kiki_eng | Entries tagged with hockey

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

The second game of the inaugural season of the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL): Montréal at Ottawa January 2, 2024. (Youtube.)

The first PWHL game apparently made a lot of people cry, because of the significance to women, women's sports, hockey, these players, future players, hockey fans, etc.

That first game was unreal to me. I don't think that the existence of this league and what it means has sunk in yet. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, because I was a fan of one of the PWHL's predecessors, the Canadian Women's Hockey League (CWHL), and when it unexpectedly folded in 2019 it broke my heart a little.

After the CWHL folded there were a bunch of players, many of them Olympic gold medalists, who didn't have a league to play in, until now. The difference between 2019 and now is ridiculous, just in terms of the resources that have been mobilized to support this league that weren't there 5 years ago. They're playing in bigger rinks, to sold-out crowds, televised on multiple channels, with a continuous stream of articles about the league and its players and games.

The First CBA In Women’s Hockey Is A Picture Of The Future, And A Story Of The Past by Maitreyi Anantharaman (The Defector, Jan. 11, 2024.) does a really good job of painting a picture of what came before and how the PWHL got going.

Liz Knox (interviewed for that piece) has been doing some really good press work in general, supporting this league and giving it and the reality of women's hockey context. Her December 3rd piece for CBC (How we built a women’s pro hockey league: Stories from a 10-year effort) is also a good read.

It feels like the landscape of women's hockey has completely changed.

When my hockey friend and I used to go to regular season games in Toronto we'd transit out and our walk to the arena would take us past residential dwellings. We didn't actually need to buy our tickets in advance, but we often did, and we'd show them to the volunteer running the table outside the rink and they'd scrawl "TF" on our hands. We'd show our marked hands to another volunteer who'd wave us in and then we'd go and pick out our seats. Nobody else I knew followed the league, though we did drag other people out with us on occasion, especially when there were bigger games, at bigger rinks.

Every single Canadian PWHL home game is sold out this season.

I had people from three separate friend groups texting me during the Montréal at Ottawa game, and it was such joyful hockey. It was fast-paced and exciting and there was wait, was that a goal drama, with lingering shots of the net, and I got to see players that I've followed for years, as a CWHL and Olympic Women's Hockey fan, play a game of hockey in a league that their player's union chose, and get paid an actual wage for it.

This is a dream that has been decades in the making. A chunk of these women grew up dreaming of playing in the NHL, knowing that they would never be allowed to do so, and they have worked for years for this, and now they have a league of their own, that is paying them real money to play. It is not perfect - another league folded to make this happen and players lost contracts, took pay cuts, and they have been rushing to get these women on the ice, to have them play, to carry the momentum forward. This is the season without logos. The team names are just the cities.

But you know what else it also is? This is the season where someone hugged their fiancée after they scored a goal and the play-by-play announcers dropped that into the commentary. When they took the photo of both teams after the game, someone went to hang out with someone on the other team for it. When players were asked about interview questions that they hate for a TSN promo interview/smelling salts challenge thing, people talked about bullshit rivalry narratives and being friends with people on the other team.

They're building something, and it looks pretty good so far.

(Games stream on the PHWHL's youtube channel and also on a whole host of other channels, especially if you're in Canada. CBC has their upcoming and in-progress games here and their archive here, including that January 2nd Montréal at Toronto game). TSN's broadcast schedule is here. Sportsnet's PWHL content is here. I am definitely missing things with this list - there's a lot of different coverage.)

This post has been adapted from a comment I left on

luthien's post, "Snowflake Challenge 2024, Day 3".

The PHF and the PWHPA are set to merge and launch a new professional women's hockey league in January. The PWHPA members need to approve it still, but it's looking pretty good.

It feels so bizarre to have the posibility of a unified North American league again ("What is this? Early 2015?) but I'm excited for the PWHPA players to have an actual league again, for all that it looks pretty American.

CBC June 29 | CBC June 30 | Reuters June 30

I'm doing a second half of March meme! It is begun!

glitteryv prompted me with "Unexpected fandom or piece of media you hadn't expected to enjoy" for today.

...so this is the least joyful answer I could possibly give, but: Men's Hockey RPF. It is the answer that latched onto something in my brain and refused to let go.

I grew up with ambient hockey culture all around me and did not get into hockey until I was older. There were a couple things behind that: I didn't grow up in a house that watched or played hockey and Don Cherry was a feature of every televised hockey game available to me. (Don Cherry is an obnoxious pundit employed by the CBC. He does commentary between periods.) I didn't successfully watch men's hockey - outside of international competitions watched socially - until streaming games became a thing and muting and avoiding Don Cherry was an option, and even then, it was a struggle. Getting into men's hockey involved a lot of processing how toxic masculinity manifests in Canadian culture and the way in which NHL culture utterly fails to protect the health of its players.

