NASHVILLE • The commissioner was beaming, the idealists were ecstatic, the goal outrageous, the vision sublime.
It was June 2023 when the announcement was made. Publicly funded, “Historically Black” Tennessee State University in Nashville, founded more than a century earlier to educate and elevate the young men and women of colour of an implacably segregated postbellum Confederate state, was planning to put a men’s varsity hockey team on the ice in just two years to compete with the American giants of Canada’s historically great white sport.
An ice hockey team at a majority-Black institution never had happened before at the highest level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the United States — or even at the lowest.
Vanderbilt University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, the University of Memphis — none of the other major colleges in the Volunteer State have a varsity hockey squad. But now TSU was going to leapfrog them all.
It will not be easy. Millions of dollars stand between fantasy and faceoff. If some loud voices of fiscal probity in the state legislature get their way, hockey may not happen at TSU this fall — or ever. But that does not diminish the audacity of the dream.
“The Only Blacks in College Hockey Are the Pucks,” wrote the editors of The Journal Of Blacks In Higher Education in 1997, setting the scene for the spectacle now unfolding on the TSU campus, at junior-league arenas from Lewiston, Maine, to Salmon Arm, British Columbia, and in the Republican-dominated State Capitol.
“Blacks virtually own a number of American sports but they have yet to make their way into college hockey,” the academics grumbled a quarter-century ago, while reporting that hockey players of colour at U.S. colleges during the previous season numbered exactly seven out of 3,554. (This ratio has gone up, but not by much.) “Even the biological racists who harp on Black physical superiority are mystified.”
But now TSU was going to shatter the Zamboni ceiling forever and go head-to-head with the lavishly endowed powerhouses of Division I — Michigan State, Boston College, North Dakota, Denver, Cornell — teams that often carry nary a Black puckchaser at all.
“This could be a game-changer,” forechecked the vice-president of the National Hockey League, back in June of ’23.
“The idea of establishing a collegiate hockey program at TSU is a tremendous opportunity as the nation’s first HBCU to take on this endeavour,” averred the school’s president. (Tennessee State is one of seven Historically Black institutions in this state and one of 107 nationwide. The majority were established in the 19th century. All but a handful are in the South.)
“The passion and vision of the TSU leadership is both inspiring and humbling,” purred Sean Henry, president of the sabre-toothed local NHL team, which may or may not end up on the hook for the whole endeavour.
“I am incredibly excited to embark on building this program, supported by God, my family, TSU students, alumni, and all those eagerly awaiting this moment,” said Duante’ Abercrombie, the Black Washingtonian — and former Toronto Maple Leafs assistant coach — who is trying to get a posse of talented young skaters to hitch their hopes to a school they never heard of, that never had a hockey team before.
Colour shouldn’t still matter. It shouldn’t. But it does.
Lokua Calvert, 13
“I firmly believe that one day, TSU will be recognized not only as a powerhouse on the ice but also as a program whose student-athletes leave a profound legacy on the world,” said coach Abercrombie, looking decades or centuries hence.
All of this first erupted in June 2023.
Two years later, the president who decreed that TSU add ice hockey to its sporting repertoire has retired and her US$1.7-million furlough package has been cancelled. The state government has Elon Musked the entire TSU board of directors, blaming it for a mega-million-dollar budget shortfall, and has called for the school to stop awarding so many full, free rides. Dozens of employees have been laid off while the remainder have been ordered to travel around campus in golf carts rather than automobiles to save on gas. Enrolment collapsed from 8,198 in 2023 to only 6,310 this year.
Meanwhile, rookie tactician Abercrombie — “I’m the lowest-paid NCAA coach by a mile,” he tells National Post — has been scouring the continent from Baltimore to Burnaby at his own expense, sleeping on the floors of friends’ houses whenever he can to save cash. Passionate and persuasive, he has convinced a vanguard of 17 young men to accept full scholarships to TSU, and thus to make the hilltop campus the nexus of their hearts’ ambitions and, eventually, perhaps, the beacon of the sport in the Black communities of the United States, Canada and beyond.
