Canada is a hockey nation. The sport is a source of pride and shared purpose for millions. So when the story broke in 2022 that five Canadian World Junior players had been accused of sexual assault, the country itself faced a reckoning.

A few years ago. I had my my son in hockey, and when I think about the culture that is apparently permeating the highest orders of that organisation, I can understand why so many parents, why so many Canadians who take such pride in our national winter sport, are absolutely disgusted by what's going on.

And although the players were acquitted in July, concerns about toxic hockey culture haven't gone away and new incidents have come to light. How can we make sure young men get the right kind of guidance and face the right kind of consequences? Where are the adults? In the room, then? You often hear that sports builds character, teaches kids about winning and losing, about giving something your all. But how much pressure is too much pressure? Can the desire to compete end up doing more harm than good for youth? This is The Rundown. A content warning for those watching this interview contains discussions of sexual assault.

In May 2022, TSN senior correspondent Rick Westhead broke an explosive story. Five Canada World Junior players had allegedly sexually assaulted a young woman in a London, Ontario, hotel room in June 2018. Hockey Canada had kept the case quiet, and more stories of assault and violent hazing have emerged since. I talked to Westhead about his new book, We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada's Troubled Hockey Culture and what's changed and hasn't changed in the world of junior hockey. Rick, welcome to our makeshift studio. How are you doing?

Good. Great, great. Glad to join you.

I want to talk about how you started writing about the problems in hockey culture in Canada. This really began with sort of a phone call. But tell me, how did that all come about?

It actually kind of began before that. So through the summer, spring, and summer of 2021, I did a lot of reporting on an allegation that a player with the Chicago Blackhawks had made who said that he'd been sexually assaulted by one of the coaches with that team. And since then, since October 21st, there has not been a week that's gone by in these four years that I haven't received a number of credible tips from people asking me to look into issues, whether it's sexual assault or fraud allegations or maltreatment in sports. And and this story on the Hockey Canada lawsuit started the same way with somebody giving me a tip in May 2022 about a lawsuit that had been filed and settled quietly in a London, Ontario, courthouse.

For people who aren't familiar, who haven't been tuning into the headlines, give us a little. I know that case is wrapped up, but give us an idea of what that case sort of started.

Well, this case captured international headlines. It was where a woman who was identified in court documents as M, alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by a number of players with Canada's 2018 World junior hockey team. She said that she attended a bar in London, Ontario and met hockey players and wound up going back to have consensual sex with one of those players. And she said that after the fact, the player invited all the players on his team to come back and participate in group sex. And so the criminal charges were announced in January 2024 by London police. And ultimately there was a trial. And after a two month trial, the judge not only acquitted all five players, all five co-defendants, but the judge actually said that she had found actual consent in this case as well. So in one respect, from a criminal perspective, these players were acquitted and in another, the National Hockey League came out subsequently and still condemned what happened, saying that the behaviour that took place in that hotel room was inappropriate and wrong.

That's just one case that you look at throughout this book. I want to talk about some maybe what people have have said about the book and what your hopes were. You wrote that your hope of this book is not to tear down the game, but to make it better. I am curious, have you been accused of trying to tear the game apart?

Well, hockey enjoys a particular place in Canadian society, doesn't it? Yeah, and I think whenever, you know, Stephen Brunt, great Canadian journalist, wrote the foreword for this book and the way he put it was to critique hockey is to be anti hockey and to be anti-hockey is to be anti-Canadian. And so when you, you know, are telling a story that's an uncomfortable truth, you're naturally going to get blowback. But two things can be true, right. You can have a sport that's so amazing and still have these systemic issues that need to be confronted.

I don't want to assume that everyone is familiar with hockey who is listening or watching to this, and there are people who are unfamiliar with the junior hockey system in itself. For people who don't know, how does it work?

So one of the things I look at in this book is both the commercialisation of minor hockey. Right. So we're talking about kids 11, 12, 13 years old and how that has become a major industry, but also the junior system. And so how that works is if you are good enough, you're an elite player, you may well leave your family home at the age of 14, 15 or 16 to go off and play for a junior team, sometimes hundreds of miles away from your family. And this is where, you know, it's really interesting talking to players who've been through this system. And what they describe is a situation where you move away from home. You're so young and you're playing on a team with teammates who are in some cases 20 or older and adults, adults. And you're so desperate to be accepted because if you're not accepted, you're an outlier and no one wants that. So this is a real situation where conformity comes into play. And again, when you are so desperate to be accepted, you know, the players I've talked to and I interviewed 58 men, 58 who've played junior hockey, junior A hockey within the last ten years in Canada. And they, to a person have said that while they love the game, they've identified that there is these real issues when when they're so young and have to move away from home.