I'd watched The Sheldon Kennedy Story before I ever saw an NHL game in full. When I tried to look that film up right now with "abused Canadian hockey player film" I found two other more recent films instead. The extent to which men's hockey culture has been and continues to be a cesspool of terrribleness almost defies description.

But I got into Men's Hockey RPF anyway! People were writing wonderful tropey fiction and it was a delight. Hearing rural Canadian accents on television giving meaningless robotic sound bites was charming. It was fun to watch a play-off game and hear my neighbours cheering for one side or another. It was neat to feel a part of the mainstream culture.

I got real good at compartmentalising for a while and I had a great time. And then sexual assault allegations against a star player surfaced and it got harder to ignore the toxicity, so I stopped reading fic about that team, and the reports kept coming and spread to other teams and I stopped reading fic about NHL hockey at all. I don't read fic about NHL hockey anymore. For a while I still had a few players that were my favourites, that I held some distant affection for, like an old friend that you don't talk to anymore and you know is going through some stuff, but who you hope pulls through okay.

No more. This has been a year for hockey in Canada. Some organisations have been called on their bullshit and desperately mobilized to avoid having to do shit about their problems. It has been high level, there have been funding withdrawals. (I fully expect nothing to come of this, because I think that everything that is wrong with men's hockey is so deeply embedded in the culture as to be almost impossible to get out. It is a thing that is happening now, though, and a good thing. Maybe the bar will get moved a bit.)

This past year in the lead up to the anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre one of those players I was attached to posted their support of a gun lobby organisation that had recently used "Poly" as a promo code. The team's response was that the player didn't know about the massacre. The player did know and he apologised, and that's, you know, good, but I no longer give a shit about any of them. I can't. All of the positive feelings I've had about men's hockey and players have been burnt out of me by the unrelenting dumpster fire that is every competitive level of the sport in this country.

It's changed my relationship with RPF. There's always been compartmentalising and an awareness of the separations between people, their public personas, and fannish characterisation. Engaging with RPF has felt increasingly like playing some kind of racist rapist roulette, though. They're not tidy fandoms - the borders are nebulous, the canon never finishes, and narrative arcs are largely constructed in post. Finding meaning or satisfaction in RPF is challenging. The canon is real, and you have to live with it on some level. That's a lot, and it can make escapism challenging.

I loved Hockey RPF. Being in that fandom was an unexpected delight for a while, but the amount of work needed to get into it was a warning sign, and not one I'm likely to ignore again anytime soon.

It's been so long since I've posted something that wasn't a recs dump that I had to look up my tags for this sort of thing.

runpunkrun prompted me with three of my interests to write about, and I decided that one of them had a timing component, so here they all are in this calendar month:

cwhl: Candian Women's Hockey League aka the thing that made me fall in love with hockey and then ripped my heart out, a bit. In 2010 a combination of things, including only consuming fanworks about women in February and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver with Marie-Philip Poulin's gold medal game goal, made me wonder where, exactly, women's hockey players were. The answer in 2010 was college teams, the CWHL, Europe, and men's teams. The CWHL was the option that players had after they'd left school if they wanted to continue to play competitive women's hockey in North America.

I gradually fell in love with it.

I started following games as best I could, looking at stats online. I figured out who my favourite team was (Stars de Montréal) and bought merch. I made friends with a Toronto Furies fan and went to some of their games with her, cheering them on (except when they played Montréal). I have fond memories of the little "TF" the tickets volunteer would scribble on your hand at Furies home games, listening to Nicco Cardarelli's commmentary at home in my apartment, watching Sasky Stewart rocket down the tunnel at the ACC to fix an announcer's gaffe, being with and seeing other queer women knitting in the stands at the final in Ottawa in 2016, and watching it in a local pub with a friend the next year, gloriously happy that they were on tv.

I miss the CWHL. In 2019, less than a month after the Clarkson Cup final and with no real warning, the league announced its dissolution. Montréal lost to Calgary in the final, and weeks later the CWHL was gone.

The CWHL was founded in 2007 to replace the National Women's Hockey League* that ran from 1999-2007. The Professional Women's Hockey Players Association was founded in 2019 to replace the CWHL and pursue a sustainable professional women's hockey league in North America. They have a showcase in Ottawa, ON February 26-27 and another in Arlington, VA March 4-6.

