Push to get Black hockey coach into Hall of Fame
A grassroots effort is under way to get professional hockey’s first Black coach, John Paris Jr., inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.
He has a number of firsts on his résumé, including the first Black coach in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, the first Black scout in the NHL with the St. Louis Blues, the first Black general manager in professional hockey and the first Black professional hockey coach, leading the Atlanta Knights to a Turner Cup in the now-defunct International Hockey League.“Well, what I’ve always said is that I’m Black by nature and I’m a coach by choice, and there’s a difference,” Paris said.
“I looked at him and I said, ‘Mr. Péloquin, there’s no Blacks coaching in hockey.’ I said, ‘You’re setting yourself up maybe to have some problems,’” Paris recalled. “And he looked at me and he said, ‘I didn’t say anything about Black. I said I want a coach, you’re the one we want.’” “When I arrived in Quebec, I was a little timid, a little country bumpkin coming from the small town,” Paris said. “So I lived in French society and I was comfortable, very comfortable within it [and] for decades I had very little communication with English outside of my family with a few friends in Montreal.”
After that, Paris had coaching stops in Granby and St-Jean-sur-Richelieu in the QMJHL before making the leap to professional minor leagues in Atlanta, where he won a championship. Before that, he was also the first Black scout in the NHL with the St. Louis Blues. Dean Smith, diversity and inclusion chair at Hockey Nova Scotia, says one of the recommendations from a task force struck in 2019 to look at racism and discrimination in the sport was to find ways to recognize and highlight contributions from those in under-represented communities.
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