Your book shares stories not only of hockey players who are allegedly perpetrating sexual assault, but you also write about players who've been victims of hazing and abuse, whether it's by their own peers or even coaches. Does this feed each other? It seems pretty obvious when you look at it on paper, when you're reading through your book that this is a cyclical problem, but does it feed into each other?

Right? I mean, isn't it a natural progression if players are going to objectify one another? Should we be surprised when there are cases where they're objectifying young women? You know, and there are a lot of this shocked me. I'll be honest. I had not heard in detail about a lot of these rites of passages that that many of these players have gone through. One of them are memories. I have that from reporting this. I sat in Toronto at a, at a, at a restaurant in the, in the West End near where I live. And I sat with a young man in his 20s and his and the man's father. And I heard in the player there in the book, so Marcus Patterson and his father, Tom and Marcus Patterson played junior hockey, junior A hockey in 2019. And he told his dad for the first time about, well, we were sitting at breakfast about how when he played junior A hockey in 2019, he went through this rite of passage called the Hot Box. And for people who don't know what that is, he was a rookie on the team and during a road trip, they were on the team bus, and all of the rookies on that team got called to the back of the team bus, tapped on the shoulder, come back again. They're 10 or 15 feet away from their coaches. So begs the question of what the coaches, whether the coaches knew what was going on. But the rookies go to the back of the bus, they're told to strip, and then they all are forced to get into the bathroom at the back of the bus and imagine 5 or 6, 16, 17 year old teenagers jammed in there without clothes on. The lights are turned off, some coins are thrown in through a vent, and they're told, you guys can only come out when you collect $3.25 and change for us. Well, the joke of it is there's only $0.95 worth of coins in there. So I've heard of anecdotes of players being in that situation for upwards of half an hour or more.

I want to talk a little bit about that age range. How does it play, whether the rookies or they're, you know, they're on borrowed time at that point when they're kind of in their 20s, that dynamic. Because, you know, those 20 year olds, they were they were ones who were 16 and went through it. They may not have an NHL team that's calling them. Is there something in that sort of dynamic there that plays into it as well?

Yeah. Good question. I think I think that there is I think if you're still playing hockey when you're 20 or 21, the writing's on the wall that you're about to have to make this transition away from being a junior hockey player into the real world. And that might be scary because all you've done, all you have identified yourself as, is a hockey player forever. And so, you know, in some cases, again, from what I've heard from these, these young men, you have situations where 20 year olds have wanted to take advantage of that and make sure that these young players coming up have to go through the same sorts of initiations that they had to. To be fair, I've also heard stories about, you know, players who are veterans, 20 who've ensured that that practice does not continue. Right, and that there is a safer environment for these teenagers coming up playing junior.

All right. I want to read a quote from your book that talks about sort of the culture of silence. It goes the young men who once endured or inflicted harm have not disappeared from the game. They are coaches and scouts and general managers and team and league executives. From these perches of influence, they have too often played a quiet but pivotal role in sustaining a culture of silence. How is this culture of silence functioned in the hockey world?

Well, I can't tell you the number of times in my interviews that I heard the word omerta, you know, like this and this, this whole concept that, you know, we don't talk about the bad things that we see and that that that's in junior hockey, it's in professional hockey. It even extends down into minor hockey because families are petrified that if they come forward and they, you know, make a report even about abuse or maltreatment, that their children will be, you know, who are still hoping to chase the dream that their kids are going to be dropped from the teams and they'll be blackballed, blacklisted, and not welcome back on their teams. I wrote about a story only in the last couple, last week or so, about a case in Ontario where an under 14 AA hockey team within the locker room, it was like Lord of the Flies. There was a group, a group discussion where there were racist and homophobic and, you know, hate speech filled passages going on this group chat. There were players holding down their teammates and pulling down their their pants and their underwear and taking photos of their genitals while other boys were standing guard by the doors of the locker room to make sure that nobody was coming in. And in that case, the coach who again, the rules of Hockey Canada are the coaches. Coaches are supposed to be in these rooms all the time. And and I think that case really does illustrate what happens when you make a report, because the, the kind of the after afterward of that story is after a family made a complaint about this and after there were sanctions, the young boy who stood up and made the complaint was assaulted in another hockey rink, punched in the face. And it only came. That assault only came days after these sanctions came down. And that led to another sanction, where the boy who punched him in the face was suspended for a year.

