NHL’s new initiative focuses on improving outreach to Latino audience

This article was written by Maria Fernanda Pavanello, who is part of the Professional Hockey Writers Association x To Hockey With Love Mentorship Program. This program pairs aspiring writers with established members of the association across North America to create opportunities for marginalized people that do not traditionally get published on larger platforms covering hockey.

To Hockey With Love is a weekly newsletter covering a range of topics in hockey – from the scandals of the week to providing a critical analysis of the sport.

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During the fifth edition of L’Attitude, an annual Latino business-based conference that took place last September in San Diego, Arizona Coyotes’ President and CEO Xavier Gutierrez shared a story of his first Board of Governors meeting, when he explained his business plan to NHL’s Commissioner Gary Bettman using a hockey metaphor. He mentioned Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote about skating to where the puck is going, not where it’s been, and told Bettman that, in the U.S., the puck was going Latino.

The sentiment resonated with the crowd at the panel on the economics of sports, which Gutierrez moderated during the conference. The panel was made up of three other professional sports executives and provided data to support the message of how Latino fans and athletes are essential to the future of the sports industry.

The Coyotes are one of the teams leading the NHL today in efforts to reach out to Latino and Hispanic communities, and for them, everything starts at the very top. Gutierrez joined the team in 2020 to become the NHL’s first Latino team President and CEO. He was hired by the league’s first Latino owner Alex Meruelo, who had purchased the Coyotes the year before. “It goes beyond just the fact that they [hold these positions], to their professional and personal mission to open doors for other Latinos and how they see themselves and their responsibility as business owners and as leaders,” said Nadia Rivera, Coyotes’ Chief of Impact Officer.

On the community side, Gutierrez built the Coyotes’ Community Impact Department and the Arizona Coyotes Foundation with a focus on underserved, minority, and diverse communities. For programs like the Estrella of the Month, the club partners with Univision Arizona and the Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to identify and promote small, Latino-owned businesses during games and on their social channels.

The team prides itself on its work building partnerships within the Latino community as being very organic. “We just get invited to participate in lots of things that are directly connecting our engagement with the Latino community,” said Rivera. “We work with the Hispanic Business Student Association [at Arizona State University]; Xavier [Gutierrez] goes and speaks to the students, we volunteer with the students and they’ve come to our games; we’re constantly getting these invitations to be part of things, but they stem from our extensive relationship building in the Latino community.”

When it comes to the hockey side of things, the Coyotes are continuously developing strategies to grow the game and the fan base. “Hockey is an expensive game, and access to this when you’re at the youth level is a big issue here in Arizona because we don’t have ice readily available,” Rivera explained. In 2021, the team launched a learn to skate in Spanish program called Los Howlitos, where kids have the chance to get on the ice for the first time in their lives. Off the ice, the Coyotes are working with the NHL to build street hockey leagues in Arizona, and hosting clinics at schools, Boys & Girls Clubs, and other programs on a regular basis. “We take hockey to them. This is just street hockey, but you have to start somewhere. We’re trying to figure out how we overcome those hurdles and take the game to the kids so that they can grow up with at the very least knowing what hockey is,” Rivera said.

The NHL Street program was launched during the 2022 Honda NHL All-Star Weekend, in Las Vegas, and focuses on getting people in non-traditional NHL markets and diverse communities involved with hockey through a more local and affordable version of the game. The Vegas Golden Knights were at the forefront of the launch as hosts of the league event and are currently building their second ball hockey rink in the city – the first one was at a Boys & Girls Club whose attendees are predominantly Hispanic.

Six years ago, when the team started to raise awareness of the NHL coming to Vegas, they made a point of going into different markets and reaching out to everybody. “We have a large Latino market [in Vegas]. In the beginning, [we created] our fan development piece of it, where we were out there teaching the game,” said Kim Frank, President of the VGK Foundation. “In the last couple of years, we’ve had a Hispanic heritage jersey, and with that, we also provide money towards a scholarship with the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Nevada.” Each year the Golden Knights continue to build into different areas like the Spanish broadcast and other programs in the community.

Other NHL teams, such as the Anaheim Ducks, the Dallas Stars and the Florida Panthers, have also been successful in deploying multicultural marketing strategies and engaging the Latino market. The league has chosen the Latino community to be a main focus of their recently adopted research initiative, the Club Marketing Pods. The concept came out of the NHL Fan Inclusion Committee (FIC) as an initiative to make sure people working in the NHL, as well as league partners, can fully understand their underrepresented groups and figure out the best ways to present and expand the game to them.

The NHL’s Vice President of Multicultural Engagement and Integration, Jennifer Ekeleme, said this pod structure has been a great opportunity for the league and clubs to be smarter about how they create strategies around engagement and to learn from each other to build and adopt the best practices. They created a curriculum of what would be discussed during the pods, and every month they host an in-depth discussion about what it means to connect with specific communities from different standpoints.

The initiative was first announced by the league in the “Accelerating Diversity & Inclusion” report released last October. Latino and Hispanic groups are at the center of their second round of sessions (the first one focused on the South Asian community) and began meeting around three months ago. For each pod the NHL invites teams, letting them know the tentative curriculum and the schedule of meetings. “Most of them have raised their hand, we have a big participation in the [Latino and Hispanic pod] and people are pretty active in the sessions in terms of asking questions and sharing best practices,” Ekeleme said.

In her role, Ekeleme is making sure the NHL can create more opportunities to get to know each underrepresented group so that the league and the teams can create a framework of engagement to connect with them. The NHL is aware that it will look different for each of those groups and there are many ways and depths of engagement, so they’re taking the time to understand the audience on different levels.

“All of our understanding of research is not going to be just dumped into September 15, through October 15 [during Hispanic Heritage Month],” Ekeleme said. The league doesn’t want to be relegated to talking to a community once a year, the goal is to be able to consistently connect with each group. “Communities know when we’re just doing things for a performative nature. And so that’s why it’s good to get to know your audience in depth because you are building relationships with that, which is what we ultimately want to do.”

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NHL’s new initiative focuses on improving outreach to Latino audience

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