We Breed Lions: Confronting Canada's Troubled Hockey Culture

This was a difficult book to read. I was never a hockey coach although I did coach and manage girls soccer for about ten years and where my main negative issues were mainly with parents who to me place too much pressure on their child to achieve forgetting there is also a fun part.

For seven years I did manage boy's house league hockey teams. The coach I worked with had a rough exterior but he knew how to control teenage boys with fairness and when necessary firmness.

During my time as manager, I never experienced any issues with boys treating females badly. While reading this book, I reviewed those years as team manager trying to see if there was a situation where there may have been issues I missed.
Some seasons I did experience players show more who were just out of control and they were placed on my team because the coach I worked with had a reputation of being able to control problem individuals. It was satisfying to us to see change for the better in some of these troubled young men but we also had to accept failure especially one season when they gave us too many problems on one team.

This book is very detailed and graphic in its descriptions of incidents of sexual assault. Some of the cases the reader has probably heard about especially if they live near the municipality or hockey organization involved.

While the issues described are frightening and made me very angry and extremely sympathetic to any female who experienced these events, there seems to a increasingly big effort to change youth hockey for the better.

An index would have made the book much more convenient to use. show less