I know that, you know, the book is focussed on hockey, but is this what is it about it being? Is it exclusively a hockey thing? Is this happening in AAU, in other sort of basketball, whether it's basketball or other sports?

Yeah, and I think that's the reflex of people within hockey is to say this isn't just a hockey problem, it's a societal problem. And there's truth in that. There really is. Of course, it happens everywhere, right? Look at all the stories that we read about Jeffrey Epstein. Look at all the stories that we've read about Harvey Weinstein that have been reported. There have been issues like this in soccer in England. There's issues around this in basketball, in football in the United States. But you know what? There's journalism about it as well. And these stories are documented. They're told, there's accountability issues that are reported on. And so to me the question is why wouldn't we report on it in Canada about hockey.

If former players are working their way into leadership positions that we are seeing, how do we break that cycle?

Well, I think there is some optimism to be found too, and there are efforts and I document them in this book about programs that are trying to do this differently. So for one example, in Hamilton, Ontario, the AA Hamilton Steel and AA Hamilton Huskies have bought into this program that started in the United States. It's called Coaching Boys Into Men. And so I went down. And the way this works this season, they have 16 teams in Hamilton that are running this program. So all the coaches are taught about how to speak to their players, about issues of consent, about what healthy masculinity looks like, how they should treat each other, how they should treat, you know, young women. And I actually sat in and watched these modules. I watched the coaches talk to boys 11 and 12 years old about these issues. And I wondered, where are the boys hearing these kinds of messages? Of course, parents should be talking to their kids about this. But, you know, I know just through my interviews and through asking people, a lot of people are uncomfortable. And these kinds of conversations they should be having with their kids are not happening. Are they happening in schools? Certainly not always. And so maybe moving forward, the reason for optimism here is if word about programs like this get off the ground and spread. Maybe hockey can be a place where we're actually as concerned about grooming young men of character as we are of grooming young men who can play hockey really well.

Rick, we're going to leave it there, really appreciate it, and really appreciate your thoughtful reporting.

Thank you.

Sports is filled with motivational sayings. Give it 110%. No pain, no gain. But what do they sound like to a kid who's under pressure to succeed? When does competition stop being healthy and start being a cause of stress and distress? I asked Perdita Felicia, world champion hurdler, broadcaster and author of My Mother's Daughter, and Andrew Wong, a clinical psychologist who works with kids, teens, and adults. About this and more. Perdita. Andrew, welcome to The Rundown. How are you two doing?

Good.

Great. Thank you.

All right, Perdita, I'm coming to you first. You competed at the highest level. What would you say that competition motivated you as a young person?

You know what I would say? For me, I loved the social aspect of sport. And that's what you find. If you look at data, like, young girls love the social aspect of sports, whereas boys like their motivation for sports is really like how far they can push and test themselves. I'm talking about like before the age of 14 as I got older, right? Because I was honestly like something I could take or leave. But as I got older, it wasn't till I was like 16, 17, 18, 19 then like, oh yeah, like, I really love doing this, but I really did it because all my friends were doing it, to be honest.

What were they doing? What were we what were we competing in.

Yeah. So oh my goodness everything. Like I tried out for cross country in grade three. That was an absolute fail. Don't recommend if you like. Have a lot of like fast twitch fibres. And then I did triple jump was horribly like awfully coordinated. I know it seems like it doesn't make sense further, but I couldn't do the hop skip jump part. Long jump was really good at it. Even tried high jump and I'm not that tall. I'm like five-five, but I got like third place in the region and work on my résumé as like an emerging athlete, just to say, like I did everything because it was cool and my friends were doing it. And then, you know, I had I got to the hurdles, didn't want to do it at all. And my coach made me do the hurdles. He would only coach me in hurdles. And that's how I became a very reluctant hurdler.

Okay, there we go. All right. Well, Andrew, it's not just sports. Of course. We know in school there is competition if you have siblings. I have an older brother. We there is an internal competition right there in itself. How can a competitive atmosphere affect young people?