As of this writing, 11 of the players who have verbally committed to TSU for the fall of ’25 are Canadian. And 13 of the scholar-athletes who will take the ice for the Tennessee State Tigers come October aren’t Black at all.
* * *
One month before TSU president Glenda Glover was to reveal her revolutionary and perhaps premature hockey intentions in the presence of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, Tennessee State University held its Spring Commencement and, as keynote speaker, invited a prominent alumna who had not been back on campus for more than 30 years.
Oprah Winfrey told the graduates: “For so many of my earlier years, I was the only woman, I was the only person of colour. The one nobody expected to be in the room, at the table, on the anchor desk … At no time did I ever feel out of place or not enough or inadequate — or an impostor. Do not let the world make an impostor syndrome out of you.”
“We’re going to go through stuff that no other program has gone through before,” Abercrombie forecasts. He is 38, a former minor-league pro and a survivor of a desolate quadrant of the U.S. capital whose mother heaved him over the boards of a youth-hockey program that had been founded by community leaders who believed that young men who were strong enough to survive on the ice could carry that fortitude with them when they took off their skates.
“We should OWN this as an HBCU,” Abercrombie says. “I want EVERYONE to know that we are doing this, and I want them to feel like they are a part of this. I want every single person that has been affected or impacted or emboldened by an HBCU to celebrate this. It is because of HBCUs that we could become doctors and lawyers and vice-presidents of the United States.”
(Former vice-president Kamala Harris went from Westmount High in Montreal to Washington’s Howard University, which is one of the most prestigious of the HBCUs. Howard has a figure skating club but never has enfranchised varsity hockey.)
Transplanting Canada’s game to Black America, Abercrombie avows, is “an opportunity to dream that could honestly be the only lifeline for a lot of young people in situations like mine growing up. It’s an opportunity to show that there IS a way out — be it the visual arts, the musical arts, some find it through sport.
“We’re not everybody’s dream, but we could be the dream of that one person, and it saves their life. I know for a fact that hockey is what drew me to achieving such great heights and kept me from engaging in situations that could have led to a different path.
“Hockey saved my life. I was the one kid that NEEDED that dream.”
Abercrombie, a father of three, is the most diligent labourer in hockey. He says he does his best work between 2:30 and 5:30 in the morning, scouring online videocasts of junior clubs such as the Prince George Spruce Kings and the Steinbach Pistons for potential Tigers, then spends the day in his more important career of Dad.
Founded in 1912 as the Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State Normal School for Negroes, Tennessee State is known for Oprah, for long-ago Olympic-champion sprinters Wilma Rudolph and Wyomia Tyus and long-jumper Ralph Boston, for Ed “Too Tall” Jones of the glory-days Dallas Cowboys, and for the deafening megalith of marching musicians who call themselves The Aristocrat of Bands. And now for hockey.
“We need individuals whose goals are so outstanding that they are willing to go through whatever it takes, and that’s rare,” the coach says. “We have a lot of amazing individuals who are trusting their academic future to an institution that some people may view as lesser. But the sense of family and empathy is so high on an HBCU campus — I am extremely proud, EXTREMELY proud of the individuals that we’ve been able to commit at this point.”
* * *
“Duante’ called at the beginning of the year and gave me an offer on the first phone call,” says 20-year-old Bowden Singleton, captain and second-leading scorer of the Calgary Canucks of the Alberta Junior Hockey League and one of Abercrombie’s first recruits. “He sold the program as a supercool opportunity to be part of a team in its first year in NCAA Division I.
“I didn’t jump right away. Coming from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, I didn’t know much about Tennessee. I was recovering from an injury. This was my first offer.
“Duante’ was the one who was the most high on me. He kept reaching out, telling me about how everybody’s a family at Tennessee State. Family is a big part of what I am and how I grew up. When he said, ‘I can’t win without family,’ it really touched home.
“I did a little bit of research. He texted me that it is a Historically Black university. I thought that was awesome. It will enable me to learn a lot more different perspectives, to be part of a new community. I’m a community guy.”
