It’s a hot August afternoon in downtown Toronto, on an outdoor rooftop basketball court currently doubling as a ball hockey rink. A group of stick-wielding children are about to start a game, but they’re short one person in net. Fortunately, a volunteer is ready.
“I’m going to have to be goalie,” Anthony Duclair says with a laugh. “Send me the goalie pads!”
Sure enough, the New York Islanders winger straps on a pair of leg pads and grabs a glove before kneeling in a makeshift crease as the game gets underway. Not far away, retired NHL forward Wayne Simmonds poses for photos alongside young fans, flashing grins with no front teeth. Down a flight of stairs, Calgary Flames center Nazem Kadri sports a pair of white Nike Air Force 1s while signing autographs.
As members of the Hockey Diversity Alliance — a coalition of current and former NHL players dedicated to “fostering inclusivity, combating discrimination, and advancing diversity,” as its website states — Duclair, Simmonds and Kadri are helping host its first annual “Summer Fest” event. In a predominantly White sport such as theirs, standing out is normal. But today at the Canoe Landing Recreational Centre, a short walk west from the home arena of the Toronto Maple Leafs, they are the majority.
All around, some 250 children from diverse backgrounds are playing road hockey and meeting on-ice heroes who look like them, including the Los Angeles Kings’ Akil Thomas, free agent brothers Gemel and Givani Smith, and retired winger-turned-Golden Knights assistant coach Joel Ward. Instead of the usual rock music heard at hockey rinks, the sounds of Drake, Tyla and Burna Boy blare from a DJ’s speakers. Had it not been for Air Canada’s flight attendant strike, former NFL stars and HDA supporters Colin Kaepernick and Marshawn Lynch would’ve attended too.
“Hockey is a sport that we all love, but there’s just so many barriers that come into playing the game — financial, racial, all these other things,” HDA founder Akim Aliu said. “So we’re trying to remove those barriers and make it a welcoming space for everybody.”
The effort comes at a particularly challenging time. Five years after the HDA’s launch amid a historic wave of social justice protests, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives everywhere are under attack, from inside the U.S. government to the corporate world. Sports are no different. Major League Baseball has removed references to “diversity” on the careers page of its website. The NFL has paused its “Accelerator” program, which helped increase opportunities for diverse candidates in coaching and management positions.
The NHL, for its part, says it remains committed to DEI initiatives like its “Player Inclusion Coalition,” founded in June 2023 with P.K. Subban and Anson Carter as co-chairs. According to NHL chief communications officer Jon Weinstein, the coalition has educated over 1,000 professional players on “the benefits of inclusion”; awarded over $425,000 in grants to expand access and opportunity in the sport; and held a number of community events, including panels, hockey clinics and mentorship sessions.
“It’s a priority,” NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said last November. “We have a group of current and former players who are working to have their own programs in conjunction with us that we all finance. We have our ‘Declaration of Principles,’ which continues to stand for the values of the game. It remains a high priority. We want this game to be inclusive, to be welcoming, and grassroots programs that support that will remain a priority.”
Whereas the HDA once imagined itself working in tandem with the NHL to make hockey more inclusive, Aliu expressed doubt that an olive branch could ever be extended given the league’s “current leadership.” But, added Aliu, a former journeyman defenseman who played seven games for the Flames in the early 2010s, “Never say never. … If they show a willingness to do it in the right way, we’d be happy to take a look at it.”
Either way, the HDA must skate ahead with its mission. Even as more diverse groups are represented at the sport’s highest level, its high costs keep many out of the game. And if they’re playing, certain corners could still stand to be much more accommodating to players of color.
“We still hear stories about racism in the sport,” Duclair said. “I think it’s very important to have groups like the HDA put in the work and try to grow the game that way, and try to educate kids about racism in the sport, in life, in general.”
Since launching five years ago, the HDA has built programming for children from diverse backgrounds in the greater Toronto area, such as the fifth-graders shown here participating in the Grassroots Original Hockey League in 2024. (Michelle Mengsu Chang / Toronto Star via Getty Images)
The HDA was born during the COVID-19 pandemic in June 2020, following the killing of George Floyd by a White police officer in Minnesota. Led by six players, including Aliu, the group pledged to encourage more diverse growth at grassroots levels of hockey while also holding the NHL’s feet to the fire on social justice issues.
When the league resumed play on Aug. 1, then-Minnesota Wild defenseman and HDA founding member Matt Dumba delivered a live pregame speech raising attention to racial injustice before kneeling during the U.S. national anthem. Later that month, after the fatal shooting of Jacob Blake by a White police officer in Wisconsin, HDA members led the way in criticizing the NHL for continuing to play, even as other leagues paused in protest. The NHL eventually followed suit and postponed games.