* not to be confused with the US league of the same name that ran from 2015-2021 before re-branding as the Premier Hockey Federation in 2021

In the meantime there's the Olympics in Beijing:

     • The quarterfinal matches are scheduled for February 10 11:10 PM EST (USA vs. Czech Republic), February 11 8:00 AM EST (Canada vs. Sweden) and 11:10 PM, and February 12 3:40 AM EST.

     • The semifinals are February 13 11:00 PM EST, February 14 8:10 AM EST.

     • The medal games are Febraury 16 6:30 AM EST (Bronze) and 11:10PM EST (Gold).

     • If you're in Canada or otherwise have access to the CBC you can watch there why I am nervous about a probable Canada-US gold medal match in Eastern Cree, in English, in French, or in Inuktitut.

merlin: Old timey fantasy shenanigans fandom of my heart. Merlin was my first big fandom after SGA ended, and it is beautiful. The show is "hey, so what if we did the story of Arthur and Merlin but they were teenagers, so Arthur's like Nooooo I don't want to be his friend, he's a nerd, why doesn't he love me back?, and Merlin's like ugh, I hate the Monarchy, why am I polishing his boots. Right. Threat of death. and a talking dragon tells him Arthur's his destiny. Yesss."

The fandom is vast and sprawling and is full of shit that is basically my comfort food, like modern AUs where they flirt with post-its and are also voice actors playing dragons on a children's animation program, or a Potter-style political AU where Arthur is the muggle prime minister, or made up or resurrected for comedy tradition they are forced to undergo for hilarity. There is femslash that falls into my comfort food genres, which is amazing, for me. There's well-written porn on a variety of themes. There's pointed meta and epic tragedies. There's beautiful art and crafts and vids and podfics and...

I'm incredibly fond of it.

tripod: Tripod is another beloved, the comedy nerd dad band of my heart. Ghost Ship is one of my old favourites from something like fifteen years ago when some youtube algorithm sent me their way. I'm also really partial to Stockpiling Weaponry for its dark lyrics mismatch. They did a dnd concept album/show in 2011 called Tripod vs. The Dragon with Elana Stone and Bard is a really lovely song off of that, with a completely different tone to it than Ghost Ship or Stockpiling Weaponry; it's not a stand-up routine or a comedy skit.

They're Australian. They do vocal harmonies and everyone - there's three of them, hence the name - plays at least one instrument. (It's been a few years since I mainlined everything I could find by them, so I don't remember exactly how many instruments each.)

There was an element of anxiety, looking them up again after a while. Some stand-up comedy does not hold up and the extent to which it doesn't can be very jarring. There were no surprises with the songs that I re-listened to; they've held up well. ...and they had a gig last year it turns out. Putting the nostalgia into words is difficult.

...and I have successfully posted an actual journal entry and have a whole half hour before the next hockey game starts.

Let me know if you want me to pick three things from your interests or tags for you to write about and I will do so.

The Olympics are around the corner and I am not ready for Olympic Hockey. I do not feel emotionally prepared for it and am kind of anxious about hockey in general right now, because: there was a Markham-Kunlun game where someone got 2 minutes for roughing when they hit someone in the head with their stick, Meaghan Mikkelson has signed to the SDHL, and Hilary Knight is a fucking badass. Hilary Knight's badassery is constant, but not constantly directed in an effort to defeat the Canadian National Team - or is it?

Caroline Ouellette came back this past weekend (she had her and Chu's baby in November) and Montreal swept Vanke in their three game series (7-3, 14-0, 2-0) and is at the top of the standings right now and Caro is still one goal short of breaking the league's record for regular season goals.

The Furies' Jessica Platt came out as transgender earlier this month, making her the third out trans player in women's hockey.

It feels like there's a lot of hockey stuff happening now and there's about to be this temporary profile-raising of women's hockey in the Canadian conscious and that's going to be good but weird. According to NBC hockey starts on the 10th with Canada's first game the next day, the quarter finals are the 17th, semifinals the 19th, and finals the 22nd. The US hasn't won Olympic gold since 1998. Canada hasn't won an IIHF tournament (played every non-Olympic year) since 2012. I am not ready for this.

I am ready for Femslash February, including my own personal version where all of the fannish content I consume and produce is female-centric gen or femslash - except this year I'm cheating. In addition to my usual marking things to look at later I'm going to try running a black history month-inspired film spree, where I will only be watching films about black people, and will be posting a media round up once the month ends.

I've decided there aren't enough black people in the media I'm watching and have been kind of regretting not doing something like this in February for a year or two. Proud Mary and Black Panther are both coming out this February. It seems like a good time.

I'm also going to be continuing my quest to clear out my drafts folder. I've been finding out this month that I have rec sets that I'm convinced I finished but haven't and aren't posted, and also that there are fics that I need to get out because I want them to exist in the world. Goals.

