R unning a non-profit — even one that deals with big-time sports stars — is a largely unglamorous venture. There’s a lot of navigating meticulous tax laws and answering emails in your bathrobe before you get dressed and start work for your “real” job. But the You Can Play Project has always represented something deeply personal to Brian Kitts and Glenn Witman, who co-founded the endeavor with Patrick Burke in 2012. You Can Play has worked with teams in every professional league in Canada and the United States, and the organization’s partnership with the NHL was the first in the world to see every club from a pro league represented by an ambassador speaking on behalf of LGBTQ+ fans and athletes. The group was the first to address LGBTQ+ issues in sports at the United Nations and YCP is a recipient of the International Olympic Committee’s Sport Beyond Borders Award for service to sport. All of this has been achieved in pursuit of YCP’s stated goal of making sports a safer and more inclusive space for people who — like Kitts and Witman — belong to the LGBTQ+ community.
You Can Play hit its 10-year anniversary in 2022 and Witman and Kitts are still plugging away, figuring out how the organization can best achieve its goals in a social landscape that — though improved since we first heard NHLers say, “If you can play, you can play” — still has a long way to go.
The two founders carved some time out of their hectic days — in addition to all their non-profit work, Kittsruns an amphitheater and Witman flips houses — to speak with Sportsnet about the origins of the organization, the power of allyship and inclusivity, and the work still to be done.
SPORTSNET: Most people recall that You Can Play came about in the aftermath of Brendan Burke — the gay son of NHL executive Brian Burke and brother of Patrick — dying in a 2010 car accident just months after he came out publicly in the hopes of combating homophobia in sports. What were the specific circumstances that got you two and Patrick collaborating?
KITTS: I had worked for the Colorado Avalanche [as senior director, marketing and communications] and knew Glenn from his work with an all-gay hockey team. Glenn had actually reached out to Patrick about speaking at a big event in Colorado. Patrick came out, did the talk and, to make a long story short, we went out for beers and said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this.” That’s how it happened, purely by fate, the three of us being in the same place at the same time. We had no intention of starting a non-profit; we thought we could probably get several athletes to say they were okay having a gay teammate. It was limited to that.
WITMAN: The event happened to be at the University of Denver and we had a panel of gay athletes. I invited Patrick to come speak and be the moderator, he had done this across the country. The University of Denver hockey team and a lot of other athletes were there and at the end of it, I just remember several athletes coming up to Patrick and saying, “I don’t want to be that guy saying homophobic slurs and it could be my best friend sitting next to me [is] gay.”
At that point, I really knew we had something. Patrick was like, “I think I could get one person from every NHL team to say, ‘If you can play, you can play.’ Brian and I were like, “That sounds like the best idea ever.”
Do you both have sports backgrounds?
KITTS: I had worked for Kroenke Sports [and Entertainment, which owns the NHL’s Avalanche, NBA’s Denver Nuggets and MLS’s Colorado Rapids]. I sort of approached this from the perspective of front offices, knowing what I thought coaches and general managers and, frankly, sponsors and other people who were tangentially attached to sports would think about what we were doing.
WITMAN: I grew up going to sports, playing sports, I was on a travel hockey team pretty much all year round. I also played football and baseball at my high school; I played college hockey. I’ve been around the locker room and for me, I was not out, and lying to my friends and family and teammates, it sucked — there’s no other way to put it. It’s the worst feeling ever lying to everybody. So that’s my background. I came out when I was 28 years old, this great cloud of stress was lifted and then I had this opportunity to be with You Can Play. I just knew, if I could help some younger kids or even adults be themselves and stay in the sports world and make the sports world safer, I knew that would be a good thing.
What do you remember about seeing Brian Burke — who is almost a caricature of a certain type of tough-guy bravado — publicly put his arm around his son when Brendan came out in late 2009?