“I know they probably don’t want to give us credit for it, but I think we made the NHL do a few different things,” Simmonds said. “I think we spurred a lot of change. You see the NHL trying to come together and get their grassroots stuff going, a lot of different entities have started to do the same thing as well, right? But we started this in 2020, I think, before anyone was really doing anything like this.”
To run their free grassroots hockey clinics today, according to Aliu, the HDA annually spends CA$1.5 million on ice time, registration, coaches, travel and food, among other expenses. Not included is the cost of gear for participating youth — that is covered by equipment maker CCM, one of the coalition’s most prominent backers.
But the HDA’s broader corporate sponsorship base has dwindled in recent years, with only CCM, Canadian Tire and JumpStart remaining. As a result of these losses, which included Scotiabank Canada, Budweiser Canada and Kraft Heinz Canada, the HDA has been forced to slash its operating budget by 70 percent over the past two years.
According to Aliu, these companies most commonly cited a shifting financial focus in explaining their decisions not to renew their respective contracts with the HDA. But Aliu suspects different motivations.
“I think they wanted to be part of something that was trendy at the time,” he told The Athletic. “In a lot of ways, we were used by some of these organizations.
“I get emotional about it because brown and Black people have been largely overlooked and marginalized for so many years. So we thought, obviously following the 2020, kind of George Floyd movement and civil rights movement, that people were really serious about the cause, but now we see that, once again, people of color were used.”
Scotiabank Canada, Kraft Heinz Canada and Budweiser Canada could not be reached for comment by The Athletic. Scotiabank currently sponsors three NHL teams and owns the naming rights to the Maple Leafs’ arena. Kraft Heinz annually partners with the NHL and NHL Players’ Association to fund community hockey programs through its “Kraft Hockeyville” initiative. Budweiser signed an agreement to become an official beer sponsor of the NHL in Canada last year.
HDA chair and co-founder Akim Aliu speaks to the crowd at the 2025 HDA Summerfest event in downtown Toronto. (Julian McKenzie / The Athletic)
The year before the HDA launched, in 2019-20, the NHL had 18 Black players and fewer than two dozen players of color. Slowly but surely, that number is changing.
A record-setting 20 players of Black, Indigenous, Asian or Latin descent were selected in June’s NHL Draft, including two Black first-rounders in Kashawn Aitcheson (New York Islanders) and Bill Zonnon (Pittsburgh Penguins). They followed 12 players of color who were chosen during the 2024 draft in Las Vegas, including three Black players in the first round.
“I think it’s a direct correlation to organizations like us doing the real work at the grassroots level, and then the NHL bearing the fruits of that labor,” Aliu said.
Some HDA members anecdotally remarked that they have noticed White fellow NHLers becoming more aware of the issues facing their sport over the past five years. But Simmonds thinks more can be done to integrate players from underrepresented backgrounds into hockey social groups, touting the upcoming removal of the league’s official dress code in the newly signed collective bargaining agreement as a potential starting point.
“A lot of people, they’ve got to change who they are to be accepted into a hockey circle,” Simmonds said. “And now that everything’s loosening up and people are starting to realize it’s not such a white-collar sport, people are going to be allowed to be themselves. It’s just going to go a long way, allowing people that can play the sport, be themselves and not have to hide who they are, right?
“I think that’ll make people more comfortable and bring out their true talents, and allow a lot of people of different ethnicities to actually come and play our game and enjoy our game, and not leave after one or two years of experiencing it.”
But, Aliu admitted, that might only become a reality if more people warm to the HDA’s message.
“I think hockey has the most potential to grow out of any of the major four sports,” he said. “And I think there’s nobody that would argue that. But I think we need to be honest about where we are as a sport and where the sport is going. And until we do that, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to address the real issue of growing the game.”
Back at SummerFest, with the CN Tower as its backdrop, the HDA ended its event with an outdoor ball hockey game featuring players and local celebrities. Kids and parents alike hung around the boards, drinking water to keep cool in the summer heat yet unable to take their eyes off the star-studded talent jogging up and down the floor.
Whether it was Kadri and Simmonds creating plays and scoring goals, or Thomas finding one of the Smith brothers with a cross-floor pass, the action marked a chance for many children present to see players who look like them playing a sport they love. It’s a vision the HDA continues to push for — at the grassroots level and beyond.
(Top photo of Anthony Duclair: Julian McKenzie / The Athletic)