I grew up hating hockey culture, but as an adult, I fell in love with playing the game

This First Person column is the experience of Jennifer LoveGrove, who lives in Toronto. For more information about First Person stories, see the FAQ.

In high school, I dreaded the corridor that led to our cafeteria: The Jock Hall. There the lighting was dimmest and teachers were rarely nearby. Large, loud and leering teenage hockey players lined the walls that made up our gauntlet, bellowing out a rating at each girl who walked past, commenting on her bra size and vividly describing the things they'd like to do to those who had no choice but to walk past.

Girls like me.

In our small southern Ontario town of Dunnville, hockey was the religion and its players were put on a pedestal. Though I refused to let it show, I was afraid of them; I hated hockey and the bullying it represented.

Years later, on the cusp of 30 and immersed in a different life in Toronto, I was struggling. I was single, depressed and felt like I didn't fit in anywhere — not at my new art gallery job, not in the urban literary community and definitely not in my hometown. I liked living in Toronto, but I craved connection.

Unafraid to try new things, I knew I needed a change, but I was waiting for a sign. Then, a photographer acquaintance mentioned a co-ed hockey tournament he was playing in and that his band was performing afterward.

"Every team has to have an artistic contribution," he said.

He told me about the Good Times Hockey League of the Arts, a gender-inclusive community hockey league geared towards artists and like-minded people.

I was intrigued — hockey and art seemed incompatible to me. Creative folks, women, men who didn't fit the misogynistic mould — they weren't part of the hockey world I'd grown up around. It wasn't a welcoming space.

Always a little rebellious, I knew then that I needed to learn to play hockey and become part of this unorthodox league. Joining it didn't feel like a betrayal of my younger self — it felt like a reclamation.

Never mind that I'd never played a sport in my life. I bought a cheap pair of boy's hockey skates from Canadian Tire and spent the winter finding my feet, careening around Toronto's outdoor rinks. Then, I joined a co-ed Learn to Play Hockey group.

Learning to play hockey was challenging but exhilarating. While I was consistently the second-worst player on my mostly male teams, I worked hard to learn. Instructors and more experienced players alike encouraged and supported me. Each crossover that didn't see me fall down, every pass I didn't miss and each shot that was anywhere in the vicinity of the correct net felt like an achievement. Each new skill built toward the next.

Soon, I was obsessed. I was on the ice four nights a week.

When I joined The Good Times Hockey League of the Arts, I found a creative, raucous, welcoming community where I fit in. There were other writers, musicians, women, queer and non-binary folks. It was nothing like The Jock Hall.

My favourite hockey event was the annual summit, a tournament full of music, costumes, art pop-ups, charity fundraising, when teams and players are rewarded for creativity, fairness and collegiality.

The first year that my team participated, we dressed up in school uniforms and performed classic 1970s Schoolhouse Rock! songs rewritten about hockey. The educational song "Three Is a Magic Number" became about hat tricks, to the delight of our audience. We may not have won any games that weekend, but we won an award for our performance, which felt even better.

I've now played hockey on and off for about 20 years. In arenas, I made lifelong friends. Besides sharing ice time and dressing rooms, we went on trips and outings, advised each other on everything from hockey gear to job changes to romance and supported each other through life's successes and tragedies.

Was my experience of hockey perfect? No. Did I witness moments of toxic masculinity and macho culture in the gender-inclusive leagues I played in? Yes.

The difference was how they were handled. A player starting a fight would be swiftly ejected from a game. Aggressive behaviour garnered penalties and suspensions. Rarer instances of sexual harassment or inappropriate behaviour resulted in expulsion from a league.

More difficult to deal with were innocuous gendered microaggressions. Experienced male players overpraising female players, to me, felt patronizing. A team captain giving my shift near the end of a game to a stronger male player felt unfair. I knew that the decision increased our chances of winning, but it stung. Sometimes, I'd volunteer to sacrifice my shift before being asked, though I'd quietly resent my decreased ice time.

Lately, with toxic hockey culture a hot topic in the wake of the acquittal of Hockey Canada players for sexual assault, I've been struggling to reconcile the violence and misogyny so rooted in hockey with my 20 years of mostly joy, confidence and community in recreational leagues.

Hockey has a reputation for male entitlement at best and at worst, rape culture. Yet, some of my fondest memories involve the sound of my blades digging into freshly Zamboni'd ice. I'm not sure how to navigate that cognitive dissonance.

But I do think professional hockey could learn from the leagues I played in, where fairness and inclusion and community were prioritized. They could stop glorifying violence and aggression. They could adopt a zero-tolerance policy for misogyny and homophobia. Women and non-binary and trans players could be paid as much as their NHL counterparts or at least have access to more and better ice time.

Then, more of us could enjoy a game that can be exhilarating and empowering.

I've already seen many truly Canadian hockey moments that exemplify a better way to play the game. But my favourite just might be when I was a right winger, and I came up against broadcaster George Stroumboulopoulos at centre ice. I lifted his stick and stole the puck — and he fell down.

Simultaneously, we both apologized.

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