Singleton’s hockey journey is typical of the kids who leave home at 14 and travel hundreds of thousands of miles — and spend hundreds of thousands of their parents’ dollars — in pursuit of an intoxicating but elusive wisp.
Goalie Andrew Ballantyne of Whitby, Ont., another future Tiger, has played for the Panthers of neighbouring Pickering and the Silverbacks of distant Salmon Arm, B.C. Forward Greye Rampton of Chilliwack, B.C., has been an Olds (Alberta) Grizzly and a Kenai River Brown Bear in Soldotna, Alaska. There is a TSU prospect from New Jersey skating in Odessa, Texas, one from Tennessee playing on Vancouver Island, and another lad from Edmonton grinding it out in Lewiston, Maine.
In fact, Singleton’s travel log is less extensive than many. Except for one season with the Vernon, B.C. Vipers, he has spent his entire career in Alberta. But the years away from Mom and Dad, the boarding with strangers in a foreign city, the lurching toward adulthood in the company of other lonely strivers — “making the jump to junior, with a few trophies along the way,” as Singleton puts it — are easy for no young man.
“My goal is to play pro, to play in the NHL, and I think the NCAA is the best way to get there,” he says, echoing thousands who came before, of whom very few succeeded while the others, heartbroken, skated home.
Being a player of colour, I have always wanted to represent what I am as a person.
Ethan Wongus, 21
So, the Calgary Canuck, the Vernon Viper, the Okotoks Oiler is to be a Tennessee State Tiger.
“I am super-excited for him,” says Darren Singleton, Bowden’s father, who works for a craft brewery in Calgary. “It feels just right for him, and as a parent I’m happy to see him maturing and figuring it out as he goes.
“When he moved away at 14, it was under the idea that he could learn some life skills living on his own, living with a billet family. His grandfather was the captain of the Colorado College team from ’61 to ’64, and then he got a PhD in education, and he is kind of somebody that Bowden looks up to. The other factor is that he wanted to be older and make the most out of his journey. We saw so many of his friends basically done at 19 and no schooling.”
The father, too, had played the game — “I was only five-eight, but full of piss and vinegar” — until a concussion put an end to it. Now his child was going to try to ascend to the mountaintop from the campus of a mostly Black institution.
“I might have reached out to Duante’ on LinkedIn and said, ‘What’s this about?’” reports Darren, the pioneer’s parent.
“I like to talk to people twice to see if their story changes. The HBCU is not something that we’re super familiar with in Canada. From our perspective, he’s going to be exposed to some learning, but the key is that Bowden is going to be kind of an ambassador. We’re hoping he’s in a good situation with good people.”
* * *
Coach Abercrombie tells me that he explains that Tennessee State is a “Historically Black” university “usually not on the first call, usually within the first couple of calls. I tell them, ‘This is what you will come to see on a daily basis, but it is not ALL you will see. This is what the institution was founded as.’ I feel they deserve this level of honesty from me.”
For the Fall 2024 semester, TSU reported an undergraduate enrolment that was 81.9 per cent Black and 4.5 per cent white.
“I have yet to have an athlete turn me down based on the HBCU factor,” the coach reports. “One turned me down based on academic rigour.
“I have had a family say to me, ‘This is exactly what we want for our child — to let him see what we have not been able to effectively show him in his 19 or 20 years of life.’
“You can travel the world, do community service, put your child in a school where he can experience diversity on a daily basis, but it’s one thing to see it for a few hours, to see one or two children from other races in your classroom, but it’s another thing to FEEL the stories of the people he’s surrounded by.
“I have had families tell me about ‘the level of empathy our son will have as he steps into the corporate world’ — those are their words, not mine — even if that world is all white, even if everyone else on that board of directors came out of affluent private schools, he will by the power of his experiences understand what truly matters.
“I haven’t met one person who doesn’t like the idea of not only just hockey, but white individuals representing Tennessee State on the ice,” coach Abercrombie affirms.
“The players are excited. They don’t care about race.”
