The Decibel - The sounds of blind hockey

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Oversized pucks clanging as they’re shot across the ice, the constant tapping of hockey sticks as players weave through oversized pylons. These are some of the sights and sounds of blind hockey.Canadian Blind Hockey began in 2009 and now has 14 programs across the country. Canada’s winter game adapted for the visually impaired is an auditory experience and so The Decibel hit the ice to find out more about it.The Globe’s sports reporter, Rachel Brady and Decibel producer Sherrill Sutherland laced up their skates and joined a youth Canadian Blind Hockey program to hear from parents, players and coaches.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

It's about three and a half times the size of a regular puck. It's made of hollow steel. Inside the puck there's eight ball bearings. The ball bearings, as the puck gets stick-handled, move around the hollow steel and act as a sound for the players to track. Luca De Montis is a hockey coach, and he's describing a specialty puck used for players who are visually impaired. So the low vision players are able to notice the puck because it's bigger than a traditional

puck and then the players with even more vision loss can hear the puck and track it around the ice. Oh wow, there's so much bigger than the regular pucks, wow. Yeah, they're so much bigger than the regular class. Wow. Yeah, they are bigger. Decibel producer Cheryl Sutherland tagged along with Globe sports reporter Rachel Brady to take in the sights and especially the sounds of blind hockey. Today, we wanted to bring you a bit of a different episode, something uplifting for the last official weekend of winter. So the Decibel is hitting the ice.

Rachel and Cheryl take us to a hockey arena in Toronto's North End to bring us another side of Canada's winter game. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. All right, I'm going to go on the ice. Let me see if I can record end. Woo-hoo! We're both at the Scotiabank Pond at Toronto's Downsview Park. It's a huge facility with four NHL-sized rinks.

On the Sunday afternoon that we're there, it's packed with teams of different ages and skill levels, all either on the ice or waiting for their ice time. Before we get on the ice, I asked Rachel about why she was drawn to telling the story of blind hockey. Yeah, I was, my eyes were open, which is an ironic thing to say, I suppose, but my eyes were really opened to a different hockey experience. What is hockey when you actually can't see hockey? We take our vision for granted, I guess, when we've played sports or watched sports and been

spectators. And in reality, there are people that are finding ways to play hockey with an adapted puck to still get the social and the friendships and the exercise and all the great things about team sports without full 100% vision. And so I found that it's a beautiful sense of community. Okay, Rachel, where are we right now? We're on the ice with the GTA Youth Blind Hockey Program, where kids are honing their skills at blind hockey,

kids who are visually impaired or blind. In recreational blind hockey, all athletes must be visually impaired. If the kids get to the competitive level, players must be classified as legally blind, which is defined as having about 10% of vision or less. Goalies are completely blind, and sometimes they even wear a blindfold. In blind hockey, it's kind of a standard that you'll always see either bright yellow jerseys, uniforms, or black because it stands out. So those are two colors that stand out so well from the ice.

So typically, you know, oftentimes traditionally in hockey, you would have one team in white and the other in white jerseys and the other team in a darker color jerseys. And that's not the case in in blind hockey. They go with yellow, bright yellow and black right now these kids are having a practice day so some of them are wearing their yellow and some are wearing their black today and they are on a team many of them called the the Toronto junior ice owls the ice owls are a traditional, a long-standing adult blind hockey program here in Toronto. And this is the junior, the junior version of that. Hi, how are you?

I'm Mike, this is Aiden. Hi Aiden, I'm Rachel and this is Cheryl. So I'm a reporter for the Globe and Mail and Cheryl's our podcast producer. Yeah, so how long have you guys been partaking in wine hockey? Four or five years I think. Since the beginning, so I think it's like five or six years, yeah. And so what's the experience like for you out here? It's a lot of fun. It's very much different from when I played minor hockey.

