Week 4 - Part 1

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:16] Speaker B: P. 97 welcome to your next week's worth of content. This week we are going to be going over your media analysis assignment. There's a full assignment outline posted on Brightspace. I want to draw your attention to that, but I also want to go over that a little more in detail as we start off this week's lecture. I also wanted to bring your attention to the articles and the slides that have been posted this week. You should see the slides posted on Brightspace. There's a little bit of the confusion there in terms of what the weeks are titled, but that's not important right now. You should see the one that says Hockey demographics and then the title says Lacing them up. Who gets to touch the ice? That's the lecture slides. The article that I'm looking for you to read right now for this week is called It's Cold and There's Something to Do the Changing Geography Canadian National Hockey League Players Hometown by Lisa Kaida and Peter Kitchen an incredibly important text and one that I'm going to be referencing a lot this semester. I have a deep curiosity in terms of hockey demographics, and I reference this text frequently. If you're curious about how NHL player dynamics are changing or the changing face of the game, or if you're maybe you're concerned. If you're an ardent Canadian hockey fan and you're worried about sort of American expansion in this way, it's something we can talk about a little bit later on this semester, but make sure you've done this reading. It's a. It's an incredibly important reading, and one that I think you're going to get a lot out of. And again, if you'd like to come by office hours at any time, don't forget the link is posted on Brightspace and we can chat about your media analysis. We can chat about how the semester is going so far. We can chat about your form. We chat about your audio responses, which have been great so far. I can't wait to read this week's as well. We're going to start things off today by talking about your media analysis. That is the most pressing issue facing you right now. The media analysis asks you to be analyzing a piece of hockey media. The assignment involves answering key questions based on a specific podcast, news report, panel discussion, etc. To determine the relationship between the chosen medium and the speaker's message. In full paragraphs with APA citations, find a minimum of three secondary sources that address key topics in your choice of media. Now here you're going to see a collection of five questions. Perhaps you've been in a course with me before, perhaps not. That's okay. So this is a common refrain in my courses, which is to say these are points I'd like you to address, please. Certainly. Now, by heading into fourth year, I think we could raise the bar a little bit here. I don't want a list of answers to those five questions. I don't want Question one your answer. Question two your answer. Question three your answer. You're going to be answering these questions over the course of complete paragraphs. Okay? So I'm sorry if I've repeated this these same instructions to you before, but I need to repeat them here. These are the questions that I want you to consider. Just consider, not just provide point form answers to what points of view are being included? Who, if anyone, has vested interests being served through this account? What prior experiences and or skills have influenced the writers or speaker's point of view? What media format has been selected by the creators? Is this format effective at conveying the message? And what secondary literature addresses topics covered in this media selection? How does this media treatment of this topic fit within the context of secondary literature on this very topic? Those are the questions I'm looking for you to incorporate. I've provided a list of media examples to you as well on Brightspace so you can head there if you need any help selecting sources. You don't need to choose those sources. You are free to choose your own source, but if you need help finding some, those are the articles that I provided there to you, as well as a list of sources on on the media analysis outline, which is also provided on Brightspace that you can go and find on your own. If there's actually going to be a hot link on the the source itself if you can access it online. If you can't, if it's just in black, it'll be in the Media Examples folder on the course outline. You are going to see two due dates on the course outline. If you have a look at the course outline on Brightspace, you'll see them. There's going to be two due dates. If you've been in a course with me before, you know how this all works. But if you have not, just as a quick reminder how this works, is this that first due date that you see on the course outline? That is for written feedback once you've received your grade. Okay, so essentially what this does is it gives our TAs the opportunity to just have a little bit of extra time to write out your feedback and if you need the extra couple days and you just want the number grade. That's fine too because at any time throughout the entire semester, you can always come and see me for feedback. That's never, never a problem. But we just have these little bit of extra wiggle room for our task. Be able to provide you with the written feedback itself. It takes a little while to do that, but sometimes near the the, the due date, sometimes some students end up taking a little bit of an extension. So that's how it works. There are two due dates, but it's only one submission. Only one submission total submitted via BrightSpace in the submission folder. So what am I asking you to do here? The outline is fairly clear. This is a fairly simple assignment. But what I really want you to do is dig in here. I want you to try and change