Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign Advanced Analysis of the Hockey Industry. Welcome to the course. My name is Taylor McKee. I will be your instructor for this course and I'm extremely excited to, to get things started. This first audio lecture is just an introduction. We're just going to sort of go over how the course is going to operate. I'm going to be reading aloud the course outline at this point. I'd love for you to be on Brightspace. I mean, surely you are. I think if you're, if you're listening to this right now, you've probably accessed this through Brightspace. But nevertheless, if you could go to Brightspace and maybe even have the course outline in front of you, that would be extremely helpful. And we can go over the course and, and how it's going to operate. I am looking over the class list right now. I recognize a lot of these names from third year classes. Maybe three P05 nonprofits, maybe two P06 which is or formerly two P06, now two P16 sport policy. I recognize a lot of you from that.
[00:01:10] We have a lot of students in this class right now. And asynchronous brings its own challenges. This is your first asynchronous course. I will just advise you again that right now, here at the start of semester, things seem, seem relatively slow. They can seem pretty, pretty manageable. But the most important thing is to establish a routine for yourself. We're going to get into why it's going to be helpful in this course specifically. But just as a general bit of advice, establish a routine and stick to it throughout the semester. And that way you don't get overwhelmed by the workload later on. So what is the format of this course? How is it going to operate? Well, on Mondays and Wednesdays you will have things posted and assigned to you. Sometimes there's going to be two audio lectures per week. That depends on how many of our guests joining us via audio lecture. Sometimes there'll be just one, but on Mondays and Wednesdays there'll be something assigned to you. On Mondays there's going to be an audio lecture posted of some variety. Maybe it'll be a guest speaker. Maybe it'll be an audio lecture like this. And you're going to have a form question assigned to you. Now for this first class there's already a form question assigned. And on Mondays the form question is assigned to you. And it is due on the the that Friday.
[00:02:20] On Wednesday, an audio response is going to be assigned to you that asks you to give an audio response. There are tutorial posted on Brightspace about how to do the audio response. I think students now are exceptionally good at knowing how to sort of upload audio clips of themselves. When I first started doing this process, that wasn't necessarily the case. But the audio responses. If you go to BrightSpace and click on audio responses, you'll see a tutorial about how to do that. Whether you're on a Mac or a Android phone or an Apple phone, you can. You can post an audio clip of yourself. And the purpose for the audio response is simple. I'm looking for ways in which you can sort of articulate more complex responses to questions to get a little bit of your own personality into these responses. It's. It's tough in async courses because you sort of do it at your own pace. You don't really feel a part of anything. I'm not really a fan of assigning work to be done at sort of synchronized times. I prefer the async model if you're going to do digital classes myself, but that's just, of course, my personal preference. But you do miss the ability to talk things through. And it's a challenge. It honestly is. And I'll say this again, I'll mention a few times throughout the semester, but it's not easy listening to yourself recorded. I still struggle with it, even right now.
[00:03:32] It's something, though, that is an important skill to practice. So throughout the semester, once a week, you're going to be practicing this skill. And the audio response questions will be questions that allow you to sort of stretch your arms a little bit and, and really consider some of the important topics that we're going to be talking about this semester. So that's going to be every Wednesday you assign an audio response question. Every Monday, you're assigned a form response question. The Monday form response is due on the Friday and the Wednesday audio response is due the following Monday. So you have the full weekend to get it done. But make sure if you've got time on a Monday or a Tuesday and you've got the form question, just do it right away. Just don't wait until the last moment. When I look at, when these things are submitted, I always see this crush of people that are doing it on say, Thursday at 11:30 at night. And it's just not a great way to sort of go about this. And I'm also aware of the fact that, look, you're probably, if you're in another async course right now, or if you're in just even in normal sort of classes, there's a fairly large expectation for form responses. I understand that it is a bit of a labor intensive process. I'm not looking for incredibly in depth essays to be written here. I'm not looking for citations. I'm not looking for that thing.
