, coaches and families are contending with the troubling tendencies of hockey culture: an exalting of domination and aggression; misogynistic locker-room talk where the degradation of women becomes a bonding tool; and a code of silence in the sport.

In reaching younger players rinkside, as educators did in Waterloo, more hockey mentors hope to use the game to change the culture.

The fundamentals – from damaging ideas about masculinity to healthy relationships – need to be established as early as possible in athletes’ lives, according to violence prevention experts. It’s a dialogue that requires time, nuance and continuing financial investment, they say, especially with adolescent hockey players, who have questions and fears but can feel it’s weak to ask for guidance.

“There’s a certain openness to learning about this stuff while they’re still learning about the world. As they get older, they can get a little more entrenched,” said Jacob Pries, a project facilitator with the Sexual Assault Support Centre of Waterloo Region who helped lead the workshops with Mr. Campbell’s team.

He added it’s critical to have these conversations often, in person, alongside teammates and coaches the boys look up to.

Mr. Campbell saw his 17 players plug into conversations that, for him, felt close-knit and non-judgmental. The lessons were delivered in language 13-year-olds can understand, including an anecdote about friends getting consensus while ordering a pizza, another metaphor for consent.

“It was really good for the boys. They didn’t have to worry about feeling uncomfortable, having mom or dad there. They could have some very open discussion in a controlled environment and really learn,” said Mr. Campbell, who is executive director of Rangers Reach, a non-profit community fund that paid for the sessions.

Hockey Canada has made its own consent education compulsory for national team athletes 15 and older across its men’s, women’s and para programs, as well as for coaches and support staff across its programs. The training was set in motion in mid-2022, after revelations that the organization misused significant sums of players’ registration fees to quietly settle cases of alleged sexual assault.

Approximately 650 athletes at the national team level have run through the training, 450 of them men, according to Hockey Canada. The one-time, two-hour sessions touch on healthy relationships, consent, the cratering effect of sexual violence, and bystander intervention – how to recognize and interrupt harm.

“Most of the guys – not all of them – want to be there. They are hungry to learn,” said Mr. Pries, who co-facilitated 20 out of 23 virtual sessions his organization delivered for Hockey Canada, most of them with male athletes 15 and older.

He saw numerous myths that needed dismantling with the teenagers in this group.

At the start of two Hockey Canada training sessions held last July, Mr. Pries informally surveyed male hockey players 15 to 17 years old. He listed 10 issues and asked the boys to indicate which were important to them. More than 84 per cent responded it was important to “protect yourself from being accused of sexual assault”; 90 per cent replied it was important to protect their “reputation and career.” Mr. Pries said he’d heard this fear of false accusations echoed in informal conversations with male athletes in both the Ontario Hockey League and at Hockey Canada.

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That stood out for the educator: The young hockey players seemed fixated on this misguided notion of women falsely accusing them of sexual assault and derailing their athletic careers. He wanted them to think about consent instead.

“That was the light bulb moment for me,” Mr. Pries said. “We needed to make sure that the players had a really, really solid understanding of consent.”

The groups discussed what consent means and what it involves, the role of intoxication, and how to check in with a sexual partner. Just 64 per cent of the boys Mr. Pries surveyed said it was important to ensure anyone having sex is enjoying themselves.

“You’re trying to give them examples of ways they can talk about consent that aren’t robotic and don’t kill the mood,” he said.

Talk turned to pornography and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. Mr. Pries reiterated what sexual health educators have been sounding the alarm on for years: teenage boys treating hard-core porn like instructional sex ed. “It’s stuff where choking people is normal, and there’s no conversations beforehand,” Mr. Pries said. “Guys aren’t seeing examples of consent happening in their lives.”

Many of the athletes were well aware of sexual assault cases involving hockey players, he said. Again, fears about false accusations bubbled up. Mr. Pries used the opportunity to discuss the disproportionately high bar for convictions in such cases, explaining that when defendants are found not guilty, this does not mean complainants made up their accounts.

“Maybe for the first time for a lot of them, it was understanding the seriousness of sexual assault.”

The educator saw some hopeful signs: Of the boys he surveyed, 86 per cent said having healthy relationships was important to them. “A lot of them know, deep down, that the way relationships are shown to them isn’t always healthy.”

Many of these concepts are new for teenage athletes, according to Danielle Aubry, chief executive officer at Calgary Communities Against Sexual Abuse, whose staff delivered the most recent sessions for Hockey Canada.

