Color of Hockey: 3 Kenyan women get ‘epic’ experience in Toronto 

William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and writes about people of color in the sport. Today, Hanan Ali, Carol Joseph and Chumbana Likiza, members of Kenya’s Ice Lionesses who were guests of Black Girl Hockey Club Canada at its annual girls’ camp in Toronto.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario. -- Hanan Ali breathlessly summed up her first on-ice session at the Black Girl Hockey Club Canada camp with one word.

“Epic,” she said.

Ali’s post-skate description could also describe the entire experience that she, Carol Joseph and Chumbana Likiza, members of Kenya’s Ice Lionesses, had during a nine-day stay in Toronto as guests of BGHC Canada, which paid all their expenses with an eye toward helping women and girls grow the sport in the East Africa country.

The Ice Lionesses traveled 17 hours and almost 8,000 miles to join nearly 200 girls and women of color from Canada and the United States during the camp, from July 11-13, at the Ford Performance Centre, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ practice facility.

The three from Nairobi also met Professional Women’s Hockey League and Olympic star forward Sarah Nurse, visited the Hockey Hall of Fame, and toured the PWHL Toronto Sceptres locker room where team jerseys awaited them.

Ali, Joseph and Likiza took it all in with wide-eyed wonder, from the size of the Ford Performance Centre ice sheets compared to their rink in Nairobi, to the silver shine of the Stanley Cup at the Hall, to the welcoming phone call they received from Sceptres and Canadian women’s national team general manager Gina Kingsbury.

On the ice, they received coaching for the first time from a staff of all women of color that included BGHC Canada co-founder Saroya Tinker, who was a defenseman for Toronto of the Premiere Hockey Federation from 2021-23; defenseman Sophie Jaques of the PWHL’s Minnesota Frost; forward Mikyla Grant-Mentis of the league’s Montreal Victorie; and Cristine Chao, a former PHF Toronto defenseman who has also competed internationally for Chinese Taipei.

“The experience was nice being with all women of color on one rink, seeing that opportunity is there for all of us,” Joseph said. “No one is exempted.”

Jaques, a BGHC Canada board member who won her second consecutive PWHL championship with Minnesota last season, was a member of Canada’s 2024-25 women’s national team and became the first Black woman to win the Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award as NCAA Division I’s best women’s player in 2023. She said the experience was as enjoyable for the coaches as it was for their Kenyan guests.

“They’re incredible,” she said. “They have so much energy, so appreciative of everything. It’s just so cool to hear their stories and see what they’ve been through. And as much as they’re learning from us, I’m learning from them.”

BGHC Canada invited the Ice Lionesses to its third annual camp as part of its mission to inspire and sustain passion for hockey among Black women and girls and communities of color and provide pathways to the sport through education and scholarship programs.

“It’s so important for the girls to know that there are other people out there who look like them in the sport of hockey,” Jaques said. “Sometimes you can feel a little isolated and alone on your team when you’re the only one, or maybe the only one in your league. I think it’s just a good representation of community, and just helping the girls find each other and connect. And to see their friendships grow over the years is just really rewarding.”

Tinker co-founded the organization in November 2022 with Renee Hess, who established the Black Girl Hockey Club in the United States in 2018.

Tinker, an analyst for PWHL games on CBC, said the Ice Lionesses were invited to the BGHC Canada camp after she received a message from Joseph, who saw a notice about the camp on social media.

“‘I hope I can come to camp one day,’” Tinker recalled Joseph’s message saying. “And I was thinking about it, we have funds and whatnot. And I said, ‘Why not come this year?’ So we made it happen very quickly, and we got them here.”

BGHC Canada receives support from the NHL Foundation Canada, which seeks to strengthen communities and improve lives across the country through hockey. BGHC Canada was one of five nonprofit organizations that recently received grants for Fiscal 2025 from the foundation.

“We had just received confirmation that we got the NHL grant and that allowed us to realize that our bank account is going to continue to keep going up so we can continue to spend money on bringing players here,” Tinker said. “As long as companies are supporting us, like the NHL, I think it just shows they are invested in the game, invested in the women’s game specifically, which I think is awesome now that we have the PWHL. The NHL funding helps us continuously. We wouldn’t be able to put programs like this on without it.”

Ali, Joseph and Likiza arrived in Toronto looking to improve as players but to also gain knowledge from Tinker and BGHC Canada that they hope will help them establish a women’s and girl’s hockey program in Nairobi that could someday compete internationally.

“Not only will this help them get the skillset to set up and found a formal women’s team, they’ll also obtain knowledge and ideas around running a foundation, running a team, what you have to do as a mentor and a leader to do that,” said Tim Colby, a Canadian expat in Nairobi who is general manager and coach of the Kenya Ice Lions. “It’s not a task we’ve assigned to them. It’s a task that they assigned themselves.”

Kenya was granted associate membership into the International Ice Hockey Federation on Sept. 26, 2024, and became the fifth IIHF country on the African continent along with Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and South Africa.

Kenya’s players skate on a square rink inside Nairobi’s Panari Hotel, currently the only indoor ice surface in East and Central Africa. It’s about one-third of the size of an NHL rink. About 90 percent of the country’s players are boys and men, Likiza said.

“I want to empower girls so that they come to play,” Likiza said. “We want them to be like, ‘I want to be like Carol, I want to be like Hana, I want to be like Saroya.’”

Tinker, who was within earshot of Likiza as she spoke, smiled.

“It tells me that my purpose in hockey and what I’m continuing to do is working,” Tinker said. “It’s the big reason I’m even involved in hockey. Seeing ladies like this come to Canada and experience hockey shows me exactly how hockey can be, and it can be for everybody. We just have to continue to build and make sure it’s for everybody and allow everybody to have access.”

Tinker hopes to build on the relationship with Kenya by conducting a BGHC Canada girl’s camp in Nairobi next year. Jaques said she is ready to go.

“I think that would be incredible,” she said. “I think with how passionate they are about the sport, I think that’s something that we want to spread across the globe. I’m super-fortunate that that’s on the table and I really hope it works out in the future. I’d be in 100 percent.”