Changing the face of hockey at tourney featuring countries new to game – Montreal

Don Anderson, president of the Jamaica Olympic Ice Hockey Federation, is under no illusions about the depth of hockey culture and history in Montreal.

“I know,” he said. “They say if you cut a Canadian you’ll find hockey blood running out of him.”

He’s in Montreal with members of Jamaica’s senior men’s ice hockey team, as well as three others representing non-traditional hockey nations for the 2025 Challenger Series, to prove that they too are capable of elite level hockey.

This is the second year they’re having the tournament. On Thursday morning, all four teams skated for an hour.

“Last year we kicked off the Challenger Series with the initial three founding members — Jamaica, Lebanon and Puerto Rico, and then Greece came in halfway through the year,” explained Scott Vargas, Puerto Rico Ice Hockey Association founder.

“We have all four teams for the full season this year.”

The countries are associate members of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), but they can’t compete in world championships since they lack proper ice hockey infrastructure, like rinks.

With these competitions they hope to build skill in the meantime, and go even further.

“We’re going to look at expanding a little bit more,” said Lebanon Men’s National Ice Hockey team general manager Ricardo Tabet. “Get more teams involved as well and grow the sport like that.”

For this year’s series, which started in Chicago, each team will play six games — twice against each team. It concludes this weekend in Montreal at the Pierrefonds Sportplexe. The championship game is on Sunday between the two top teams.

Jamaica is the defending champion.

“Well, you know, we’re a sport-mad country,” joked Anderson, “and if we can make it in bobsled, why not ice hockey.”

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He has been at the forefront of the Caribbean island’s bobsled development, serving on the board of the Jamaica Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation.

Their 1988 Olympic bobsled team famously inspired the 1993 movie, Cool Runnings, about the challenges and the smashing of stereotypes.

Anderson points to well-known NHL players of Jamaican heritage as proof that they too can excel at winter sports.

“We have people like (former Montreal Canadiens) P.K. Subban and all those guys who are pioneers in this thing as far as we are concerned,” he reasoned.

Vargas added that most, if not all the players on these teams live in Canada and the U.S., so this exercise is also about inclusion and proving that the game is theirs too.

“It’s about the diaspora and it’s about the nation,” he pointed out. “We have to build hockey in our home nations.”

He said that the more people from non-traditional hockey see themselves excel in the sport, the more youth will want to take on the sport, make it their own and take their place in hockey history.

 

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