Every week, the New York City Pride Hockey Alliance meets on the ice to play the sport they love.<\/p>\n
On this particular Sunday, there\u2019s an extra buzz around the rink. Players from all across the country \u2014 and Canada \u2014 face off at Chelsea Piers for the 24th annual Chelsea Challenge.<\/p>\n
What You Need To Know<\/p>\n
The New York City Pride Hockey Alliance was founded more than 25 years ago
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It started with one team, now the organization has grown to six teams
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Every year, the organization hosts the Chelsea Challenge, inviting teams from all over the United States and Canada<\/p>\n
The LGBTQ+ hockey tournament is hosted by the alliance, or the NYCPHA. Steven Greenberg is the president.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe organization started now 26 years ago, when Jeff Kagan went to a tournament in Canada and went to his first LGBTQ tournament and decided to bring the idea back to New York City. So it started off quite small \u2014 I couldn\u2019t tell you how many teams to start with, maybe it was just one,\u201d Greenberg said.<\/p>\n
Today, it\u2019s grown to six teams, where everyone \u2014 and every skill level \u2014 is welcome.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, I would never even call myself an athlete at this point,\u201d Greenberg laughed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI actually started getting into hockey at the 2017-2018 season. It was very enticing for me to learn all these new teams, all this history, all the different players, all the different aspects of hockey. It was a brand new rabbit hole that I just sunk myself into, and I\u2019ve been a massive fan ever since,\u201d Jakob Sosa, a member of the NYCPHA, said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI started playing hockey in high school for one season and then I took 17 years off, and then the 2022 winter Olympics happened and I watched the women\u2019s hockey tournament at the Olympics and I said, \u2018Wait a minute, that\u2019s really fun, I forgot how fun that is, I can do that,\u2019\u201d Abby Miller, another member of the NYCPHA, told NY1.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d been watching hockey in lockdown with some friends and just really found myself amazed by the body movements and thought I have to try that myself and so I learned to skate, I took some classes and then I was able to join the Pride Hockey Alliance and start playing, and it\u2019s been about four and a half years, it\u2019s kind of changed my life,\u201d added NYCPHA member Nozlee Samadzadeh.<\/p>\n
But others, like Cleo Kromelow, grew up in the sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cI played on the Central Park Lady Hawks pretty much my whole life. I really owe it to hockey that I feel like I can be a strong woman \u2014 it\u2019s taught me how to command a room, be a leader, stand up for myself; I owe so much to the game,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Kromelow said hockey was her whole world, but she never quite felt she could be her whole self on skates.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy whole life playing hockey, I have felt like the only queer person on teams and it didn\u2019t feel like a part of myself that I was really like loud about because, like, just kind of wanted to fly under the radar and fit in,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
She and so many others said they felt \u201ciced out.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHockey, as well as a lot of sports, have a homophobic culture, and it\u2019s hard for folks to find a safe place to play and be themselves,\u201d Greenberg said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of baggage that can come with playing team sports. To come walk in, \u2018Which locker room am I supposed to use? What\u2019s happening? Which team style am I supposed to play on?\u2019 For there to be a group that just says, \u2018Hey, if you can play, you can play. If you\u2019re willing to sort of self-select into this group or coexist with us, then you can play with us,\u2019\u201d Miller added.<\/p>\n
That freedom \u2014 that \u201ccome as you are\u201d environment \u2014 has allowed them all to grow as players and people.<\/p>\n
\u201cI truly think I could be myself when I\u2019m here, I could really be proud of my sexuality, I could be proud being around the people that I like to call friends,\u201d Sosa said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s fun, it\u2019s safe, it\u2019s silly, it\u2019s emotional, it\u2019s just great,\u201d Samadzadeh added.<\/p>\n
And yes, they\u2019ve all watched \u201cHeated Rivalry.\u201d In fact, since it came out, Greenberg said there\u2019s been an exponential increase in people who want in on the league.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really exciting for me to see the hockey world changing. Before \u2018Heated Rivalry\u2019 and before joining the PHA, I kind of felt like queerness and hockey were totally separate parts of my life that were both really important to me, but to see \u2018Heated Rivalry\u2019 and to see that come together, it makes me really excited for what might come in the hockey world,\u201d Kromelow said. \u201cI think we\u2019re still waiting for someone in the NHL to come out, and I will be really excited when that happens, because I\u2019m sure that there\u2019s queer folks there.\u201d<\/p>\n
But here, on this ice, there\u2019s already plenty to celebrate.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be able to play in an organization with queer players where you know gay is not an insult, I feel like here gay means strong and powerful and you know it makes me feel like I can really be a leader,\u201d Kromelow added.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what race, what gender, what age, what experience you have, this is a community of people that brings one another together all for the love of hockey,\u201d Sosa said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes people ask me, why do I keep doing this? It\u2019s a lot of work being president and I have lots of examples of people who said: \u2019I was contemplating suicide, and if it wasn\u2019t for this organization, I don\u2019t think I\u2019d be alive.\u2019 And it\u2019s stories like that that keep me going and keep doing what I\u2019m doing,\u201d Greenberg said.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every week, the New York City Pride Hockey Alliance meets on the ice to play the sport they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279541,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[11101,25,9,24,12,56,63,65,64,84251,319,11102,27,200],"class_list":["post-279540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-app-sports","tag-app-top-stories","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-pride-month","tag-sports","tag-stef-manisero","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279540"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279540\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}