Friday Notebook 2.9.24

A story from Jenna Trubiano highlights the festering of misogyny in hockey, the men's team rides one rivalry sweep into another featuring the Duel in the D, WoHo starts a three-game win streak

On Monday afternoon, University of Michigan women’s hockey coach Jenna Trubiano shared the story of an incident from her adult hockey league on Twitter:

“After much internal debate I felt that I needed to share my experience in an attempt to educate those both in the hockey and non-hockey world.

Last night I skated in my usual adult hockey league at a local rink in Metro Detroit.  We played a team we usually do not have any issue with—they compete hard and we try our best to keep it a close game.

As far as I know, I am the only woman in the league, which has been pretty normal throughout my adult hockey experience.  Last night, I was body checked (a penalty was called) and the man who checked me said ‘stay on your feet-this is a men’s league.’  Throughout the remainder of the game, I was harassed while I was on the ice.  Repeated comments of ‘join a women’s league this is men’s league’ being screamed throughout the rink and can be heard on the Livebarn recording.  The other team was composed of adult men, most of them in their 30s and 40s and several with daughters that play hockey.

Immediately following the game, I approached the league director and asked him to confirm that this is an adult hockey league, and not a MEN’s league.  He confirmed I was welcome to participate in the league and was furious those comments had been made to me.  I told him all I wanted was an apology from the team regarding the comments being made to me and the harassment I faced, and he went into the other team’s locker room in an attempt to get them to apologize.

As I patiently waited in the lobby for the other team to come out of the locker room, they passed by and no apology was offered, only a sarcastic ‘have a great night!’ as a group of five to seven of the men walked by.  I started crying in the rink lobby in public in front of many others.  After processing my emotions, my emotions are sad emotions.  Sad that misogyny still exists at the rink today after it seems we have made so much progress in so many ways paving the road for girls and women in hockey on paper, especially in Michigan.  I know I am not alone in this experience and my heart aches for young girls and other women who have also experienced harassment at the rink.

The goal with the apology was to help educate this group of men as to why the comments were inappropriate and hopefully influence their future actions when they eventually run into another girl or woman on the ice.  I pray their daughters will never experience harassment like I did last night.  Hockey is for everyone.”

There’s a lot to find disturbing there: That something like this would happen at all.  That it would happen to a person who has so thoroughly dedicated herself to improving hockey opportunities for girls and women across Michigan.  That one individual’s misguided and misogynistic behavior would beget back-up rather than rebuke from his teammates.

It’s a story that evokes empathy, sorrow, anger, and frustration, and before proceeding, it’s worth naming the admiration I feel for Trubiano’s willingness to share this story as well as her perhaps even more powerful choice to use the incident as a moment of education rather than impugnation.

As Trubiano notes, incidents like the one she experienced serve as a reminder that—despite the progress that a variety of indefatigable advocates like herself have made to improve the culture around the sport—a deeply ingrained misogyny continues to fester in hockey.  Look no further than the initial perpetrator in this incident finding support from his teammates.

And, of course, it’s impossible to ignore that Trubiano shared her story on the same day that the London, Ontario police held a press conference to update the public on allegations of sexual assault against five members of Canada’s 2018 World Junior team.  Those five individuals—four of them current NHL players, one a former NHLer—have been charged with sexual assault.

I bring the coincidence of these two events up not to equate them but rather as an illustration of the pervasiveness of violent misogyny in the sport.  Both incidents, on different scales, offer clear and obvious examples of the harm these attitudes routinely cause across the world of hockey.

At the press conference, London police chief Thai Truong said, “I do want to highlight that how we portray young women and girls on TV, in music videos, how we write about them, magazine shoots, all that contribute to sexual violence and the normalization of what we’re seeing.”

This remark drew the ire of a number of commenters, who perceived Truong’s words as excusing the alleged perpetrators in drawing attention to pervasive cultural attitudes.  I understand this concern, and of course, individuals must be held accountable for their actions, but it’s also important to acknowledge that many of the attitudes underlying and enabling this sort of reprehensible behavior are culturally ingrained.

Again, it’s obviously paramount that individual perpetrators be held to account for their actions, but, in our rush to fixate on those punishments, there is a risk of ignoring the widespread scale of the problem by localizing our attention on a single high-profile example, which is implicitly or explicitly framed as an outlier within an otherwise functioning and healthy environment.

At his All-Star press conference, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said of the incident, "This is not typical of NHL players'' and characterized the sport of hockey as "inclusive, welcoming and safe."  This sort of denial—or any suggestion that an incident like the alleged one at the center of this case is anomalous within the world of hockey—plays a vital role in allowing latent and ingrained misogyny to fester within the sport.