In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

01. Go and vote for Marie-Philip Poulin for Captain for the 2017 Canadian Women's Hockey League All Star Game: HERE. Tell me about it, maybe?

Marie-Philip Poulin is sometimes called the Sydney Crosby of women's hockey, because she's a two time Olympic gold medal game-winning-goal-scorer for Canada, and she's good. I feel like game winning goals are kind of her thing, along with being just a fantastic person in general?

Like, she just seems like she has a good sense of humour and is kind of a French Canadian dork and also this fucking amazing role model of a human being:

Here is:
a gifset in which Poulin is doing that role model thing
a gifset of some of her on ice encouragement
a a photo of her tackling an ex teammate (I think) into a foam pit at the winter classic a year ago
a gifset of Pou on ice fails, basically

Marie-Philip Poulin is great, and I want to watch her make terrible jokes as she picks out her all star game team roster or try to steal all the goalies or be super casual and relaxed about the whole thing, because that seems like a her thing to do. And I want to watch her take the ceremonial puck drop at centre ice in the ACC and skate around there with a "C" on her chest.

You can vote every 24 hours until Thursday February 2, and anything helps and is amazing.

02. Meta on Reccing. Especially before 2003 and after 2013, and especially on non-journal platforms, though anything is good.

I have a project in my back pocket that involves compiling a lot of meta on reccing. Those "especially"s are where I have fewer links and where help would be really useful.

03. Tell me about a femslashy thing you love.

I love to hear what people are interested in and excited about, and femslash is love. ♥

Les Canadiennes are a team in the Canadian Women's Hockey League (CWHL) and they are my favourite. Here's some of the why:

My team is better than your team; the Stars have had the most Clarkson Cup wins and have finished the regular season at the top of the league standings, ahead of Calgary by 8 points. They have the second fewest penalty minutes in the league (earlier in the season they had the fewest and were second in the standings) with only Boston having fewer this season.

Kind of amusingly it's Montreal's Karell Emard who is tied with Rebecca Vint of the Brampton Thunder for having the most penalty minutes in the league, though. Emard picked up 14 of those 42 minutes against the Brampton Thunder on January 7th; I actually haven't seen that game but kind of have the impression that this was maybe in reaction to the more penalty-rich game that the Thunder plays.

4/5 of the league's point leaders are Canadiennes, with Marie-Philip Poulin at the top. That might be a name you recognise. She's kind of a big deal. She's a two time Olympian and was responsible for the gold medal goal in both games - actually she scored 4/5 of the Canadian goals in those games, so some people call her the Sidney Crosby of women's hockey, but, I feel she is so much more awesome than he is that this comparison is somewhat sad.

People in the CWHL are pretty awesome in general, especially Les Canadiennes. I mean, they have Julie Chu. Everyone loves Julie Chu - we made her our all-star captain this year and that's a title open to every all-star player so that's some stiff competition. ...and that was a fantastic choice, I feel, for so many reasons, including the weekend itself. The draft was great - you can watch it here (you'll likely want to start 38 minutes in) or

icing-on-the-rink has put together some twitter highlights.

sobsister commented at the game that Chu does so much interaction with everyone on the ice, which is great to watch, and she does. She does that.

Julie Chu has jokes and cheers people on, which is so great. She cheers on her teammates and young players and she's great. I sort of think that she might be living in Montréal now, but there was this year where she was commuting from the States for practice and it was an impressive commute, especially for someone who's not getting paid for this; she's very dedicated. She just seems really lovely all-around. Did you know Julie Chu knows how to crotchet and has been learning French with Anastasia Bucsis?

Anastasia Bucsis is Charline Labonté's girlfriend. Goalie! (Labonté came out after the 2014 Olympics.) There's also a video of Labonté cooking and goofing around and she has a cat who is tiny in it. Labonté was an all-star captain last season, actually, which was great; the ceremonial puck drop in particular was good. There's a nice gif set featuring her and Poulin and Ouellette doing a Hockey Canada event and they're all doing such a great job as role models, I feel; it's lovely. There's a quote from Poulin in there where she talks a bit about the importance of being a good human being off the ice, and, I just, yes. Yes, this is why I love them.

They are dorks, mostly Quebecois dorks. It's awesome. Look at these hats. They wore them to the Winter Classic. There were more hats on the bus to the winter classic. Dorks, dorks with matching hats. They do the crossword. I admit that I am getting progressively lazier with this post, so I present Caroline Ouellette singing.

