The University of New Brunswick women’s varsity hockey team played its first game on October 13 against Mount Allison after being resurrected following a lengthy battle lasting a decade.
Following a neo-liberal capital-centric sports agenda, UNB downgraded its women’s varsity team to a sports club in March, 2008 citing funding issues. That decision cost the team most of its funding and its ability to play in the Atlantic University Sport conference or the Canadian Interuniversity Sports national championships.
It is unacceptable that this case took ten years to be resolved. It speaks volumes on how amateur sport is being blocked in Canada and the little-known battles being waged to defend participation in sport.
Faced with cutbacks in government funding for education, different universities in Canada and the United States have similarly cut back on both women’s sports – such as women’s hockey to field hockey – as well as sports deemed “fringe” or “minor”, that is, those that do not generate revenue, while prioritizing so-called “high profile” sports.
At UNB, along with women’s hockey, wrestling, cross country and men’s swimming were slashed from the school’s varsity program, changing the teams’ status to competitive clubs. As of fall 2008, the teams were no longer eligible to have a share of the university’s $1 million athletics budget. Students participating in the programs were not able to earn an athletic scholarship.
Money the “deciding factor”
The athletics budget increased funding for the surviving programs of soccer, basketball, volleyball, women’s swimming and men’s hockey. Spectator interest and money were the two main criteria, according to statements by university officials made at the time.
Sixty female and 62 male athletes were affected by the cuts, which changed the status of teams being cut to competitive clubs. They were left to fight amongst themselves for a portion of the universitys $10,000 budget for all sports clubs available through the recreation program.
However, former player Sylvia (Bryson) Dooley alleged the decision amounted to discrimination on the basis of sex. Ms Dooley played defence on the varsity team for four seasons.
“It was just an absolute sense of betrayal and very demeaning…”
“It was just an absolute sense of betrayal and very demeaning that everything you had done for the previous four years, trying to build something and trying to improve, just meant nothing,” she told CBC in 2014.
“Being deprived of opportunities for recruitment, opportunities for coaching, budgetary opportunities for out-of-conference exhibition play, and academic and athletic scholarships to attract new players.”
The move sparked protests on campus against a pattern of discrimination, including demonstrations and a petition.
Ms Dooley, then-head coach Don Davis and Janis Thompson, a volunteer with the program, all filed human rights complaints against the university, which fought them tooth and nail.
In 2011, the Human Rights Commission decided to forward the complaints to a board of inquiry. UNB filed an appeal to stop the inquiry.
Two years later, a Court of Queen’s Bench judge, Paulette Garnett, ruled on the appeal on April 29, 2013 in a 20-page decision, dismissing the application by UNB in the Bryson (Dooley) complaint, while quashing the complaints by the coach and volunteer. UNB argued that neither complainant were “aggrieved persons” under the act and the judge agreed.
The Human Rights Commission ordered a board of inquiry. The university failed to stop it in court and the board of inquiry took place in Fredericton in 2014.
In 2016, the province’s Labour and Employment Board agreed and ordered the school to reverse its decision.
Ms Dooley said Saturday’s home game in Fredericton against Mount Allison University would provide “a pretty significant sense of closure.”
Action from October 13th game between UNB and Mount Allison Tommies
The former UNB hockey player, now based in Ottawa, was in the stands when the Varsity Reds hit the ice for the first regular season game in a decade.
She says she met head coach Sarah Hilworth on Thursday and that the team appeared excited to start the season.
Mount Allison won a taut game 2-1 in double overtime.
In the United States
The case of the University of North Dakota illustrates the neo-liberal, anti-social trend in the United States.
On March 30, 2017 North Dakota cut women’s hockey, one of the top-tier Division I teams in the NCAA. There were reportedly no alternatives, such as club teams, offered, either.
The program produced 12 Olympians in only 15 years, including eight who played in the Sochi Games; the Fighting Hawks had come into the season ranked sixth in national polls.
Sports Illustrated reported that University president Mark Kennedy, faced with state budget cuts, pressured “the athletics department for greater funding for the four recent conference championship teams of volleyball, football and men’s and women’s basketball.” Other sports such as men’s golf were offered the opportunity to fundraise the difference but not men’s or women’s swimming and diving, or women’s hockey.
The cuts left just 35 women’s Division I hockey programs in the US.