WITMAN: He said, “I stand by my son with an axe.” I was like, “Oh my god, this is unbelievable!” I fully remember that like it was yesterday. We had been in touch with Brendan [around that time] because I had this team of gay hockey all-stars from around the country and I think he had been chatting with one or two of those guys and I reached out to him after he came out and we kind of had a dialogue. He was going to end up playing with our team at some point [we hoped] and then obviously he passed away like two months later. It was just so tragic.
His family took his energy and what Brendan stated he wanted to do, which is make the sports world a safer place and just make it more accepting. His family just kind of ran with that [along] with us.
KITTS: I think what Brian [Burke] and the Burke family did — the entire family is just terrific —plays out around the world every single day with families being supportive. That said, there are still plenty of places around the world where [homosexuality] is still illegal and families are not supportive. The impact of the teams [like the Toronto Maple Leafs club Burke was running at the time] showing up at the funeral, I think that is the first time we actually thought, “This is something that goes beyond a family.”
[It’s rare to see the momentum] we saw when Brian and the Leafs and others started to step up. [Former NHL defenceman] Brooks Orpik, before he really [officially] joined up with [You Can Play] said, “It’s time for the image of athletes being homophobic to end.” Everybody made assumptions about athletes that weren’t necessarily true, but it takes something like Brendan’s death and guys like Brooks and Brian Burke and Patrick and lots of other allies to really step up and say it’s time for us to collectively change this dialogue.
Thankfully, vocal allies of the LGBTQ+ community have become a lot more common in the past decade, but it’s easy to forget that wasn’t the case when You Can Play began enlisting NHLers to stand up and use their platform for something good.
KITTS: That’s where I think it’s incredibly important to give them credit. None of this happens without one or two of those guys stepping up and saying, “I’m willing to say this on camera.” I won’t speak for Glenn and Patrick, but I was scared to death we were going to do this and we’d get a couple guys to say yes and then it would be over — because that doesn’t change a lot. It’s kind of an, “Okay, that’s nice” type of scenario. But that’s not what happened here and I think there was a really nice groundswell that picks up at the pro levels and trickles down into the minor leagues and into young players and their parents and then it starts moving to other sports. That’s where you start to see social change really happen. Like I said, I was scared. I would have been so disappointed, but I wouldn’t have been surprised, and so my surprise was a pleasant one.
WITMAN: The first video we did, getting the 12 all-stars to make that video, that was just unbelievable. I’m from Philly and it had two Philly guys on there [Claude Giroux and Scott Hartnell] and then some of my other favourite players. That video made me cry and then some of the other ones that started coming in, too. I mean the first two years, I was a mess. It was just so touching that you had allies sticking up for you. That wasn’t the case [previously]. It felt so good.
How do you feel things have changed 10 years on in terms of everyday people being aware and inclusive?
WITMAN: I’ve been playing hockey my whole life and I’ve been in locker rooms pretty much three or four times a week, even today. I think it has changed. I don’t hear as many slurs, but I’m also playing with people in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
I was in the locker room [about five years ago] one day at lunch, I’m getting ready to go on the ice and this younger kid comes in, doesn’t have a jersey and says, “Does anyone have a jersey?” One of the guys throws him a pink jersey and he goes, “I’m not wearing that f—in’ jersey, I don’t’ want to look like a f–.” I’m like “Oh no!” It’s five or six years into You Can Play; I’ve got Pride Tape on my stick. So I go on the ice, I play the guy really hard, he didn’t score any frickin’ goals. I was on him, like, boom! [After the game] I pull him out of the locker room and I’m like, “Hey man, you see this tape on my stick? It’s Pride Tape. Have you heard of Hockey is for Everyone with the NHL?” I went into this whole thing and this kid is like, “Oh my God, I didn’t mean it. All the kids on my high-school team, this is how we all talk.” Anyway, next thing you know this kid becomes an ally. It was like two weeks later he had Pride Tape on his stick and we took a picture with a bunch of guys in the locker room.