the way that you view hockey. We've been talking about demographics. You've had a guest lecture already. You're going to have a few guest lecturers come in. What I do not want is you simply listening to a podcast and summarizing that podcast. Please don't do that. I don't need a summary of a spit and Chiclets episode. I don't need a summary of a 32 thoughts episode. I don't need a summary of an athletic podcast. I can just go simply listen to that podcast if I'd like a summary. Right? I'm looking for you to dig in when I'm asking you about vested interest sometimes I've had that question come up frequently. What is a vested interest? What that essentially means here is whose interests are served financially? Is someone trying to sell you something? Is someone trying to change the way you buy things or consume things or the way that you experience the game of hockey or sports in any way? So think critically here, not just simply listing off the advertisers. That's not good enough. If you simply provide a summary of your piece of media, you will receive a suitably average to below average grade. And you're not going to be pleased with that. Okay, so dig in. Really take these questions seriously. Really consider sources that you listen to. If you listen to these sources on the regular or you read these sources on the regular, that's totally fine. If you've never read a piece of hockey media for fun or interest on your own before, this is a perfect time to start to really take your lens and sharpen it in on the media, the way that hockey is reported in the media. Why are we doing this? We're doing this because it's important as critical consumers of the game of hockey to make sure that when we consume hockey content, our critical brains are activated. Right. We want to be able to say, what is going on here? Is this something that. That is indicative of a broader issue? That's why when you're choosing a piece of media, it is crucial that you choose something that is a little substantial. Not a story about the trade deadline, not necessarily a story about lines that are being updated or a player being called up from the American League. Because that's a separate part of this sort of media discussion, which we'll have a little bit later with Tory Peterson, who manages the social media accounts of an NHL team. That's a different part of the job. This is the sort of more substantial issues facing the game itself and the more substantial task of digesting media and hockey specifically. So I encourage you here now, again, dig into this one and really take these questions seriously and not just simply at face value, and certainly do not just provide me a list of answers to these questions in essentially a bullet form. Okay. That's the sort of media analysis talk we're going to be getting into our discussion of hockey demographics. All right, let's talk demographics. So this is an issue that is extremely important for the way in which we understand hockey today. It's something that's at the front of mind for companies involving in the. Involved in the hockey space. It's certainly front of mind for Hockey Canada. It's front of mind for NHL organizations. Where do elite players come from? Where do hockey players in general come from? And how have these things changed? And as we're going to look at the article, do we have preconceived notions about where to find these players? And are these preconceived notions perhaps inhibiting our ability to find. Later on, when we talk to Byron Bader, who runs a draft website and has developed a data analysis tool to evaluate hockey prospects. We're going to be talking about some of these issues as they relate to the NHL draft, but we're going to be talking today about the same process, but from a more grassroots level here, which is to say, how do you. How do you incorporate these things into the way that we understand the industry as a whole? Well, we got to go back in time first. We got to figure out what the traditional background of a hockey player is. We've talked about before that the institutional home of hockey in the 19th century was Montreal, 1875. You have their very first game. We've talked about this briefly now. I've got some information in the slides there that detail sort of the historical nature of hockey's progression here. We've also kind of already talked about this in previous lectures, so I don't want to dwell on it for too, too long here. It's this notion of middle class though that I want to focus on because it's extremely important for the way that we understand how hockey players are located within Canadian contexts, how hockey players are identified today, and how hockey players of the of tomorrow may look different. Colin Howell argues, quote, because hockey drew most of its place, players from the middle class, young businessmen, professionals, university students and so on, and because it had secured the support of so many important members of the social hierarchy, the game was never seriously threatened by its critics. This is in the early 20th century, the late 19th century. Howell is one of the foremost hockey historians alive right now. And he's saying basically, look, the game itself has middle class origins and these origins are what enabled the game to grow so quickly across Canada. This is basically beyond debate at this point. If you've done any reading on this subject or research into this, that hockey's relationship to the middle class is inextricable. Hockey in central Canada was almost exclusively involved young middle class males beginning in the mid 19th century, though we have plenty of evidence of women playing hockey dating far back as the, as the 19th century as well. But this middle class influence on hockey is directly related to the exceptionally important influence that amateurism had on the development of organized sport in