Podcast Transcript –
Jacob: Hi, I’m Jacob Eckert. I’m a fourth-year here at OSU, a statistics major taking this for a GE Credit.
Pranav: My name is Pranav Karanth. I’m a fourth-year mechanical engineering major.
Hayden: My name is Hayden DeMark. I’m a second-year computer science major also taking this for a GE credit.
Jacob: Okay. So this in this podcast, we’re talking about systemic injustices and hockey specifically, but sports as a whole. And I wanted to start off with my own personal life experiences growing up, playing hockey. I played for 15 years and through all my years of playing, I only two people of opposite race of that. Weren’t white growing up. So I, I played against two African-Americans everyone else. My entire life was white. Those clearly a not diverse community. And while I never ran into any racist actions, anywhere around me, it was pretty clear that there was a reason that minorities weren’t playing. And, I kind of discovered for myself that, you know, it’s probably the pay gap and where the, the rinks are located. For instance, the rank I played at was in one of the nicest neighborhoods in Cincinnati, and that’s kind of typical. A lot of cities at the rinks were just in nice places and they weren’t as accessible to minority communities. And just on top of that, the actual cost of everything was so much so.
Jacob: I noticed that and I, I researched it more for more showcases and we, we decided this would be a good topic to go even deeper on. So Pranav, if you want to talk about the economics behind it?
Pranav: I wanted to talk mainly about the economic impact of this game about someone professionally trying to pursue hockey in a career perspective. So according to my research in 2015 from a survey by Aspen Institute, it was found that about one in three parents from households making less than $50,000 a year said that sports cost too much and make it difficult for their child to continue participating. That is compared to the one in six parents from households making $50,000 a year or more who said the same. Parents with a child in hockey spent on average $2,500 per year which makes it the most expensive sport compared to other sports where the average is about $700 a year. These costs can easily skyrocket into 5 figures as you consider playing this sport even more professionally. Not to mention the travel aspect of sporting accounting for registration fees, camping fees, equipment, and housing. Such high costs make this sport less accessible to minority children and is generally the reason why sport participation rates for white children exceed that of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian kids.
Jacob: One thing to comment on this was growing up. I actually asked my parents about how much my hockey stuff cost. And for me, it was an $800 membership fee and then $200 a month, a year to be a part of the hockey club out of that. So that’s already like around $3000 just to get the highest time on the team. And then because of that, I really only played hockey. And I had friends that one year they played multiple sports. And then when they wanted to go to travel teams, it was not, it was not even a question they had to quit all their other sports because not only because of the time commitment, but it was really just like a lifestyle with hours of travel every weekend, like crossing streets, state lines, because frankly there’s not as many people playing hockey and to find the competition at that level it costs so much just to orchestrate these like tournaments with getting people from all over the country and just the travel expenses. So it really does have a big pay barrier.
Pranav: Right? Yeah. And going to the national hockey league perspective historically there have been several work stoppage incidents where like the commissioner, like locks of the players or like shorten the season unexpectedly. This also damages the players a lot as they don’t get paid and impacts the team owners and recovering their investments and their team. And when compared to various other sports like NFL NHL revenue is way lower than the other sports in the United States. As of my research, I found that the biggest deal the national hockey league was able to secure I think a couple of seasons ago was about $4 billion where NFL managed to bring in like nearly $10 billion a year, I guess if this league had greater revenues, perhaps it’s labor difficulties might be easier to solve. And the fact that Americans view this game increasingly as Canadian and does not help either thereby making it a little unpopular down in the Southern part of the country.
Jacob: Yeah. I think one more thing that the NHL is a little irresponsible with is helping create a more diverse culture. Two specific examples that come to mind are there was a player drafted by the Arizona Cardinals this past year. I’m sorry, I’m trying to find his name. It’s Mitch … Mitchell Miller. And he got, he was convicted of hate crimes for bullying and abusing a disabled black team. One of the things he did was him and his friend peed on some candy in a urinal and then forced the kids to eat it. And so obviously this, this was like, everyone’s seeing this as disgusting as they should. It is a disgusting thing and.
Hayden: Super messed up.