[00:04:41] What I'm looking for, especially when I'm asking specifically for references to the audio lectures that we're giving, is just indications that you're listening to what's going on and that you're doing the readings. And I'm also very well aware of the fact that AI has enabled form responses to essentially become a bit of a pit of endless chatgpt regurgitated responses. You'll notice that many of our, many of the formal questions, the form response questions this year are designed to be directly related to the course material specifically and a lot of that is based on guest lecturers. So it's incredibly easy to spot chat GPT reform responses when you're, when you're, when I see them. Just keep that in mind as we go through this. That's really not the place for it. I'm not asking for a lot of writing. I'm just asking for a genuine effort. And, and just if you establish that routine early in the semester where you do it on a specific day at a specific time, it doesn't take up that much time at all. So let's have this point now. We'll head to the course outline and I can sort of go into more detail about what this course is going to be and what we're going to get up to.
[00:05:39] So right now, if you, if you don't have it in front of you, you can hit pause and if you do, fantastic. So right now, hopefully you're looking at the course outline and we will, and we'll get, we'll get into things. So calendar description, what is this course going to be about?
[00:05:53] This is. We are incredibly fortunate, I really believe that, that we have a course like this here at Brock. I'm extremely excited. In many other courses you're sort of stretched between other sports and stretched to different perspectives. In this course we get to really just sit in our, in our hockey fandom and really just allow ourselves to think deeply about the hockey industry. If you're, this is your goal, maybe you're obsessed with hockey, maybe it's your, your great love, maybe it's the, the industry you want to work in. That's fantastic. We're going to try and make you a more complete version of yourself here. Maybe you don't like hockey at all. And you just needed an async course and this fit your schedule fine. And that's totally okay as well, because the issues that we're going to be addressing in the hockey industry, as they relate to the hockey industry, are widely applicable in other industries. But we are going to be getting pretty specific about hockey things in this course. And if you're, if you're new to hockey or if it's not one of your favorite sports, that's actually probably going to give you a more valuable perspective than if you're a simply just a fan and are not able to remove yourself as a fan from these, from these topics. And that's something that I'm just going to, as a, as a broad point, which is true in every sport management course here at Brock University, but specifically in this course as well.
[00:07:00] Your fandom, that might be why you came to this course and I'm. Or even to this program more broadly. And it's not something that I don't believe that fandom is something that we should be ashamed of or try and get rid of. Absolutely not. No. But I do need you to remove the fan lens when I'm asking you for a media analysis or I'm asking you for an in depth analysis of a specific topic. Your feelings about a team, your feelings about players, your feelings about media personalities are really immaterial here. I want you to be able to use the fandom that brought you here to sort of really dig in to the issues that play in the hockey industry from a lot of different perspectives. So is it important to know the Toronto Marlies depth chart down to the fourth line and third pairing? Probably not here. Okay. Not in the sense of how this is going to help you succeed in this course specifically. And also stretching your fandom beyond one specific narrow interest of hockey and into other aspects of the industry, Other aspects, other types of jobs even. That's something that I want you to do from this course as well. You're taking this course for a reason, right?
[00:08:00] You want to become more holistically rounded in the sport of hockey. We're going to get into lots of different aspects of the sport of hockey here and that's why we're so lucky to be in this course. Bit about myself personally, if we've never met before, I'm incredibly interested in hockey from a number of different perspectives. I've had the good fortune of being able to work on this sort of safe sports side of hockey. From the administration side, I've had the good fortune being able to work on the analytics side of hockey in the junior system. I've supervised grad students who work for analytics programs both in the junior system and the major junior system.
[00:08:36] I'm incredibly interested in many aspects of hockey. I'm very interested in hockey violence specifically. That was what my doctoral work was in, in the early hockey violence of the 20th century and the institutional roots of violence. I'm incredibly interested in the organizational elements of hockey as a whole.