* * *
The truth for many Black hockey players in Canada is that race has always cared about them.
“Being a player of colour, I have always wanted to represent what I am as a person,” says 21-year-old Ethan Wongus of Edmonton, the top point-getter for the Maine Nordiques of the North American Hockey League and an 11th-generation African-Canadian who has committed to TSU. “I think it is great that an HBCU team is being started and I can be a role model for young Black hockey players. I want to be someone that they can look up to and I want it to be at Tennessee State.
“I have been playing hockey since I was three. Ever since I first touched the ice, I absolutely loved it. There is no better game out there. Being at the rink every day is where I find my peace.
“When I was younger, playing in Alberta, I would hear the comments. I heard what they said, but I tried to block out the noise …”
Alberta, Florida, New Jersey, Maine — for Wongus, all the bus-miles lead now to Nashville and a laboratory of possibilities. But the future Tiger’s father has not seen his son play a game in person since the boy was 14.
“At first, it was heartbreaking,” Stan Wongus, an account manager for a financial-services company, states. “But he’s living his dream.
“Ethan is built a little bit differently than other kids, I know,” Stan says. (The family moved from Nova Scotia to Alberta a decade ago.) “I don’t know if I myself could continue on with a sport where the comments, the remarks, were constantly made, but it’s never deterred him. It just made him try harder.
“In athletics, the opposing players will use whatever they can to try to get under your skin. Whether that is what they actually think as part of their upbringing, I don’t know.
“Growing up, there have been cases when fans and players targeted him and it was something he had to come to terms with and learn to play through. He’s had to learn how to not retaliate. He’s always going to have to learn to deal with it other than taking penalties or tossing the knuckles.
“I would hope that it is progressing.”
Ethan says, “When coach Abercrombie approached me, it was just like the best of everything, like the No. 1 thing on my list. I always knew what HBCUs were, and I always thought it was really interesting and super cool. It was kind of a no-brainer.”
“I guess I was ignorant,” Stan admits. “Here in Canada, there is no such thing as an HBCU. I didn’t know there was such a thing as an HBCU hockey team.
“I was a little apprehensive. I thought Ethan wanted to be involved with an established program, but as we discussed things with the coach, he impressed on us that this is something that has never been done before. I don’t think the idea of being separate for the sake of separatism is ever positive. But that’s just based on my experience here in Canada.”
“I knew it wasn’t going to be an all-Black team,” Ethan says. “It’s going to be a great experience whether you’re white or Black.
“At the end of the day, we’re all hockey players.”
* * *
“Groundbreaking,” Kendrick Douglas reacts when he hears about the Tennessee State Tigers. “Amazing.
“I would fantasize about playing at that level where I would have teammates who had the shared experience of what I went through.”
It is Halifax in January, and I am hearing this from Black men who had bananas thrown at them when they took the ice, who heard the bigots in the stands shout, “Monkey!”
“I played baseball from Little League up through Pony League and never heard the N-word. Then I got on the ice and I heard it from Atom right up to university,” Douglas says with a sigh. He is a former high-school standout from the Black enclave of Whitney Pier, in what is called “Industrial Cape Breton,” who now serves as legal counsel for the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission.
Every February, Douglas and dozens of other active and former Black players commemorate the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, an all-Black, church-led entity that flourished for 35 years beginning in 1895, a quarter of a century before there even was an NHL.
To Black Nova Scotians, what Tennessee State is trying to do may be vital and exciting, but it is hardly new.
“It blew my mind,” says Calvin Barton, who searched through 36 boxes of microfiche to excavate a newspaper report of the Colored League’s inaugural match. “It was such a moment of reflection and pride that such a league existed from our community.”
“It was a portal to the past,” Douglas says. “To think that our grandfathers who were treated as less than human could organize something like that.”
“It is so important for our youth to know the history and take ownership of it,” says Dean Smith, a lawyer for the federal Department of Justice.