Because when I was playing minor hockey, you were doing drills and you were sighted. Now the drills are more, we understand that you cannot see so we're adapting. And I like that. What's your field of vision like out here, Aiden? Uh... It's decent, like I can see to the net over there, but if you would ask me to tell you the number on someone's jersey, I couldn't do that. So if I take off my glasses, something has to be an inch away from my face for me to be able to see it clearly. So it's... yeah, it's very annoying. So that's why I use my glasses so much.

And even then, some things are still blurry with my glasses on. So was this the first time, joining Blind Hockey, that you had played with any other kids that had a vision impairment at all? Yeah, absolutely. Had never had another teammate. Yeah, no, we didn't really, like, we knew of the school in Brantford, but didn't know that there's, like, activities and adapted sports that we can take part in, right? And this program has kind of opened us up to a bunch of stuff, right?

And they do, like during the summer, we were at a camp where he got to play goalball, blind soccer, blind tennis, all kinds of different adapted sports. And we didn't know, because it's not advertised or anything anywhere really, right? It's hard to find out unless you know someone in that community already. It's really hard to find it. And what is it, do you find yourself relying more on your ears now that you have the puck? What's the experience of working with that really noisy puck? Well I definitely personally I rely on my ears a lot more but it's a little hard when you're trying to rely on your ears and then you hear this puck being so loud which is a good thing but also a bad thing if you're

trying to hear someone tapping their stick and then the puck is rattling over if you hear the whistle for the pass so it's a lighter noise at once. You get used to it honestly. For myself, like trying to volunteer and coach is again learning how to adapt like coaching skills like you can't stand there and be like oh yeah you see him up at the blue line skating that's what I want you to do right? It's just not that simple out here right um but it's good like he had mentioned too the tapping of the stick it's amazing how these kids can like follow you anywhere on the ice just with that tap right they they adapt well better than us we'll be right back. So we're going to start from this corner. And before we start the drill, we're going to go

skate through it as a group because we got these neat pylons. That's Luca De Montis again. He was the one who demoed that very noisy puck earlier. Now, he's on to the pylons. So we're going to use them here now at this program. They're a little bit bigger. I think they come almost to my waist, to be honest. Luca is really involved in the sport, and he has a personal connection to it.

His brother Mark was a star player in the Greater Toronto Hockey League and just a year shy of a potential NCAA hockey scholarship. Then at 17, Mark lost his vision. In 2009, Mark founded a program that eventually became Canadian Blind Hockey. He now plays on the national team, and Luca is the manager of the national team and its youth programs. The sport now has some 250 players and 14 programs across the country.

More than a thousand kids have tried it. Today, about half a dozen kids are practicing on the ice, ranging from the age of 6 to 22. Today we have a pretty good group, so we'll probably do some full ice drill. We've got some big pylons, we've got some stick handling objects. Make them start in one corner, go through the pylons, come all the way down here, and get a shot on the net that's going to have some targets. And when you hit them, it makes a noise. So that's how they know they hit the target.

So what are some of the basics of teaching a player and coaching a player about their whereabouts on the ice and where to find the puck and that sort of thing. So because every player has a different visual impairment and no two players have the same amount of vision, it kind of makes it a little tricky, to be honest. But we really just preach communication is the biggest thing. Communicating where you are, where your teammates are, where the boards are, everything. Where the bench is, every little thing like that.

We try to make it easier for them. How do you use sound when you're teaching them about skating and coming forward and directionally? So I try not to yell loud, because it gets muffled, so we'll bring the group together closer, easier to talk to them. Right now it's free time, so it sounds hectic in here for a person to be visually impaired.