Well, I think I think you hit it on the on the nail on the head there. Nature has this built-in mechanism called siblings. And they promote this healthy competition. Or they can and I think just like in sports, sometimes you need the referees who come in. And for siblings it's the parents. And I think when it comes to siblings, what is so important to understand is that they will push each other right. But at the same time, what we hope to see is this sort of healthy problem solving as well, that there will be laughter and there will be problem solving, and they sort of work things out. And from time to time, parents will hop in and say, okay, I'm gonna have to help you guys problem solve a little bit. But this is where I do believe, and the research has shown that those who form these positive sibling relationships can go out there and form these positive relationships in sport, just like Perdita was saying, you know, the social aspect is so important.

All right, Perdita, you are a parent. Shout out to six and a half year old Nova. Knowing how much pressure you were under through your life as an athlete, would you want to see your own child deal with that kind of pressure?

You know, that's a good question, and thank you for putting the half on the six and a half. That's very important to Nova. I will say that we've thrown her in everything like swimming, you know, tennis, figure skating. She's done all the things. And it actually when she was around five, she I think she heard someone saying that she's like, mama, I'm just a child. I'm doing too many things. And I was like, oh, he's like, kind of wanted. I know. I was like, oh, I kind of want her to have all the things and the experiences I didn't have because I kind of just, you know, did track. It was something I could afford. So about the pressure piece, little Nova probably feel some of that and actually pared it back. She's just doing swimming right now and figure skating and that's enough. The two things she loves. But I will say this the pressure has to be age appropriate right now. What I don't like seeing is the fact that, you know, you see these these young athletes, nine, eight, 14, it's like it's become a professionalisation of youth sport. They have the nutritionist and the coaches. And I actually think that's unhealthy. It can lead to burnout. It also can lead to them not really doing it for them doing it to like please a coach or please a parent. I think parents and all of us who have littles around us need to kind of keep an eye on that. Are we doing it for us or is it really about them and their enjoyment?

All right, Andrew, I'm going to get you to pick up on what Perdita said there, but help us understand what's the difference between healthy and unhealthy competition?

Healthy competition. It's so important to focus on the effort to focus on the skill development, the positive reinforcements of praise and celebrating the relative achievement of that child. I think so many times, I mean, it's built into to human nature. We will compare. I get parents in my office all the time saying, oh, I wish I didn't compare, but I do. And I always remind them, we do, we compare and that's okay. But we have to be aware of that. And is it a healthy comparison or not. Right. And so when we talk about healthy competition, it's knowing that, okay, we are going to celebrate that relative achievement. If they've never jumped an axle with foreign figure skating and this is the first time we celebrate, that doesn't matter if you know, another child on the other side of the rink is doing a double axel, right? It doesn't matter. And then with unhealthy competition, the piece around that, there's just so much emphasis on winning and losing. And I think nowadays there's so many different levels of competition. Like Perdido is saying, I mean, you can have a six year old who is being chosen for, you know, a single, a team, a double, a team in hockey. And what does that even mean to the child? And so when we go into that level, it becomes problematic because now we're just emphasising winning and losing. We have to emphasise the fun and the learning and the skill development. You know, sometimes when we put too much pressure on kids, we emphasise, oh, you did this wrong, you did that wrong. You have to do this better. And we indirectly produce this notion of shame. And so when they be, when they feel shame, now they're scared of making mistakes. Now they're only playing, as Perdita mentioned before, to please the coach, to please the parent, you know. Oh, I scored three goals. I'm going to get praised today. I didn't score any goals that that's going to be a tough one. On the car ride home.

Perdita, I want to get your take. What do you think the difference is between healthy and unhealthy competition?

You know, I've been through, like, every level of sport, grassroots, emerging, elite, professional with my job for a long time. And I have seen some coaches that have been the reason that athletes can excel. So I'll give you a quick, quick understanding. I had a a world class and elite training partner for a really long time, and so I competed for Canada. I won't say her name. She competed for another country, but so we were in university. She'd do great and then she'd go back for the professional season, let's say Olympics or worlds. We go back and so. So I'd see her, you know, we weren't at camps, but we'd be like, let's say the Olympics, the World Championships, wherever they were that year. And she could not get it together. Like she wouldn't even make a final. And it was so confusing to me. And I remember asking my coach, like, why is it when she goes back home, like she doesn't perform? And it came down to her coach being so high strung, so stressful yelling at her that her ability to perform under pressure was low. And so you see those unhealthy environments when an athlete really can't normalise, failure is not allowed to fail. If you see your young emerging athlete looking over at you as the parent or looking at you as the coach for confirmation, if they should move, they should make this play. Should I, you know, ask to come off the field. Those are the things that are starting to really become unhealthy because that child's not able to make decisions for themselves. You want, like Andrew said, to have this environment where you know, the child feels free, they're enjoying themselves. It's fun. And the other thing I want to stress, and I'll say this is we have to normalise mistakes, right? You have to normalise. And people hate this word. I love this word failure. It's okay. And instead of saying to your child nitpicking and analysing, just say, oh my goodness, it was great to see what you did today. You know, whenever Nova comes off the ice, you know she's not a great skater yet, but I have dreams of her maybe, you know, being a prolific figure skater, I'm projecting, I'm projecting. But the point I'm trying to say is, once she gets off the ice, I ask her, like, how did it feel? It looked great, I love it, I can't skate, but you're six and a half and you can. So I think you have to really check yourself as the parent and the coach and then make sure that child is really doing it for the right reasons.