That night, at the creaking old Civic Arena, I meet a 13-year-old hockey player named Lokua Calvert who was adopted by a mixed-race Canadian family from his boyhood home in Mozambique. Lokua has scored six goals so far this season for The Gulls of the Nova Scotia Under-15 Major league and has taken only two penalties in 26 games.
“The first time I walked into the dressing room, I didn’t see anyone the same colour as me,” he remembers. But he loved the game too much to quit — the skating, the hitting, the friendships.
“I took the puck from one kid and he called me the N-word,” Lokua says. “Another time, playing against P.E.I., we were shaking hands and a kid called me that. I guess he felt bad that we beat his team. All you can do is keep your head up and try to do your best.
“When someone gets on me about the colour of my skin, it motivates me to be better than him.”
“Colour shouldn’t still matter,” Lokua affirms. “It shouldn’t. But it does.”
Every year, Barton, Smith and other leaders of Nova Scotia’s Black Ice Society convene an 18-week training camp for boys and girls of African descent aged five to 12.
“It all goes back to the Colored Hockey League,” says Douglas. “They tried to plant us in the ground, but we were seeds and we grew.”
Now a Historically Black institution down in Tennessee was plowing the same soil.
“Tennessee State won’t be seen as a gimmick,” Barton predicts. “It will be seen as an advancement of the sport itself.”
“How many of our Black kids will take that as a beacon and go down to the States?” Douglas wonders. “If you can see it, you can BE it.”
* * *
Only 70 virtuosos, a mere fragment of The Aristocrat of Bands, are in the stands in Nashville as the Tennessee State Tigers take on the Lions of Lindenwood University, a Missouri school that is not one of America’s Historically Black colleges, on a Saturday afternoon. But 10 massed tubas and 20 trombones are sufficient to make a noise exceeding the priestly trumpets that brought down the walls of Jericho.
Other than the musicians and a few hundred loyal alumni, the arena is nearly empty for the women’s and men’s doubleheader. A portion of wooden bleachers marked “Student Section” is entirely bare. And this is not ice hockey but basketball, which has been a fixture at TSU since the days of the chest pass and the two-handed set shot. A trophy case in the stadium overflows with ancient urns. Photos of Black hard court champions line the walls, along with the Olympians, Rudolph and Tyus and Boston.
In a quiet dressing room before the game sits a young Montrealer named Louis Daoust, a first-year guard for the Tigers who has seen only a few minutes of action this season for a team that sits near the middle of the Ohio Valley Conference. The era when the HBCUs, segregated by law and walled by bigotry, could send only Black players into the fray has ended. Daoust, who was born in the Netherlands, is one of two white members of the team, presaging the presence of the hockey players who will arrive this fall.
“I did not know anything about TSU,” he admits. “I really did not know anything. I paid my agent a good chunk of money and he got me a workout here. My dream was to play Division I basketball. I didn’t really care where. They could have sent me to the middle of North Dakota and I wouldn’t have cared.”
Now he spends most of the game on the Tigers bench while being gently serenaded by the Aristocrat of Bands.
“In my high school in Saint-Laurent, I think I was the only white kid in the whole school,” he says. “I liked it. I feel like international people don’t see race in a way.
“My reception here has been great. It’s not the most famous or the biggest school but people have been really nice.”
“What awaits the white Canadians who have answered Duante’ Abercrombie’s call?” I ask Daoust.
“There are some cultural differences,” the Dutch Quebecer says. “The tastes in music. And they’ve probably never experienced Fried Chicken Wednesdays.”
* * *
On March 28, 2024, the Republican governor of Tennessee signed a bill that summarily fired TSU’s entire board of trustees. The action, it was reported at the time, was prompted by “numerous instances of financial and procedural mismanagement uncovered in recent school audits.”
A member of the state House of Representatives named Ryan Williams alleged that a previous appropriation of US$250 million had been “completely blown through.”
Can TSU afford 20 full hockey scholarships and road trips to Alaska? “Not at this time,” says Rep. Williams, who hails from Cookeville, population 34,000, and who serves as the chair of the Finance, Ways and Means Subcommittee. (Chairman Williams played Division II soccer at Carson-Newman University, a Southern Baptist school in eastern Tennessee. Hockey wasn’t an option — Cookeville doesn’t have a rink.)