“A lot of it is, what is sexual violence? Some of them don’t know that. We have no consistency across Canada with sexual violence education in our schools,” Ms. Aubry said. “When we talk to them about relationships and how you treat people, we try to get at the level of, these are human beings.”

With hockey teams scattered across the country, the training has been mostly virtual. Building rapport with teenage hockey players through their screens over a single session has proved challenging.

“They’re very quiet,” Ms. Aubry said.

During a workshop last December, boys and their coaches all appeared virtually, from their individual screens. This was not an ideal scenario, Ms. Aubry said, with some coaches less involved in the conversation than others.

“The coaches, if they’re going to be there, they need to take the leadership by speaking, encouraging and participating, because that’s who the athletes are looking at.”

When young athletes do find the mettle to speak up, she finds them thoughtful. She remembers one boy talking about growing up with a single mother and four sisters.

“He could see the other side of it,” Ms. Aubry recalled. “It was personal for him: ‘I’ve got five women in my life that could be vulnerable to this.’”

The training has been a work in progress. “Which isn’t surprising,” she said, “given this kind of education within the world of sports is still very new.”

Approximately 400 national team staff members have completed their own sessions, which focus on understanding rape myths, rape culture and trauma, as well as responding to sexual violence, including disclosures.

Mr. Pries found many Hockey Canada staff members receptive, especially women. But he also heard from other staffers who felt these conversations belong squarely with parents − not with them. The educator countered that most parents aren’t equipped to delve into consent with adolescent sons prone to defensiveness: “It’s not an easy thing to do.”

Some experts see other hurdles to progress with hockey parents, particularly mothers and fathers who still encourage aggression in the sport. Violence on the ice, playing through injuries, “manning up” – these are signals boys bring to other corners of their lives, including their relationships, according to Jake Stika, executive director at Next Gen Men, an organization focused on the future of masculinity.

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“The parents are a huge issue – and in saying that, parents are also the solution,” Mr. Stika said from Vancouver.

“One of the turning points in this was when parents found out that part of their registration fees was funding a slush fund – that was the outrage that tipped Hockey Canada. If parents give these registration fees with the expectation of ice time, skills development – and that you’re helping co-parent their child for whatever time they have together and that we’re going to raise good children out of this – that changes things. Parents need to be brought along.”

Equally crucial is the role of coaches. Those who had a hard time coming up in hockey and got into coaching partly to spare other boys from similar struggles see real value in this training, Mr. Stika said. But he also hears coaches from the old guard complain this education is “making kids soft.”

“So you’re doing this work, you’re feeding these young people – and then you plug them into a locker room with an old-school coach who grew up in a misogynist, sexist world,” Mr. Stika said. “The work you did with the youth is all for naught if the container they’re plugged into hasn’t changed.”

In much of the training with young hockey players, Mr. Stika sees a blind spot: masculinity’s pull in all this.

When Hockey Canada opted for a basic, introductory training model compressed into two hours, the time constraint meant much of the focus swung to consent and bystander intervention, with less attention paid to masculinity, according to educators who are delivering the material.

Mr. Stika feels that’s a problem. He put it in hockey terms: Promoting healthy, consensual relationships without talking about masculinity is like expecting players to score goals before teaching them how to skate. “You need these foundational concepts.”

He urged more nuanced conversation on what it means to be a man, as well as young athletes’ fears about the consequences of speaking up when they witness harm, including that they’ll lose membership in their peer group.

Embedding this type of education within boys’ hockey schedules and holding sessions right at the rink is critical, said Melanie Widmeyer, whose son plays on the Waterloo Wolves U14 BB team and recently completed the pilot program.

“It’s outside of the classroom and it’s outside of the home. It’s not like any other environment. The conversations they have there are completely different.”

She appreciated the open atmosphere that allowed the 13-year-olds to discuss burning questions about navigating early relationships. A sampling: If you ask a girl on a date and she says no, do you ask her again? Do you deserve to know where your girlfriend is at all times?

“There was no, ‘I can’t believe you asked that question,’ or, ‘You should know,’ or, ‘Here’s the right answer,’ ” Ms. Widmeyer said.

The mother felt the sessions shifted something in her adolescent son: “The conversations were getting him out of his own world and his own head and thinking about the perspective of the other.”

Doing this early matters, she stressed.

“This is the time to have these conversations. They’re starting to look like men but they think like boys.”

Editor’s note: A previous version of this story stated 400 Hockey Canada staff members completed sessions related to preventing sexual violence. Further information provided by Hockey Canada after publication clarified that 400 national team staff members completed the training. This version has been updated.