Growing up in Oakville, Ont., Christian Purboo, ArtSci ’25, never thought much about race when playing hockey. As a young goaltender, he was more focused on stopping pucks, not the fact he was often the only Black player on the ice. It wasn’t until high school he began to understand the barriers that made hockey inaccessible to so many kids who looked like him.As of 2019, less than five per cent of the National Hockey League (NHL) is comprised of Black athletes. In Purboo’s 2016 Ontario...