To reinforce this point, I’d like to turn to an excerpt from the introduction to A New Formation: How Black Footballers Shaped the Modern Game, edited by Callum Jacobs.  Jacobs examines the role of soccer media in enabling racism within the sport.  He writes: 

“Football media’s sustained focus on painting racist football fans as uneducated, working-class and/or foreign caricatures, while simultaneously burnishing the reputations of now-retired Black footballers (while—until recently—tacitly denying them a platform to speak and write) who excelled while having bananas, phlegm, and insults hurled at them, enables British society to avoid asking substantive questions about why overt mass anti-Black racism endured in the UK for decades and is now habitually attributed to a suspiciously large ‘small minority.’  Only when this question is confronted, and attempts are made to answer it, will we see larger numbers of Black people in positions of authority in the football industry.”

If we fail to acknowledge just how ingrained and widespread attitudes that produce actions like the throwing of a banana at a Black soccer player or a series of escalating misogynies directed at the lone woman in an adult hockey league, we do a disservice to the victims of that behavior by ignoring how much work needs to be done to prevent the recurrence of those problems.

This should not be confused for the suggestion that events like these, much less the alleged incident in London, are actually positive for the way they raise awareness for widespread issues.  Instead, what strikes me about these patterns of behavior is the need to highlight the extent to which these problems are borne of both individual actors and a wider sporting and social culture. 

Let’s return to the incident Trubiano experienced in particular, with Jacobs’ guiding question in mind.  Why is it that misogyny has endured within hockey culture, manifesting in behavior like she experienced?  Why, when one individual engages in this sort of behavior, do his teammates feel empowered to double down on it?

There’s no easy or neat answer, but one factor that cannot be ignored within the particular context of Trubiano’s experience is the way that from the top down, the state of Michigan positions women and girls as inferior within the world of hockey.

In the absence of Division I women’s hockey in the state, in the absence of widespread support even for existing high school programs, it should come as no surprise that men have been empowered to perceive women and girls as less than in the environment of the hockey rink.

I say that not to excuse such behavior, for which those individuals deserve to be held accountable.  Instead, it serves as one more piece of evidence toward the urgent need for increased support for women’s and girls hockey in Michigan—from the institution of the game at the DI level to the improvement in funding and support for girls’ participation in youth leagues.

Women and girls across Michigan deserve far better.

Wolverines Look to Ride Momentum from One Rivalry Sweep into Duel in the D Weekend

Fresh off its first Big Ten sweep of the season in the form of a 4-2 then 4-1 victory on consecutive nights last weekend over Ohio State, the University of Michigan men’s hockey team will enter its second in-state rivalry weekend of the season with some momentum on its side.

“Really happy with our effort, just closing out both games,” said sophomore T.J. Hughes of the Wolverines’ performance in Columbus.  “Second night was really good in terms of O zone time and playing the way that we want to play.  First game was good just knowing we can close out games now, and we can do it the hard way.”

When asked whether this season’s challenges with closing out games has shifted his perception of the relative value of scoring an extra goal to put a team versus focusing on the defensive zone to deny any hint of a comeback, Hughes replied, “Any way you can close it out, it doesn’t really matter as long as you get the win.  For our team, it’s not really sitting back and playing defense.  It’s more just going at them and attacking and play the way that we always play.  When we sit back, we aren’t really playing to our identity, and when we don’t sit back and we just go, I think is when we’re at our best.”

For coach Brandon Naurato, the sweep in Columbus brought catharsis in seeing his team earn a reward for what he perceives as sustained strong efforts throughout the conference slate: “It just feels good to get a sweep.  We haven’t had one in the Big Ten.  I don’t think we did anything different than what we’ve done against Michigan State or Wisconsin…It was just good to sing a song, for them to get rewarded for the effort.  We’re right there in all these games, and it just hasn’t gone our way.”

Michigan’s last tangle with the rival Spartans offered a decent illustration of the season in miniature: sustained spells of brilliance to earn a 7-1 Friday night win in East Lansing and build a 4-1 lead the following evening at Yost, only for all-too-familiar lapses in game management to crop up in what proved a 7-5 defeat.

“We’re gonna come in with a little chip on our shoulder I think this weekend,” offered goaltender Jake Barczewski on Tuesday.  “Obviously, we wanted that second game back against them.  We break down for what is it?  Five, six minutes, and find ourselves trailing the game.  I think it’s just gonna be slowing the game down a little bit this weekend and just taking it one shift at a time, one shot at a time.”

“I think we learned more about ourselves that series [than about MSU],” he continued.  “We know that they were gonna come out hard.  We know what they have.  They have some guys that can score; they have some guys that can defend, good goaltender.  But at the end of the day, they get what we give them.  If we play our game, then I think we’re fine.”

Hughes had a similar assessment, saying “Last time we played State, both games we played really well.  Second game, we just couldn’t close out, but we played really good hockey both games.  I think I’m confident we’re gonna do the same thing this weekend, just continue to go at it and play to our identity, and that’s when we’re at our best, so we’re gonna continue to do that this weekend.”

