The hockey landscape for LGBTQ athletes is significantly different now than when You Can Play was founded in 2012.
Thankfully, the appetite and acceptance for the work done by the social activism campaign — whose mission statement involves working to ensure the safety and inclusion of all in sports, including LGBTQ athletes, coaches and fans — has changed as well.
“The landscape when we started this work was very much that teams and leagues wanted to do the work, they wanted to send the right message to the LGBTQ community and the general population, but they weren’t quite sure how to do it,” says Ryan Pettengill, executive director at You Can Play, which has been partners with the NHL and MLS since 2013 and the CFL since 2014. “And they were also somewhat handcuffed by the fear of offending people.”
However, the presence of experts in the field such as You Can Play has wiped away some of the hesitation, paving the way for real growth.
“The biggest difference now is that teams and leagues really no longer have that fear,” says Pettengill. “They’ve seen enough work done in the space, and especially us and the NHL, that they no longer overthink whether they are going to offend people by doing this work.”
Sportsnet caught up with Pettengill to learn more ahead of the 2019 edition of Pride Toronto.
SN: How has You Can Play developed in unison with changes to the acceptance of LGBTQ athletes in the hockey world?
Pettengill: Over past few years, we’ve transitioned to this way of thinking about transforming our sport, rather than teams and leagues thinking about their own interests and their own community. Generally, people are thinking a little bit broader on how to affect the culture of sport at all levels. The nature of our relationship with the NHL is one where we’re thinking about the best interests of the NHL and the individual teams, but also thinking creatively about impacting youth sports and youth hockey and hockey of all levels. What I appreciate most about teams in Canada and the U.S. is they are willing to think through their activities in that lens, rather than just what’s best for them.
All 30 MLB clubs participate in some sort of Pride-related activity. What’s the interest level among NHL organizations?
We partner with the NHL year-round and we have a lot of different activities. Now, obviously, it’s all about Pride. They actually just hit 100 per cent participation. Every single NHL team is marching in a Pride parade this year, which is amazing. The league has partnered with us to march in Montreal, New York and Toronto, but every single team, with the help of You Can Play, is doing something around their local march.
That means different things in different cities, obviously. Some teams really go all in. Some teams are just learning how to do it. Excitingly, we’re just starting to partner with the owners of the new team in Seattle. They’re not even up and running yet — they don’t even have their facilities finished — but they’re already talking about what they can do for the community in Seattle. It’s really great to see the NHL have a wraparound approach to all of their teams being involved.
How do you measure progress? I imagine it’s tough to gauge success with You Can Play’s work.
We can quantify a lot of different data in our programs — how many people are buying tickets to Pride games and social media action. We do a lot of work trying to evaluate the number of homophobic incidents in facilities and sporting events. The best data that we have is a study called Out on the Fields. That’s a few years of data now, but we also partnered with a number of different universities in four different countries to create the biggest research project in and around homophobia in sport. We were a partner in that and it involved over 10,000 participants, both members of the LGBTQ community and people who were not. Really, that was the most engaging research that we could have possibly done.
You do a lot of work to change the culture in locker-rooms. Can you tell me about that?
The best example is actually the CFL. We have a partnership there and we have an ambassador on every team to help with communication. Last year we went to their league offices in Toronto and did staff training. The staff at all the CFL teams dialled in to that, as well as the ambassadors. We have programming for the individual ambassadors throughout the year and the model is that you can’t get in every locker-room — it’s beyond our resources to be able to pull that off and it’s a challenge logistically with teams.
But we work through ambassadors and the idea is that the ambassador, in a way, is a police dog of the locker room culture and can take our messaging. It’s one thing for us to go out and do a workshop. It’s another thing when teammates are holding each other accountable for language choices and behavior in the locker-room when we’re not there.
We have a similar model with the NHL. We didn’t do the training that we did with the CFL, but the NHL also has the ambassador program and we help program the ambassadors on all the teams and that information flows through them to their teammates.
What still needs to be done in the area that You Can Play operates?
As far as we’ve come, we still know that participation rates in sport in the LGBTQ community for youth sport is considerably lower than the average. So we know that those who identify as LGBTQ not only are [more] likely to drop out once they play a sport, but they are less likely to start in the first place. So even though the sport has come far in terms of high level of organizations thinking more holistically about impacting the culture of their sport as a whole, we have a long way to go.
Kids are still afraid of the locker-room and they do not feel that sports venues are a safe space. The more that high-profile organizations can do work in their communities to send that message, the better. And the more work that organizations like You Can Play can do at the youth level — youth programs, high school and college — the more we’re really going to affect that culture and flip things around.
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