“They have serious problems and it’s going to take serious changes to right the ship.”
By last fall, TSU’s fiscal crisis had become so serious that the school stopped sending The Aristocrat of Bands to perform at road football games. On Feb. 19, TSU’s interim president, Dwayne Tucker, told the state government that the school was working to “reset the culture” and asked that more than US$150 million that had been appropriated for capital improvements be used to patch the budget hole instead.
If the TSU venture is delayed, or it collapses entirely, Music City still will be far from puckless. This is the home of the Nashville — the marketing people call it “Smashville” — Predators who, in the 25 full seasons since they joined the National Hockey League, have reached the Stanley Cup final once but never have claimed the holy mug.
This season, the Preds are languishing far out of the playoffs, yet their arena in downtown Nashville — across the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame — is filled on a February Saturday, even against the last-place Buffalo Sabres.
“It’s my understanding that TSU needs US$2 million to play hockey next year,” says Bill Wickett, chief marketing officer of the Predators when we chat before the game.
“They’re looking to fundraise that and the Predators very much support this endeavour. However, the Predators and the NHL all preferred a club program before seeing TSU jump into varsity hockey.”
(Players on “club teams” at U.S. universities compete against other schools in their chosen sports but they do not receive athletic scholarships, and they pay their own way or solicit sponsorships for equipment, travel and ice time. Vanderbilt has club hockey. So does the U. of Tennessee.)
“If they jump right into Division I, what will the Predators do?” I ask the CMO.
“We can best support TSU by assisting at fundraising events, by using our games to give them visibility, and also by working with them in the ice facilities that we control,” Wickett says. “We’re less likely to write cheques than we are to make our facilities and resources available to TSU.
“Duante’ is doing all he can to get college hockey off the ground at Tennessee State. It’s not a secret that we’re trying to grow the game in minority communities, and we think this is a great step no matter what the composition of the proposed roster looks like.
“This is going to take time. It’s going to take a long time.”
* * *
On a January night that promises snow, Duante’ Abercrombie takes in a junior game in the unsuspected hockey hotbed of Odenton, Md. The Maryland Black Bears are hosting the New Hampshire Mountain Kings of the North American Hockey League, a truly nationwide circuit the franchises of which include the Fairbanks (Alaska) Ice Dogs, the Odessa (Texas) Jackalopes, the New Mexico Ice Wranglers and the Colorado Grit.
The grandstand is packed and raucous, and the building pulses with hockey’s unique energy, a spirit that one day soon — despite the forces arrayed against it — might come to a red-brick college campus in Nashville, Tenn.
The coach has come to look at a couple of players on the New Hampshire squad and to check in with the compact, scrappy captain of the Black Bears, a 20-year-old from Long Island, N.Y., named Tyler Stern who was one of the first players to say Yes to Tennessee State.
“I’m already a minority in hockey,” the future Tiger says with a smile. “I’m Jewish.”
“Some of the players I have contacted have committed to TSU, some have committed to other teams, but I am proud of all of them,” Abercrombie says. “Just because they don’t commit to us doesn’t mean that I am bitter.”
“To me, it’s about being first,” says Stern. “It is about a shared enthusiasm for what we want the culture of hockey at Tennessee State to be. I look at this as, ‘OK, so this is what my college journey is going to look like.’
“I don’t fear anything. I feel that in 2025 we should all be able to get along.”
“Why don’t you just ask Oprah Winfrey for the money,” I suggest to Abercrombie in the Odenton grandstand, as the Black Bears and Mountain Kings battle for the puck below.
“If I can get Oprah or Magic Johnson or Snoop Dogg or the Obamas to show up and say, ‘This is something we support,’ and give money, I would welcome that,” he replies. “But first I want everyone to know that we are doing this, and I want them to feel like they are a part of this.
“It’s on us to build the relationship first, to make this so big that someone like Oprah WANTS to be a part of it.”