Grow the Gay(m)

hilary knight talking about the pressure of homophobia/feminine conformity:

erin ambrose has discussed mental health struggles stemming partially from being closeted/internalized homophobia, etc.

All teams jersey hoodie done! With the Royale Tiger to represent my favorite chat/lb joke.

ooooh the writer actually answered the vancouver question at the bottom of the article:

Yeah, and that’s not even getting into the value of just having a support system. Like you’re a player who plays for the frost and grew up in Minnesota or Ontario kid playing for Toronto / Hamilton or so forth, it’s probably easy for you to find a couple kids camps or skills training coaching roles with flexible hours to get extra income. Your parent or cousin or friend can watch your dog while you’re on a road trip instead of boarding, you can keep seeing your family dentist, your friends are around when you need a break from hockey stuff sometime and while you still have to miss some of their life events you do catch the occasional wedding or birthday

You don’t get that if you’re far from home, and it’s 10x harder if you’re from somewhere overseas. You probably don’t know many people who speak the same language as you and even if you’re fluent in English that can get lonely. Your friend is getting married and even if it’s during a stretch of games off where you may be able to ask the team for a practice or two off it’s 700$ to get back home. You need to do a ton of paperwork to do just about anything, or pay an agent to do it, likely you’re doing a mix of diy for your most personal stuff and agent help for the professional side. The food isn’t what you’re used to. You might be driving more than normal on roads you’re not used to. It’s really, really hard. Some of the players have been here a few years already if they went to an ncaa school and may have roots which helps.

šmits' is 6'3" and a dman so using a long stick is not unusual, but apparently it's SO long EVERYONE thinks its weird.

his abnormally long stick was in fact a teammate's very first impression of him.

šmits: "I've added a centimeter to it in recent years"

roberts mamčics, Man Who Nearly Got Busted At Worlds 23 For An Illegally Long Stick, was basically like 'yeah the iihf couldn't figure out how to measure my stick because measured one way it was illegal and measured another way it was fine. also i'm taller than 2m in skates but shorter than 2m without skates (players >2m tall can have a longer stick) and they couldn't figure out how to measure me either. so they let it slide' LMFAO ???

"The Milan Olympic database lists Šmits as 4 centimeters shorter than Mamčics" (does not specify in or out of skates)

as šmits is almost certainly getting drafted into the nhl, the latvian junior coach said he would have to shorten his stick to adjust to the smaller rink. smits (paraphrased): stop telling me how to live my life

"[Šmits] does not rule out the possibility that the already long stick will become even longer."