central Canada. We talked about this briefly in previous lectures. Essentially, in his earliest years, the working class was largely excluded from organized hockey in Canada. Now again, it's important that we take some time here and identify what we mean by working class, what we mean by middle class. Too often these terms are used interchangeably. They are very different. The working class, especially when we talk about this in the early 20th century, late 19th century, we mean those who are working just to survive. We mean those on the sort of very, very margin of comfort in society, those that have to work for a living. The middle class, on the other hand, is the entrepreneurial class. Doctor, teacher, lawyer, that kind of thing. Okay? So do not, don't confuse those things. I know by your fourth year in university you should probably know the difference between those two terms, but perhaps you've never come across it or never had to put a fine point on it. There you go. That's the difference. Hockey is this middle class game for the sons, largely sons, Anglo speaking sons of the entrepreneurial class in central Canada. During These early, early years. Now, this changes to some extent, but the extent to which it has changed is something that I do want you to think about very carefully as we move throughout this course. When I offer these descriptions of the game's past, this is something that is. Is dear to me, this period in hockey history. It's something that you can do your own research in, if you prefer, but you can have a look at this period in the game's history. And I want you to observe this and think to yourself, has the game changed? Has it moved? Has it expanded very far? What is our idea of what a hockey player is and where they come from? This is something that I think we should take some time to consider as well. [00:12:15] Speaker C: I grew up in a small town. A hockey night in my hometown kind of place. It was really not much. You blink and you miss it. I never knew life would bring But I always had victories. Early mornings down at the rink and every night I'd wish that I'd get a shot at the big game here on the plane say my name so I played hard and dreamed about the day I'd lift a Stanley cup up high. Cause that's where I come from. That's who I am. Hard working and God blessed. Yes, sir. Thank you, man. The best things around that I have ever seen. [00:13:06] Speaker B: This was a purposeful interlude. I wanted you to have a listen to the lyrics of that song. I'm not a huge country music guy, but perhaps you already know this song. Perhaps you know the artist itself. I wanted you to hear that song. That's Paul Brandt song called Small Towns and Big Dreams. That is the hometown hockey version, which features Tara Sloan also singing. You can have a look at that on YouTube. It's there if you'd like to listen to it. But this is where we're at right now with a lot of what we imagine to be the. The makeup of a hockey player. So we listen to those lyrics again. If you. You can even look at that song if you want to listen to it in more detail. But this ended up being a song that was used for the 2018 Hockey Day in Canada. And you can again see the full version of it. It comes with a visual component as well, showing images of small town hockey players. And this is something that I think is really crucial to the place that hockey resides in the. In the Canadian cultural imagination. I think there is a conception that hockey is related to small town life, that there is a rural connection to hockey, that playing outdoors in small towns is a. Maybe an authentic version of the game. This is something that hockey is constantly at war with. What is the authentic version of the game? Who has an authentic claim to the game? Whose version of hockey is real and which one is artificial? Does this mean that if you grew up in a city that you have no possible way of relating to these, the lyrics that, that Paul Brandt is singing there now, while it's fair to say, okay, well, look, this is just a country song. Who cares about its larger cultural implications for the game of hockey? I think it's important because it's the way in which the game is marketed, not just by sportsnet, when they choose do Hockey Day in Canada the way that they do, or when they do hometown hockey once a week, and they've altered that broadcast schedule, but it's still a very valuable cultural product to the game. Certainly Ron McLean still carries a lot of value and he is very, very much about maintaining a sense of the game's history or a version of the game's history that he's extremely interested in and Rogers has been able to capitalize in. So it's important that we understand what this looks like. But it is very unusual if you consider the origins of the game and if you consider the ways in which the game has been producing hockey players in general, but certainly at the highest levels. Now, your reading this week is, I think, is just fascinating. The article that I want you to read addresses this with this connection to the rural roots of the game, the small town hockey connection that many of us feel, I think is a large part of Canada's connection to the game itself. And this city game, this version of the city game that has been able to produce elite hockey players so, so frequently. Now I've often said it's just absolutely remarkable. You could drive coast to coast. And I've done this, you know, cross Canada, drive a couple times, and every single time you stop for gas, there is a town that has an NHL in it. And it is remarkable. It's absolutely remarkable and gives the impression that every single small town produces NHLers, and therefore the NHL must be comprised mostly of players from small towns. But have a look at your reading, have a look at the research done about where NHLers are coming from. So now we know the