Mississauga Steelheads: At the Mercy of Hockey Culture

Problems in Mississauga

There are multiple issues with the team that they can’t control. The arena is not placed in an ideal area, Mississauga is a huge city but with multiple and spread-out population centers, and the Toronto Maple Leafs are a much bigger and dominant force to focus on instead of the Steelheads. All are popular reasons that are spread around when talking about attendance issues, even if I don’t believe all of them. But if you were looking at local teams that take up attendance away from the Steelheads, you should look more into the Raptors 905 and various soccer teams in League One than the Maple Leafs.

The issue comes as hockey is having a hard time adjusting to attracting new people from various backgrounds. Since beating out cricket as the nation’s most popular sport, hockey has always relied on its dominant stance of being integrated into Canadian culture. If you were moving to Canada from another nation, hockey would be the easiest way to assimilate into that culture. It’s still something that happens even in Mississauga.

But with so many recent sporting events happening to move Canada forward, hockey’s dominance in Canadian culture is starting to erode and the powers that are trying to keep it powerful are squandering every chance they have to improve. Hockey Canada over the summer has shown that it will protect its clients and its clients have to fit a mold. Rich white men.

Competing Sports

In Mississauga, the three sports that have been growing with a lot of influence are tennis, soccer, and basketball. Bianca Andreescu, someone born in Mississauga has gained prevalence recently by winning championships and winning the Grand Slam US Open. Soccer has gained massive traction this past year in getting into the FIFA World Cup with a very likable and diverse team that is represented by people who are from a lot of different places around the world also the women’s team won the 2020 Olympic gold medals in Tokyo.  The Toronto Raptors inspired a nation in 2019 when they won the NBA championship and did it with likable characters. Their farm team plays at the same arena as the Steelheads which makes for competition in the same region.

What is inspiring about the Mississauga Steelheads? Why should someone who moved from India care about hockey or the Steelheads when you have the Raptors 905 or various soccer teams? It doesn’t make it better than the Steelheads haven’t made a good effort to try to reach out to these communities as well.

Chances Blown

A great example of these missed opportunities for the Steelheads was earlier this week. Diwali was the past week and there are over 60,000 people who have immigrated from India alone. Not everyone from the country celebrates the holiday but there is still a great number that does. The Steelheads have no record of doing anything special to celebrate with the population or doing anything. Again, why should a community care about the Steelheads when the Steelheads don’t do anything to make them care? Mississauga is a city with 375,000 immigrants and most don’t come from a nation where hockey is well-documented or cared about.

Now it’s easy to look at the situation and say ship the team, but that doesn’t fix an overall problem that plagues hockey in this nation. Even before the pandemic, OHL attendance numbers have been slowly going down and while it’s not alarming, it’s still a trend. Hockey hasn’t grown in this country for years and now the United States has more reported players than Canada for the first time in history.

Looking Forward

This is a problem that the OHL and Hockey Canada need to look into to try to appeal to the sport to people of different backgrounds. The Steelheads are the perfect team to try to fix the problem since it’s located in the most diverse city in the country. Will something happen? Likely not as people who are important to hockey’s growth have historically been much more reactive than proactive and it shows.

What are your thoughts on the Mississauga Steelheads? Let us know in the comments below!