But when we are doing drills, it's typically just a person that has a puck that is moving the puck. Yeah. Right? So we're going to skate through the maze together. There's four pylons. At the end of the four pylons are the two stick gates that we have. I know it's kind of difficult to see how far it is right now, so let's just go for a little

skate in and out of the pylons and we'll be able to kind of get our feel for the school so the kids are skating through a series of oversized pylons so for those that are visually impaired it's bigger if you've ever practiced uh participated in a hockey practice you know that there's lots of pylons involved in your ass to weep through these ones are spaced out much much further than it would be in traditional hockey and they're much higher so they're they're much easier to see than a traditional small hockey pylon would be and then they're coming to two different targets that are marked by coaches who are tapping their sticks guiding the kids to these targets where they need to pass the puck underneath

the target and then a big loud clang that we're hearing at the very end is that the kids are firing those pucks into the net. Yeah there's a few kids that I guess are going to play some traditional hockey in a session after this that are watching on with curiosity and wondering why that puck is making so much noise. So I think there's some kids who are certainly getting a bit of a learning experience watching some of their peers play blind hockey out here. Okay you ready? On your mark, get set, go! 32 seconds. Good job! 32 seconds to go around the world!

Can you imagine if you would just stay in one continent? You'd be, you'd do it in 13 seconds! Exactly! What's his vision? No, no idea. Yeah. I try to like, I talk to the kids about that to a certain extent. Because I don't want to kind of bring it up too much with them. Yeah, I try to, like, I talk to the kids about that to a certain extent

because I don't want to kind of bring it up too much with them. So I'll talk to them about it to a certain extent, like, what can you see, how far away should I pass the puck to you, try to make it realistic to the sport. I just kind of respect their, I guess, privacy, but more like I don't want to get them kind of down, right? I don't want them to think, like, oh, coach knows. Like, yeah, I know, but that's I don't want to get them kind of down. I don't want them to think like, oh, coach knows. Like, yeah, I know, but that's why we're able to have this program for you.

So certain players, especially when they get a lot older, I'm able to have those conversations with them and learn more about their visual impairment. But I find it's like a thin line. You've got to watch where you cross, kind of. Ice time is over. And we have the Tambodi coming on, eager to clean the ice. We all head to the change rooms.

But before we leave the rink, Rachel and I talk to some brothers who were working together on the ice. Yeah, so my name is Aiden Wood. I'm 22, and this is my brother Dylan. Yeah, I my name is Aiden Wood. I am 22. And this is my brother Dylan. Yeah, I'm Dylan Wood and I'm 18. And I think, Dylan, how long have you been doing it now? I think this is my fourth year now, maybe fifth.

For me, hockey's always been a very important part of my life. It's really nice to be able to help Dylan play a sport that I've always played my whole life. So, yeah, it's just really great I noticed the two of you guys spend a lot of time you have a really good sense of of leading around the ice what's your experience with that drill going through that drill so D loves the drills I really do like the drills they are they are fun Dylan's not uh completely blind so I don't actually have to be there for D it's just kind of fun to be able to kind of pick on him a little bit and get him like

you know like you would in normal hockey. You kind of just want to you want it to be the full experience. So what does it feel like to do that drill you were doing going through the pylons with your brother? I'm just really glad that you can come in and and help and helps other kids too because for some kids they do need more help. So it's just great, but it's also just nice having my brother. It's just a sense of connection and just doing it together. It's really really really fun. What's the story behind the Toronto Ice Owls jersey that you're wearing? What does it feel like to wear this Toronto Ice Owls jersey for you?

Yeah, this feels good. That's really good quality, it's pretty, it's nice. Do you feel proud to wear it? I do. Cool. Why do you feel proud? What, what makes you proud about it? Just that I'm a part of blind hockey is, and that I, I, that I am a part of it. Um, and I, I can show other people about blind hockey and like, if I wear this and they say that oh what's blind hockey and I tell them what it is

yeah just really nice great answer dude that's it for today I'm Cheryl Sutherland a special thanks to Rachel Brady

for letting me skate along with her and to everyone who spoke to us. Luca De Montis, Aiden and Dylan, other Aiden and Mike. My name's Aiden Quilty and I'm 13. Mike Quilty, 39. Aiden's dad.

Our producers are Madeline White and Rachel Levy McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer. Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thank you for listening and have a great weekend.