Jacob: Yeah. You see arguments about people. Well, when you give them, You had a chance to like, come back from this, but it’s well, you know, I get that he was a child when he did it, but there are certain things that no matter what you know, it’s not a good thing to do.
Hayden: Yeah, it damages your character
Jacob: When he was a child that just, Oh, he didn’t really understand it. He understood what he was doing. And so the hockey diversity Alliance which I’ll get to in a second, they were at, they’re asking the coyotes and the NHL, like, please don’t let this guy play. It’s a terrible look for the community. And it, and it makes plenty of players uncomfortable that a kid like this is joining the league in the association. And then another example of this is higher up bill Peters. He was accused of racist comments and actually abusive actions towards players of color. He made a couple comments to Akim Aliu. Who’s a member of that NHL diversity Alliance or the hockey diversity Alliance not NHL. And as well as Michael Jordan, not the basketball player, but put a different hockey player. And after they lodge their allegations on Twitter about the coach.
Jacob: He he was, he eventually resigned after four days, but the, the club themselves didn’t actually fire him. They left it till he resigned after a few days. And then going back to this hockey diversity Alliance Akim Aliu is one of the seven board members of this. They’ve tried multiple times working with the NHL to create a pledge that was aimed at making hockey more affordable and making the hockey community more diverse by requiring a percentage of employees to be of color and in different amounts at different levels. So it was 3.5% at the executive level to 10% at non hockey related operations and a pretty reasonable things they’re asking for, but the NHL barely cooperated all the players were pretty upset about it. And one of the players, one of the co-leaders of the hockey diversity Alliance, Matt Zoomba, he quit recently after making that after making the Alliance with those players, he had this quote in this interview and it was, there’s a conversation that white parents don’t have to have with their kids, that parents of players that players of color have.
Jacob: And that’s what I want to eliminate. And the conversation was that white parents don’t have to worry about their kids being accepted into the culture, whereas black parents do. And the entire hockey diversity Alliance, they all kind of looked at Colin Kaepernick is a leader who has been a massive leader to other sports in general. And, you know, there’s still a lot of other sports that are having these problems. So I think that this hockey diversity alliance could be a way to push forward if they’re starting to take it seriously by the NHL.
Pranav: Yeah, I know, I really hope more people come forward to bridge this gap, try to make it more accessible to everybody.
Jacob: Yeah, me too.
Hayden: Yeah. And then going into those topic of other sports, sports like golf and tennis, which I played growing up and in school, those are also kind of those more elitist white oriented sports. For example, in golf, while there are famous golfers like tiger woods, other golfers that are famous are predominantly white, such as Phil Mickelson, Arnold Palmer and Rory McIlroy and then just the cost of clubs and balls are upwards of like together $500. And that’s not even counting greens fees and to rent a golf cart in entire country. There’s only one free golf course located in Pennsylvania. And then taking into account tennis. Tennis, a lot of teams are only available through private clubs. And once again, we see that approximately 77, 77% of players are white, according to assets.usta.com. And while there are players like Venus and Serena Williams that are helping to kind of break that barrier, and those are kind of household names at this point it’s still viewed, especially like the tournaments are kind of exclusive and elite the Australian open or the US open.
Jacob: Yeah, no, I get that. One of my roommates is on the tennis team here and from meeting him and a couple of his friends, you know, they’re all white and from pretty well off families, from what I can tell, I don’t know him super well, but
Hayden:
Yeah. And then like I went to an inner-city school where half the school was white and half the school was African-American and they both had equal opportunity to be on the golf team or the tennis team. But since out in like the real world, there’s not that opportunity. The African-American kids just weren’t interested. So the teams ended up being completely white anyways.
Jacob: I think that kind of wraps up our discussion on the, the, I’m sorry, I’m blanking, wraps up the discussion on the diversity in some of these elitist sports. I think that one of the main barriers is cost whether it’s cost of equipment, cost of playing cost of travel. There’s a …. There’s a huge barrier there and accessibility, and unfortunately there are people at the higher end of these organizations that are not doing much to ensure that for it to become more diverse.
Hayden: Yeah. Or trying to just stop them from being diverse in general.