The battle waged by the U.S. national women’s team
In parallel, national team players were waging their own campaign for parity.
Until last year, U.S. women hockey players earned US$6,000 every four years from USA Hockey – US$1,000 a month for the six months before every Olympics.
This translated to $6.25 an hour based on a 40-hour week (knowing athletes, a rather mythical figure). The players had to threaten a boycott of international competition to get an increase in this meagre stipend. Canadian women receive $2,000 a month and, in Olympic year, $2,500 or $15.625 hr.
And though fair pay was a big consideration in negotiations, Noah Underwood, author of a recent study of the campaign and a master’s student in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta, said the players were also fighting for additional advertising and support for all levels of girls’ hockey. “It wasn’t all about them.”
As well, USA Hockey had no budget for elite girls’ programs while it spent US$3.5 million annually on elite boys’ programs.
In their fight, “they didn’t use the mainstream media for information dissemination to the public – they basically took it into their own hands,” he added.
“When USA Hockey heard about the strike action, they immediately tried to get a scab team together, but the women’s team were way ahead of them,” he said. “They completely struck out USA Hockey.”
All told, hundreds of female hockey players stood in solidarity vowing not to join a scab team.
“While a shot at playing for a national title or even in the Olympics seems tempting, women hockey players were basically saying, ‘Getting equality across the board is more important for our sport,’” said Mr Underwood.
This demand for funding for all levels of the women’s game, according to Mr Underwood, was the key to why a so-called backlash from the general public was kept to a minimum.
“The public believed the players were fighting to change the entire system,” he said.
The players secured a four-year deal that increased their salaries to about US$70,000 a year and gave them the chance to win performance bonuses based on their results at the world championships and the Olympics.
As part of the deal, USA Hockey guaranteed that each player on the national team, regardless of experience level, would receive a monthly training stipend of US$2,000. USA Hockey would also provide the same travel arrangements and insurance coverage to the women’s team as it does to the men’s team.
The anti-social, neo-liberal agenda – a false alternative
These cases shed a light on all the hypocritical noise about the growth of “women’s hockey” in Canada, the “golden generation of women’s hockey” and the real nature of the “domination” by the USA and Canada in international hockey.
During the recent 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, the Toronto Star was unabashed in its exultation. “For Canada, it’s a chance to live up to the standards set by the women who came before them. For the Americans, a chance to repair whatever was broken in that devastating loss in Sochi. But ultimately, playing for gold is where they should be,” columnist Bruce Arthur wrote.
“The sport is improving. More countries are better. But it is the United States and Canada, again, forever locked at the peak (emphasis added).”
This is self-righteous indeed coming from a country wherein there is no level playing field. The women’s game is marginalized, sport is being privatized, most men and women athletes train in near-starvation conditions while a few monopolies enrich themselves from sponsorship of the Canadian Olympic Committee and national teams. The privatization extends to Canadian elite youth sport, including hockey academies that can cost parents tens of thousands of dollars annually.”
What is championed are gold medals, superiority over other countries, and the unabashed commercialization and privatization of sport. Yet at the same time young women and girls have fewer opportunities to develop to play professional hockey or for the national team. In Canada, for example, participation in the national women’s team is overwhelmingly from west of the St. Lawrence River. The number of Indigenous women players over the past 20 years can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Women’s hockey is concentrated in or near major urban centres. Indeed, according to a recent study, “only three players are from towns both under 100,000 and more than an hour away from a major urban centre (the same pattern plays out on the roster of Canada’s 2016 men’s World Cup team).” Private elite hockey academies are promoted as the training ground; the expense is scandalous.
Meanwhile, there is no shortage of funds for the militarization of universities such as UNB, which hosts the DND-linked Center for Conflict Studies and programs funded by Lockheed Martin.
The monopoly media frankly promotes that the future of women’s hockey in Canada lies in the neo-liberal formula: the development of an annexed professional league under the thumb of the National Hockey League cartel – the Buffalo Sabres have already purchased a women’s team – and intensifying the wretched commercialization of athletes by private capital. This false alternative is opposed to a human-centred approach to expand participation in sport and education as a people’s right.
With files from Canadian Press, CBC New Brunswick, Sports Illustrated and Folio
Statement issued by North Dakota women’s hockey team
Statement issued in March 2017
Friendship First, Competition Second – An Amateur Sport Website 