who is White and Ukrainian; both of whom may have experienced discrimination in their own ways raising a family in Oshawa — even told her to shake it off, to just let it go in one ear and out the other. This didn’t happen in the 1950s. It only happened just over a decade ago. And while there were no repercussions for the girl who committed this hateful slur, there could have been very real repercussions for Saroya if she walked away from hockey after that. Hockey isn’t just a youth sport or something kids play for fun in Canada; it’s a lifestyle that can propel top players toward a successful and lucrative career. At the time this occurred, Saroya and her teammates were only a few years away from possibly receiving scholarships to major college programs or invitations to national team selection camps. And Saroya was that good, even then. She and her family knew what the repercussions would be if they spoke up or if she quit hockey altogether. Coming from a lower middle- class family that struggled at times to buy new hockey equipment and cover the costs of playing on the road, speaking up or walking away were not options for her or her three brothers. A common phrase thrown around an ice rink is “shut up and play.” According to Saroya, those four words and the ideology behind them are deeply rooted in the misogyny and racism that has plagued the sport since its inception, but that’s essentially what she had to do at the time. This experience and others like it caused Saroya to grow resentful of hockey, both the sport itself and the culture surrounding it. But instead of letting that hatred poison her, she let it fuel her. From then on, she played like she was forcing the game of hockey and the world to accept her, whether they liked it or not. She was determined to be the best player on the ice and, ultimately, prove those who doubted her wrong. This drive led her to excel in high school both academically and athletically, and ultimately receive an offer from Yale University to play hockey on the collegiate level at an Ivy League institution. “I wanted to play professionally because I knew there isn’t a lot of representation out there for little Black girls who want to play hockey,” Saroya said. In other words, she decided to become the role model she didn’t have growing up that other young women of
Saroya Tinker (Iota Chi-Yale) is not the type of woman who can easily be placed in a box, but one word that comes to mind when describing her is resilient. And it was her resiliency that pushed her into a career as a professional hockey player in the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF), formerly the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL). Growing up east of Toronto in Oshawa, Ontario, Saroya was drawn to ice skating and ice hockey at an early age like most of her Canadian peers. Saroya started out by ice skating at the frozen pond down the street from her childhood home. She recalled her father — who also played and loved the game of hockey and passed that passion onto his children — lacing up her plastic blue and white skates and holding her hand as she navigated the slick ice. “I fell in love with skating right away,” Saroya said. “I actually loved skating first; not hockey. There was a sense of freedom that came with skating. I felt like I could do anything.” Saroya, however, said she did not feel that way with hockey. Being a young Black woman in Oshawa, she stood out, and this was magnified on the ice. Where skating was an inclusive experience, hockey felt exclusive, no matter how good she was. From the time she started playing on organized teams around 6 or 7 years old, Saroya said she felt like she didn’t belong. She expressed experiencing microaggressions regularly, even at such a young age and from her own teammates when they wouldn’t let her sit in a certain part of the locker room or not include her in post-practice activities with the group. However, this adversity didn’t stop her from following in her father’s footsteps and pursuing hockey. In fact, it motivated her to be the best player on the ice. But nothing prepared her for what a teammate said to her in 2010 when she was only 12 years old. “My team was wrapping up practice, and everyone was in the locker room,” Saroya recalled. “Another girl — a teammate — looked me right in the eyes, told me to ‘shut up’ and called me the N-word.” Worst of all, no one did anything about it — not the trainer, the other girls or any adults. Saroya’s parents — her father, who is Black and Jamaican, and her mother,
21
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software