Ashley Messier builds hockey legacy with sights on PWHL, Olympics
9h ago
Mark Messier is her distant cousin, but this Sask. hockey product is carving her own path.
Harassing, bullying, demeaning — or just being hard on a player to get more out of them.
The line is all of a sudden fuzzy when it comes to the relationship between coach and player.
Sure, physical abuse or racial slurs are obvious fireable offences. But the stories that are coming out around hockey show the old-school theory of “what happens in the room stays in the room” going toe to toe with the new school of treating players with a softer approach and giving them more power in leadership.
Most of the time, it was a dictatorship. Now, not so much. Maybe it’s not quite a democracy but it’s starting to feel that way.
Mike Babcock, one of Saskatchewan’s favourite success stories, is now becoming a horror story, with players calling him the worst human being they’ve ever met.
They’re telling stories of what he said and did that threw players into bouts of depression. That’s a cause, we should add, that Babcock has fully supported by being an ambassador for Bell’s Let’s Talk campaign about mental health.
So what is it? Is he a hard coach to play for or a serial bully who should never coach again?
We of course are missing one side of the story: Mike Babcock’s. Hopefully he gets a chance to speak before the final chapter is written.