For Hughes, that the Saturday night game will unfold at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit adds an extra bit of excitement to the rivalry, particularly after the fireworks of last year’s Duel in the D, which Luke Hughes won with just tenths of a second remaining in overtime.

“Last year was crazy. It was so much fun,” Hughes said.  “This year’s gonna be just as good if not better.  As a sophomore, I know what to expect, and a bunch of us know what to expect.  We’ve been excited for the last few weeks, so it’s gonna be a sweet weekend.”

State’s Savage Compares the Big Ten and NCHC

Last week, as part of the promotion for the Duel in the D, Spartan standouts and Red Wing prospects Trey Augustine and Red Savage spoke to the Detroit media before the Red Wings took on the Ottawa Senators.

As part of those remarks, Savage—who spent two seasons with Miami in the NCHC before transferring into State and experiencing the Big Ten for the first time this year—offered an interesting comparison between life in the two leagues, saying:

"I think Miami and [the] NCHC, they're both amazing places to play. It's just there's a difference between Big Ten and Miami.  There's a lot more money in the Big Ten, so it's a little bit easier getting to games and stuff, being able to charter flights and getting treated a little more like a professional.  The NCHC is still one of the hardest leagues to play in in college hockey.  It's just different from a skill and age level.  I think the Big Ten is a little bit younger and a little bit more skilled, a little bit less hard on the puck in some areas.  The NCHC, it's really old, and every night's like a game seven battle, where the Big Ten it feels like everyone's kinda running and gunning a little bit more, which I think is a little bit more fun to play.  It's a little bit eye-opening to see the amount of skill in the Big Ten and how good each team is every night."

When asked for his assessment of that comparison, Naurato said, “I just think there’s more higher end prospects in the Big Ten…The difference between Michigan and Ferris when I played wasn’t guys like me.  It was the Max Pacioretty’s…It’s the Brissons, the Beniers, the guys like that…I think the Big Ten has done a good job of getting those higher end draft picks and prospects, and that’s probably why he feels that way.  But the rest of the game is all the same.”

While he disagreed with the idea that the “game seven battle” style of NCHC put those teams in a better position come tournament time, Naurato did say, “There’s something to be said for older teams for sure, and just the majority of knowing what you have to do to win because it’s four-year guys.  Think of that Quinnipiac team; they’re whole senior class came back.”

However, in the end, Naurato concluded, “I wouldn’t change how we’re doing it for the world.  I think it’s important to have a mix of young guys and then older guys to show them the ropes, whether they’re a first-round draft pick or an undrafted player.”

WoHo Returns to Winning Ways in Happy Valley, Then Makes it Three Straight vs. Concordia

After suffering home-and-home defeats to Adrian College over the final weekend of January, the University of Michigan women’s hockey team got back to its winning ways last weekend in State College—where the Wolverines swept Penn State in a two-game set at Pegula Ice Arena.

It began with a 2-0 Friday night shutout victory.  On a first period power play, Samantha Carr put Michigan ahead with her tenth goal of the season, then Emily Maliszewski added a second before the period was up to give the Wolverines all the run support they would need.  By night’s end, Michigan earned a commanding 51-18 advantage in shots, with Sandrine Ponnath stopping all 18 attempts that came her way.

The following evening, the Wolverines completed the sweep, emerging from a more back-and-forth affair with a 4-2 victory.  Michigan picked up two goals from Julia Lindahl (her ninth and tenth of the year), one from Lucy Hanson (her tenth of the year as well), then a third-period insurance marker from captain Katie German.  Freshman Emma Johns made twenty-two saves on twenty-four shots to improve to 5-0 on the season.

Then, last night, Michigan improved its win streak to three and record to 15-3-1 with a shutout victory over Concordia University.  The game was scoreless through forty minutes before Allison Fleszar, Lindahl, and Carr scored in an eight-minute span over the front half of the third to give the Wolverines a 3-0 edge that would hold through the final horn.  Michigan once more enjoyed had a comfortable advantage in shots, peppering the Cardinal net with 32 of them while Ponnath had just 13 stops to make of her own.

The theme of the three-game win streak for Jenna Trubiano’s team was depth, with three different skaters hitting the double-digit goal threshold for the season.  Meanwhile, in Ponnath and Johns, the Wolverines have a pair of goaltenders with a save percentage better than .940 and a goals against average under 1.50.  Ponnath sits at .961 and 1.21 in 14 games this year, while Johns can claim a .944 and 1.40 in her five appearances.

Michigan will return to action next weekend for three games at Yost: first a Friday night date with UM-Dearborn, then a Saturday-Sunday tangle with Lake Superior State in the final weekend of the CCWHA’s regular season.

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