[00:08:52] This is something that my current research involves as well, how hockey is executed at a community level from coast to coast coast. I work right now with the National Aboriginal Hockey Championship, something I'm going to be talking about a little bit later on in the semester. But my love for hockey runs really, really, really deep. And I am myself an obsessive of this sport. And I'm really, really, really honestly fortunate to be able to have this course with you. And I wish it was in person in certain ways, but I'm also glad that we can have the flexibility of this asynchronous format. So, returning to the course outline, what we're going to be doing this semester is we have readings. There's no textbook for this course. The readings are going to be posted on Brightspace. It's important that you do these readings. I know that everyone says that in every course, but again, not doing these readings, it's incredibly difficult to sort of catch up in that regard. When I ask about a form response and ask specifically about the readings or an audio response, I'm looking for your, your personal reading of these, of these texts. They're not dense, they're not overwhelming. They're. They're incredibly relevant to specific hockey. Specific topics. And I think you should take advantage of the fact that we have a course that is specifically designed with hockey in mind in that way. So the audio and the form responses here, if you're looking at the assignments themselves and you look at those percentages, what you'll be immediately struck by is the fact that that's 40% of your course grade. And you think to yourself, that's fantastic. That's super easy. I can absolutely knock that out. Let me tell you now from this is the fifth year I've run in this sort of format. Those grades are incredibly difficult to make up. If you miss them early on this semester, each week is scored equally right. So you can't make it up later. You can't cram it. If you fall behind and miss three or four weeks, that's. That's just gone. So it is, it is truly, I think, remarkable. If you saw from my side, how often students just throw away 10, 15% there. So if you keep to that format and you take those, those, both of those, those elements seriously, you're going to do very well in this course overall. There's a media analysis. We're going to talk about each of the assignments in more detail. We're going to have separate outlines posted about the assignments themselves. I don't want to spend too much time, especially early on in the semester. There's not much point giving you all this information all at first, where you're just getting your feet underneath you in the semester, both in this course and all your other courses.
[00:11:04] But there's a media analysis assignment. There is a hockey industry assignment that specifically with one element of the hockey industry of your choosing and a critical conversation based on the guest speakers you're going to be hearing this semester. And I think at this point it's also worth mentioning how the course is going to function from a sort of brightspace related way. As I mentioned before, the audio lecture is going to get posted.
[00:11:27] The purpose, the way, the way that I do things. If you've not taken an asynchronous course with me before.
[00:11:32] I like having slides posted, but I don't narrate the slideshows. I don't necessarily think. I think we learned some lessons during COVID and I think it taught us that the narrated slideshow is not necessarily one of the most engaging ways to learn. So the audio lecture, the purpose is this. You can listen to it at your laptop. Fantastic. You can listen to it on Spotify as well. There's a Spotify link to these lectures. If that's your chosen sort of audio player, it is syndicated through there, so you can pick it up there. You can listen to the audio lecture anywhere. You can be at the gym, you can be on the bus, you can be on the train. Doesn't matter. You can listen to it there. And that's sort of a part of the course that you can sort of take with you. It's not a narration of the slideshow, though we do cover the topics that are present on the slides, especially in the early part of the semester. We have a lot more slide driven than the guest lecturers appear in about the second or third week or so. So there's an audio lecture, there's some slides.
[00:12:26] I think generally speaking, the slides, the readings and the audio lecture are the main components of the course. There might be a video here or there, but the idea is again, you can do it anytime you want just make sure you have a routine in place so that doesn't become overwhelming later on in the semester and it doesn't hit you like a ton of bricks.
[00:12:42] So the weekly assignments, those are the ones to sort of focus on at this point. I would make a schedule for yourself.
[00:12:50] We're really not looking again for a lot of detail here, but we're looking for 350 words for the form response, which is again, it seems like a lot right now, but again, once most of these are specifically targeted at hockey related questions. And again that's each week you have a full week to be able or a full workweek to be able to respond to those things as well.
