When Lucas Rotondo (BSM '24) was invited to participate in a sport research project supporting Indigenous hockey players, he didn't realize he was taking the first step on an unexpected journey.
Sport Management master's students Lucas Rotondo (left) and Nick Lacoste (right) worked with the Manitoba Aboriginal Sports and Research Council to better understand, and support, the experiences of Indigenous hockey players.
Then an undergraduate Sport Management student, Rotondo was eager to develop his technical skills. Beyond leading him to his current master's program at Brock, however, the experience also proved to be an opportunity for personal growth.
"Those opportunities allowed me to reconnect with a significant part of who I am, which was so impactful for me," says Rotondo, a member of the Michipicoten First Nation. "And as I look back, those were important moments in my personal learning and healing as well."
Led by Assistant Professor of Sport Management Taylor McKee, Rotondo and fellow Sport Management master's student Nick Lacoste (BSM '23) recently completed the project "Making us whole again: Developing culturally appropriate, evidence driven evaluations for Indigenous sport organizations in Canada."
The team collaborated with the Manitoba Aboriginal Sports and Research Council (MASRC) to develop ways of gathering, analyzing and presenting Indigenous hockey data to better understand Indigenous athlete experiences and how to support Indigenous hockey in Manitoba. This work was supported by Mitacs through the Mitacs Accelerate program.
"Most evaluations have been led by non-Indigenous government agencies and third parties whose sport development goals may not align with Indigenous organizations," McKee says. "These metrics have also often been used to act for Indigenous communities rather than to work with them through respectful collaboration."
The project builds on earlier research, funded by the federal government through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, in which McKee and his team collaborated with Indigenous sport organizations to create evaluations in line with Indigenous Data Sovereignty.
Under the leadership of the MASRC, Rotondo and Lacoste attended major Indigenous sporting events across Canada, including the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships (NAHC) and the North American Indigenous Games.
Lacoste, whose academic background is in statistics and data management, tracked live statistics for Team Manitoba games at the NAHC. He shared visuals and data reports with the coaches at each intermission and submitted full game reports each day to both the men's and women's teams. He also provided video coaching during intermissions to players and coaches. Both Team Manitoba teams won gold at last year's NAHC.
With Rotondo's help, Lacoste produced an interactive map of high-level women and men Indigenous hockey players across North America. The tool has since been used to promote local success stories and has been adopted by Hockey Indigenous as part of the sport organization's database work.
"The interactive map celebrates the breadth of Indigenous hockey talent across Canada," Lacoste says. "Parents and athletes have used this map to learn about local Indigenous hockey connections."
For the major Indigenous sporting events, Rotondo drawing upon his passion for communications took photographs, produced videos of the athletes in action and publicized the games on social media.
His photos were published in MASRC's History of Excellence book, and he helped process nominations for the Tom Longboat Awards, an annual recognition of outstanding Indigenous athletes in honour of the record-breaking long-distance runner Tom Longboat.
Rotondo's work paved the way for him to complete a year-long communications contract with the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Multiculturalism and the Ontario Ministry of Sport before starting his master's program.
Lacoste, who is wrapping up his master's and expects to be finished this fall, now tracks and monitors hockey policies for the Ontario Hockey Federation and is an Assistant to the Governance Advisor at Hockey Canada.
He says he has "a much greater sense of inequities and privilege" in sport which are largely based on race, class and access to sport opportunities that has directly influenced how he approaches policy work in Canadian hockey spaces.
"Before the Mitacs project, I felt that I was destined to work in the NHL, to work with the biggest success stories," he says. "While that door hasn't closed, I now feel more motivated to work on supporting safe and positive hockey experiences for the 99 per cent who haven't made it to the top."