origins of the game, where this middle class game from, from urban Montreal, from the most densely populated part of Montreal during this period as well. And understand that there might be a disconnect between the way in which hockey players are perceived in the Canadian imagination and where it is that they're actually coming from now, whether or not this is an issue for the way that hockey is producing elite players is something that is certainly on the. On the minds of hockey Canada. Is hockey becoming a game that the wealthy can play? Or should we say this more accurately? Is hockey becoming a game where the elite of the elite of the elite can only come from wealthy areas? Now, again, there are statistically, basically statistically significant samples where that's not true. And there are anecdotal examples of players that don't come from this background in the modern NHL. And I'm sure you can think of a few of them off the top of your head, and that's fantastic. But we're talking about overall demographic changes today. We're talking about the overall demographics. So one or two examples that you can name off of the top of your head is not terribly helpful when we're talking about large demographic shifts. So once you have that mind, when we're talking about demographics and also when you're doing this reading. But the conclusion reached by the authors is fascinating, and I think that the first part of that genuinely surprised me. Their sort of initial finding about the game's maybe more recent history from say, the 1980s and 1990s and early 2000s. It surprised me. But I want you to have a look and read for yourself what they found out. Why is this important? Right. We're talking about this with relation to your writing now, with your critical analysis projects that you're going to be doing a little bit later on. This is a big issue, and this is an issue that's related to many different topics that we're going to be covering in class. It's going to be related to a lot of topics that you're going to be presenting on a little bit later on in this semester. And that's this notion of who is playing the game and how can it grow. How can we address new populations? Right? And we can't really plan these things. We talk a lot, an endless amount in hockey circles about growing the game. Games gotta grow, gotta market it better, gotta market our stars. Over and over and over again, we hear all these solutions about how we got to do things differently, but very few times do we stop and actually consider the way the game exists right now. And there's a lot of sort of maybe pseudo research that's done into this field that sort of feels like we understand what the game looks like, but we need to understand specifically what the game is like right now. If you seek to. To overhaul this industry or offer new insights, you're gonna need a keen understanding of what it looks like right now. So we kind of have two issues that we're dealing with right here. The larger sociocultural issues, the experiential issues that we talked about, where, you know, what's the experience of experiencing the hockey industry itself. But we also have these larger statistical demographic shifts that we have to talk about as well. Especially if you're seeking to the business side of things in the hockey world or if it's something you haven't thought about but you'd like to get into, we have to understand the way in which the hockey industry exists as an industry right now. So these demographic shifts tell us a very interesting thing about where hockey players are coming from. Now, when you read the article and you read the conclusions reached, I want you to ask yourself some questions about this. Does the NHL consider this a problem? And when we say and again, I've said this already in a previous lecture, but I want to reintroduce it. And when I say hockey, I don't mean the NHL. When I say hockey, I don't mean Hockey Canada. But there are some issues that I think the NHL and Hockey Canada would be, I think, jointly interested in and maybe jointly concerned about. If the conclusions of the article are our reasons for concern for either of those two parties, how would you suggest going about this and fixing it? These are questions I want you to ask yourself when you're doing these readings. I suspect we'll be addressing this in your form and audio response in some fashion in the second audio lecture, but I want you to just keep this in your mind as you're doing these readings. What can be done to address this? Right when you're doing your critical analysis project at the end of semester, when you're doing your presentations, keep these things in mind. Are these demographic changes problematic or is this a recognition of a phenomenon that's been occurring for decades? And simply, this is just the modern feature of sport as a whole. So we'll finish off our discussion of what the demographic shifts have been over time in our next lecture. But, but I want you again to begin this discussion of demographics by noting again the history of the game itself. This middle class white Anglo Saxon game born in the cities, specifically born in Montreal for the most part, and then expanded throughout central Canada. And further, I want you to remember that sort of middle class origin. How does that compare to our modern assertion that the game has a connection to small towns, rural Canada? The the version of hockey that is sold to us from the Heritage Classic Hockey day in Canada, Hockey night in Canada, Hockey day in Canada, any of these various properties. There's a lot of money to be made in tapping into this feeling. So what is it about hockey that makes us yearn for that sort of rural connection? Now, you yourself might even be from one of these small towns. And there. I am not here to dispute the connection between small towns and hockey. It is 