As far as I can tell they are all lovely and I have mentioned barely any of them, which I feel a bit bad about, but I did mention the laziness. They are great. This weekend they are facing off against Toronto in the playoffs. Toronto has 14 points to Les Canadiennes' 42. Les Canadiennes are undefeated on home ice. (I am pretty sure your team is going down,

sobsister.)

If you're around Montréal the 26th-28th you can buy tickets for those games here. The games will stream on the CWHL website and will cost $10 to watch, which is less than a single game ticket and I think will work out to about $2/game. (You can read about scheduling here.) Saturday's Furies vs. Canadiennes game is on Sportsnet 360 at 5pm EST / 2pm PST.

If all goes well Les Canadiennes will face off against either the Calgary Inferno or the Brampton Thunder in Ottawa on the Senators' ice on Sunday March 13th. (Tickets are available here for $20.) That's the first weekend of March Break for a lot of elementary school kids here and it sounds like a pretty good way to start it off.

I am so excited about the playoffs, and also anxious. Go Les Canadiennes Go!

If you were planning on sending a card to Denna Laing you should do it.

Today is the last day that I'm reminding people to:

SEND A POSTCARD TO:

Denna Laing
c/o National Women's Hockey League
67 West Street Suite 401-C11
Brooklyn, NY 11222
United States of America

WRITE:

You are awesome.

Cheer her on.

The postcard flashmob thing ends today, but I am pretty sure that a card for Denna is welcome at any time. All the cards for Denna, I say.

...and then I made a reblog if you sent Denna mail-type tumblr post to spread this thing some more. I hope she gets so much mail.

The goal is for everything to be sent by the 30th, like a flashmob with postcards. Details are on the tumblr post and also here.

If you're not on tumblr and want to leave a comment here that you did it that would be cool. --If you do it but don't want to leave a comment that is also cool, but you should tell your friends to do it, too, so she gets more mail. ALL OF THE MAIL.

Right. So, a few times fandom has done a thing where it has sent people postcards. So many postcards. From everywhere. Fandom did this to David Hewlett in 2006 and Martin Freeman in 2012.* An amazing number of postcards were sent. [So, stealing that idea from

slodwick:]

Let's do it to Denna Laing in 2016.

Denna Laing is a hockey player for the NWHL's** Boston Pride. On New Year's Eve at the first ever Outdoor Women's Classic she suffered a serious spinal injury.

Two of her teammates have started a thing they're calling #Cards4Denna, where they have been collecting cards for Denna. She is a fan of the cards thing, it seems.

"So we thought, what better way to show support than to gather cards from all of our fans? That way, Denna knows just how far her support system reaches and how much she means to us and all of her fans. We hope to collect as many cards as possible for Denna to keep her smiling during her road to recovery." - Kelly Cooke

I want her fucking flooded with cards, from everywhere. She's rehabbing now and I want everyone to tell her how awesome she is.

So, yeah, let's do this thing:

SEND A POSTCARD TO:

Denna Laing
c/o National Women's Hockey League
67 West Street Suite 401-C11
Brooklyn, NY 11222
United States of America

WRITE:

You are awesome.

Those words. If you want, you can also tell her why she's awesome. Yo can doodle hearts, or a tiger, or whatever. Maybe a dog. Wish her well.

DO IT:

The week of the 24th***. January 24 - 30.

MAKE SURE:

You get the postage right and the address is correct and legible.

If you're making a postcard yourself, make sure that it's the right size and you've put the address and stamp in the right place and left places that need to be blank, blank.

I'm sending this from Canada, so it's gonna cost me $1.20 CDN, which is less than a coffee around these parts. Postage varies in different countries to different countries, so check it before you send it.

If you want to help more:

There's a website and they're taking donations. (American healthcare system, what even are you?) You can also sign up for a newsletter there.

But yeah, let's cheer her the fuck on. DO IT. SEND DENNA LAING A THING. TELL HER SHE IS AWESOME. SHOW HER YOUR SUPPORT.

*David Hewlett proved to be more awesome than Martin Freeman, but that is a side tangent.
**National Women's Hockey League. This is their first season of hockey and they pay their players, which is very exciting.
***It's her Pride jersey number, and also next week.

ETA: I made a tumblr post.
ETA2: If you're linking to this post off of DW/LJ please link to the tumblr post.

wanderings

Montréal at Ottawa - January 2, 2024 (Snowflake Challenge #6)

It's happening

Unexpected

three interests meme

Hockey, Femslash February, and Black History Month

Snowflake Challenge: Day Six

Les stars de Montréal: Les Canadiennes

Postcards for Denna Laing

I sent off my postcard to Denna Laing today.

Yo Hockey People. Let's do this thing.

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