{"id":12455,"date":"2025-07-21T08:05:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T08:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/12455\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T08:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T08:05:08","slug":"color-of-hockey-3-kenyan-women-get-epic-experience-in-toronto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/12455\/","title":{"rendered":"Color of Hockey: 3 Kenyan women get \u2018epic\u2019 experience in Toronto\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Tinker co-founded the organization in November 2022 with Renee Hess, who established the Black Girl Hockey Club in the United States in 2018.<\/p>\n<p>Tinker, an analyst for PWHL games on CBC, said the Ice Lionesses were invited to the BGHC Canada camp after she received a message from Joseph, who saw a notice about the camp on social media.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2018I hope I can come to camp one day,\u2019\u201d Tinker recalled Joseph\u2019s message saying. \u201cAnd I was thinking about it, we have funds and whatnot. And I said, \u2018Why not come this year?\u2019 So we made it happen very quickly, and we got them here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>BGHC Canada receives support from the NHL Foundation Canada, which seeks to strengthen communities and improve lives across the country through hockey. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhl.com\/news\/nhl-foundation-canada-announces-2025-winners-of-5-grants\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">BGHC Canada was one of five nonprofit organizations that recently received grants for Fiscal 2025 from the foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had just received confirmation that we got the NHL grant and that allowed us to realize that our bank account is going to continue to keep going up so we can continue to spend money on bringing players here,\u201d Tinker said. \u201cAs long as companies are supporting us, like the NHL, I think it just shows they are invested in the game, invested in the women\u2019s game specifically, which I think is awesome now that we have the PWHL. The NHL funding helps us continuously. We wouldn\u2019t be able to put programs like this on without it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ali, Joseph and Likiza arrived in Toronto looking to improve as players but to also gain knowledge from Tinker and BGHC Canada that they hope will help them establish a women\u2019s and girl\u2019s hockey program in Nairobi that could someday compete internationally.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNot only will this help them get the skillset to set up and found a formal women\u2019s team, they\u2019ll also obtain knowledge and ideas around running a foundation, running a team, what you have to do as a mentor and a leader to do that,\u201d said Tim Colby, a Canadian expat in Nairobi who is general manager and coach of the Kenya Ice Lions. \u201cIt\u2019s not a task we\u2019ve assigned to them. It\u2019s a task that they assigned themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nhl.com\/news\/color-of-hockey-kenya-elated-by-membership-into-iihf\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Kenya was granted associate membership into the International Ice Hockey Federation on Sept. 26, 2024<\/a>, and became the fifth IIHF country on the African continent along with Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and South Africa.<\/p>\n<p>Kenya\u2019s players skate on a square rink inside Nairobi\u2019s Panari Hotel, currently the only indoor ice surface in East and Central Africa. It\u2019s about one-third of the size of an NHL rink. About 90 percent of the country\u2019s players are boys and men, Likiza said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI want to empower girls so that they come to play,\u201d Likiza said. \u201cWe want them to be like, \u2018I want to be like Carol, I want to be like Hana, I want to be like Saroya.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tinker co-founded the organization in November 2022 with Renee Hess, who established the Black Girl Hockey Club in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12456,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-12455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12455\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}