1,100% verifiably true across Canada. But why is this such a large fixation for many of the larger cities in Canada? Why is this notion of a rural game more authentic to many Canadians than the versions of the city game? Because I want you to ask yourself a question about an origin story for many hockey players. And I think about this when you're watching maybe, perhaps, maybe you've seen the Amazon special on the Toronto Maple Leafs, maybe you've seen 247 the special, HBO, when they follow around a team, maybe you've seen any of these hockey documentaries, even some of the. The PR done by the various teams themselves, when they go into the backstory of the players, when they present how they introduce themselves to the game. There are certain things that these media institutions and these companies and the people that present these stories look for. They look for certain talismans, certain ways in which they think audiences will latch onto, and there are certain things that are omitted. There are certain aspects of their stories that maybe don't get told, I think to where the way in which Auston Matthews was presented in his very first moments of the Amazon documentary, and there's an interesting way in which Matthews was presented. If you've seen it, that's. That's fantastic. If you haven't. Matthews journey is described as an unorthodox, which of course it is if you're familiar with his journey. But this connection to a sort of small town version of hockey or a rural version of the game itself, just a different version of what rural means. His context is definitely highlighted, but there's a lot omitted about how that journey really went. There is this need to sort of paint everyone as somewhat similar in terms of their interpretation of the game. And that similarity is normally a connection to what we're talking about today with this notion of small towns. So why is that? If you grew up in an apartment complex with no access to an outdoor rink and you made it to the NHL, is your story of, is your hockey origin story less authentic? Is your claim to the game less Canadian? Right. If you grew up in a suburb with strip malls and community center arenas with four pads and you made the NHL that way. Is that less authentic than the person that grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan? These are interesting questions, and there's a larger point that we're going to make at the end of semester here and towards the end of semester, and certainly even we're going to pick up next week. But I want us to start by asking these important questions about demographics, which is just fundamentally the question of where do NHLers, where do hockey players come from? Who gets to play? You can see, I think where we're going with some of these topics and some of the issues that are facing the modern day NHL. But I want us to start with these very, very, very fundamental questions and I want you to hear a piece of that article which is posted on Brightspace right here. [00:23:58] Speaker A: It is such a contrasting image of community and hockey in Canada, the long lasting notion of the small town advantage or the big city reality of a high cost sport that motivates our study. We will illustrate and contextualize the changing relationship between community and participation in elite level hockey in Canada over the past four decades. We aim to put the birthplace effect research into broad social context. We argue that the birthplace effect research focuses on the optimal community size from a sports science point of view, but does not address the changing hometown geography of elite Canadian hockey players. Our research questions are twofold. First, how has the geographic distribution of Canadian raised NHL players changed since 1970 in terms of province, community size and distance to large cities? Second, how has the association between hometown, community size and participation in elite hockey changed over time? To answer these questions, we examine the geographic distribution of the hometown of Canadian raised NHL players from 1970 to 2015 using publicly available information on NHL players. [00:25:23] Speaker B: And that does it for the first part of this week. I want to thank you for bearing with me in terms of trying to to get you an audio version of that article, please make sure you read the entire thing. I know that's not the same, but just to give you a general sense of what the article was trying to get at, make sure you have a look at the BrightSpace link. In terms of your office hours, make sure you have a look at the outline for your media analysis. Again, I really want you to give this your best effort. And again, if you've got an article that you'd like to read instead, if you believe that it's something that fits the description of the assignment, again, it's not just simply an episode or just something that is analyzing, say the NHL training camps or trade deadline or free agency or something like that, something that's got a little bit more substantial weight to it. That would be obviously what I recommend to you. Let me know. You can sort of pass it along but if not, if you're not sort of as familiar, there's a, there's a long list there of articles from the past couple years that you can choose from on brightspace and I'm looking forward to hearing your audio responses, reading your form responses. My goodness, this group has done a really good job with your forum responses so far. I'm really enjoying this. I really wish I could see you all in person. It's. That's something that's really does stink about this online format of the course but it's kind of given me the sense of that I can hear your voices and I can read your writing and it's, it's. I do enjoy this course so very much and if you want to come see me in office hours, happy to do so. Otherwise, have a great week. Tell me everything.