[00:13:14] So that's what we're looking for in terms of what the course is going to be. It's organized into topics and they're listed there on the course outline as well. In terms of generally speaking, those are the sort of large overview of what we're looking for in terms of what we're going to be getting into that week. But it'll be sort of broadly defined in terms of our topics themselves.
[00:13:33] We're going to get into a lot of things. We're thinking about the people that we have scheduled here. We have Dom Luchuzen from the Athletic is going to be joining us. The commissioner of the ECHL will be joining us.
[00:13:43] There's a whole bunch of. I mean we have former professional players.
[00:13:47] We have a hockey agent will be joining us. It is again, we have a. We're very fortunate. And some of these are still. Some of them have already done these interviews just about the last week or so. Some of them are still coming. Some of them are back for their third or fourth time in this class. I do like to keep it as fresh as I can in terms of being able to interview them as frequently as I can because the information changes so quickly. But the hockey industry itself is one that is changing dramatically day after day after day. And there are certain topics which I've spoken to in previous courses. I've probably related the subject matter to you where the industry has changed as in the past tense, in ways that maybe appear as though they're still moving. But there's lots of sort of new frontiers in the hockey industry that have changed dramatically even since the time you started at Brock. Analytics being a great example of one where not that analytics is now a part of NHL front offices. That was true when you started at Brock. It's the way in which these front offices are structured, the job postings that actually exist out there, the actual roles themselves, they've changed. And it's moved from being an open debate about their usefulness into an open debate about what kind of labor is used there. That's one example. It's true on the marketing side of things, it's true on the administration side of things. These roles are changing and the issues that affect the industry as a whole, not just in terms of the market dynamics, but the cultural issues that affect how these jobs are executed. That's something else we're going to be talking about as well, how the industry is changing to, to respond to the nature of a changed sport industry as a whole. Something that you're experts in here at Brock. And if you're in your fourth year and you're starting your final semesters here at Brock again, this is your chance here to really lean into the industry itself, the sport as a whole, to think deeply about these issues. That's my last sort of ask here in this first lecture, is to please dig in deeply to these issues. Don't simply rely on the fact that you, you enjoy a specific team.
[00:15:45] Don't rely on the fact that, you know, you listen to, say, spit and Chiclets. And this is the, how you engage with the hockey industry. That's fantastic. We got to go deeper than that, right? I encourage you to, to think broadly, think, expand your horizons. Imagine other forms of the game, other leagues, other, other types of hockey. The same way that we ask you to expand your horizons about what you were looking for on the industry side of things. Right? If you're not familiar with East Coast Hockey League, let's, let's, let's dig into that a little bit. If you're not familiar with the American League, dig into that. Look at how European leagues are organized. All that good stuff we're going to get into in the coming weeks. And I'm incredibly excited to get things started. So your force, your first form response has been post, your question has been posted. At times it's going to be done through the actual form response prompt and sometimes it'll be in the actual audio lecture itself. I like to sort of move it back and forth to keep you on your toes. But if you head there and if I haven't asked you a formal naughty response question in the, in the audio lecture itself, it'll be written in text on the, on the Brightspace site as well. The first week's questions are extremely basic and we're looking for really, really, really basic responses. And they're just about learning more about you and where your goals are at and what, what types of, what types of things you're interested in. That's what I'm really looking for this first sort of week and also to teach you how to use this sort of format of the course and get you to kind of get used to how all of that works. So I'm extremely excited. The last sort of piece of information I want to give you is the office hours. The time is listed on the course outline there and it's a digital office hours. So it's a link on the side of the Brightspace site. You go to that office hours link during the time in which it's there, you click in there and we go right to a teams meeting during that time. So have a look there as well at what time it is going to be held digitally. And that's how we do office hours this year in this course. I can't wait to get started and I can't wait to talk about this stuff. I'm extremely passionate about, passionate about hockey as a sport and an industry. And I can't wait to chat with all of you at some point, either in person or online. And let's get this thing started.
[00:17:52] Sam.