All right. Andrew, Perdita had mentioned the commercialisation of sports. Sports has grown so much. Do you think parents are feeling pressured to put their kids in competitive sports, or grab that camera to film that highlight reel to post on YouTube? So the scouts are watching because we know scouts are watching. But do parents feel that pressure?

Oh my goodness. Absolutely. So just some self-disclosure. I have a seven year old and a nine year old, and the nine year old is a figure skater as well. And even she sometimes asks, hey, did my club put that video of me out there? Right? And then you have my seven year old who wanted to try out for select baseball. And so, yeah, there's a lot of commercialisation. That's a huge part of it nowadays, I think. Yeah, money is a factor. Every club, every league wants to generate profit. And so you have, like I said before, like four different levels of hockey, four different levels of baseball. And everybody is trying to recruit. So I do think that's a that's a huge factor. Plus social media too.

All right. In the last few minutes that we have Perdita, do you have any advice to share for youth or the adults in the room on how to maintain your self-worth during the ups and downs of winning and losing?

I love that question. I think that you have to diversify your child's identities. And so if the only focus in the household is them being a hockey grade, a hockey star and having the rink and whatever the arena of play is, I think you do your child a disadvantage. Because here's the truth majority of the human population does not go to the Olympics, does not go and win a Stanley Stanley Cup. Sorry to break it to you moms and dads spending all these thousands of dollars on these things. Do it. Love the development idea of it. But the point is, if that is the goal, that's the idea. No. So I think you really have to check yourself and be like, no, I'm doing this because there are things my athlete is going to learn from sport that will serve them forever. And there's things I remember learning from, you know, when I was nine in club track and then when I was, you know, 18 in university where it's like, now I'm accountable. If I say I'm going to do something, I say it. Also, when I've not worked out for a long time, I can get back on a treadmill and do it again. These are just the effort. It's like me able to do things and try hard to be uncomfortable are lifelong lessons. I don't have all these, you know, medals hanging around, but well, actually I do. Sorry, not everybody has all these medals hanging around is what I meant to say, right? But the point is, what is what's more lasting than these rusty, dusty medals is really those kind of the intrinsic motivation I have to grow myself and to be better. And so that really has to be why you do it as a parent. And just make sure at the end of the day, that you're not projecting what you want on your for yourself onto your child. Let them have their own goals and their own dreams. And if, yeah, they go on to be the next Sidney Crosby or the next Perdita Felicien. Touché, Amber Morely. Yes, great. But just do it. Just do it for them.

Andrew, that, you know, a lot of people have a hard time with the phrase, you know, winning isn't everything. Adults, youth, parents, whatever it be. How can parents help their kids figure this one out?

I think first and foremost, let them play. Let them enjoy themselves out there. You know, this this idea that, you know, winning isn't everything. It's true. Going back to what Perdita was saying, sorry, it's being able to build resilience throughout their lives. Take what they can learn from sport into everyday life. Resilience. What is resilience, right. It's the ability to be able to say, I can do hard things. I can ask for help. Some of the athletes who I work with, they are so scared to ask for help because they think they have to do it on their own. But research has shown that resilience is built on being able to be resourceful and to ask for help. So that also means that they can be vulnerable to others and trust others that they know better. And so being able to take that away through sport, I love sports because it teaches so much about life. So when they go out into the work world, you know, can they ask for help instead of trying to figure things out on their own? I hope they can.

All right. We are going to leave it there. Andrew, Perdita, thank you so much. Lessons not just for the young ones, but for the adults as well. Really appreciate it anytime.

Thank you so much.

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