Shock was replaced by nerves when Keivonn Woodard helped perform the ceremonial puck drop before the Washington Capitals hosted the Vegas Golden Knights on Friday for their Celebrating Black History game.<\/p>\n
Woodard, a 13-year-old deaf player with the Bowie Hockey Club who gained notoriety and an Emmy nomination in 2023 for his role in the HBO series \u201cThe Last of Us,\u201d<\/a> was surprised when he was chosen to be one three local hockey heroes<\/a> to do the drop.<\/p>\n He admitted to shaking a little as he stood between Capitals captain Alex Ovechkin<\/a> and Golden Knights captain Mark Stone<\/a>\u00a0at center ice.<\/p>\n \u201cI was a little nervous when I first went out there because I didn’t know I’d be seeing all those players,\u201d Woodard said. \u201cI was nervous, don\u2019t get me wrong, but I definitely got to fist bump the players, that was cool. That was amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n Woodard was assisted by Duante Abercrombie, an alum of Washington\u2019s Fort Dupont Ice Hockey Club who was hired in 2024 to lead Tennessee State University\u2019s effort to become the first Historically Black college with an NCAA Division I hockey program<\/a>, and Luke Zeigler, a U16 AAA player with the Washington Little Capitals and an ambassador for the Capitals Rising Stars Academy<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMy life is where it is because of the Washington Capitals, and it just feels great to be able to come back and pretty much kick off this game as a guest of the Caps,\u201d Abercrombie said. \u201cThe sense of pride that I have from going from never seeing anybody who looked like me at rinks for almost an entire year outside of playing for the Fort Dupont Cannons to, not even just these two, but seeing many more playing here in the Washington, D.C. area. It\u2019s major steps forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shock was replaced by nerves when Keivonn Woodard helped perform the ceremonial puck drop before the Washington Capitals…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":504328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,448,82],"class_list":["post-504327","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\/504327","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=504327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/504327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/504328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=504327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=504327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=504327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}