#rookspeaks

When I initially heard boy aquarium to describe men's hockey/rink I thought it was cute and harmless. When people, particularly women hockey fans, started to talk about not liking it I didn't see the big deal. Then my teammates and other women's hockey players started to talk about not liking it and that made me pause.

What finally pushed me to a point of really hating the phrase came from a combination of videos on TikTok. One was a video of a girl from her childhood that said "pov: you grow up playing a male dominated sport" and the other was of a takeover tour clip that said "the boy aquarium became the girl aquarium for the night"

These videos put into perspective two things for me: 1) there are so many women who grow up playing hockey on boys teams, being isolated in their own locker room or storage closets, who for SO long had no path forward after college, girls who fought through all of the adversity to be treated with less respect than men all to play a sport that they love and 2) people are not calling it "boy aquarium" because the rink is the aquarium and the boys are playing that night, they are calling HOCKEY a boy aquarium.

Also look the bench was too tall for her. Look at her skates vs everyone else 😭