KITTS: I look at it more from the professional, organized level, because that’s where you start to see some change, too. Twelve years ago, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. When you get leagues saying, “Yes we will do Pride nights,” that’s fine because that’s a [specific] sort of fan outreach. But when, behind the scenes, they are providing counselling for athletes, when they are providing media help for athletes who have used a slur, when they talk about changing rules to prevent homophobic language, that’s when you start to see things are really changing. The NCAA had never had [that kind of messaging to athletes]: “Don’t say this.” I think there’s a conscious [effort] across sports to change the behavior of fans and players. Beyond that, there’s also [more awareness in general]. When we started working with professional athletes, a lot of this stuff had just never occurred to them. I remember we did a video with [NHLer] Cal Clutterbuck and he was tripping over [saying] “LGBTQ” because it [wasn’t as common in the everyday lexicon at that time]. I think this raises awareness, not just of who’s in the locker room next to you, but of people in the community in general and their allies and their families and friends.
It sounds like you believe the actions taken by teams are now going beyond tokenism.
KITTS: When we do outreach to teams, there are a lot of times where we get the discussion about authenticity. Yes, we can do a Pride night, but we’d rather do something that reaches into the community that’s probably a bit more quiet. When you see somebody like [Avalanche captain] Gabe Landeskog working with individual high school teams, making videos with them, that’s much more impactful on that one-on-one sport level than lots of Pride nights. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do one over the other, but I think there are ways to drive this that are coming from teams, leagues, individual athletes and agents.
WITMAN: It’s more than one night, it’s a whole year now, 365, what can we do? Not every team is there yet, but more and more teams are asking, “Besides the Pride night, what can we do? Let’s be in the Pride parade, let’s do some community stuff.”
KITTS: One of the things we’ve seen at the team level is a real effort to include LQBTQ employees and make sure they are as valued as others. I think this is all happening in the context of diversity and inclusion that includes Black Lives Matter and Asian Pacific discussions. All this can happen at the same time.
WITMAN: It’s still this basic message of, let’s respect each other.
What can the average fan do to make sure we keep moving in the right direction, and what’s on the horizon for You Can Play?
KITTS: I think you should go from a period of acceptance to actual advocacy. You can do that. During COVID, we took a look at some of our programs and realized we haven’t really done what we set out to do in the first place. There is still plenty of casual homophobia. If Glenn is still hearing it on his pickup teams, we’re not done yet. I think we’ve made really good progress, but this sort of social change takes years and years. You sort of solidify your basics, but then move to different types of inclusion and different types of awareness.
WITMAN: We also, over COVID, took a step back and we re-did our coaches program. We’re making it more accessible [including online training], where people from grassroots levels on up can kind of just go and learn. We’re still getting it going, but I think the next 10 years are going to see us training way more coaches and making more inroads into beer league or lower leagues and really generating more allies.
KITTS: We’re also re-engaging with new generations of athletes. Ten years ago, when we started out, there was this wave of early support and I think athletes, generally, are still on board with what we do, but we haven’t asked anything of anybody who has only been in any of the pro leagues for a year or two. So I think we’ll start going back to them and saying, “There’s a whole new set of kids who are now 20 years old who were 10 years old when we started this, they would rather hear your voice as somebody who’s [closer to their age].” I think that goes across the board, whether it’s media, whether it’s leagues; you have to find ways to reinvent yourself and keep your message relevant.
The cool thing about what we see is, over the course of time, people aren’t afraid to work with us anymore, they aren’t afraid to have this discussion. There was a lot of [hesitancy early on]: “We’re sort of interested in LGBTQ issues, but we don’t want to be the first to take that step.” The very first talk we did was at the American Hockey Coaches Association meetings in Florida and we had a couple GMs come up afterwards and say, “My daughter is a lesbian, thanks for doing this.” Turns out lots of people know people who are part of the LGBTQ+ community, but there hasn’t been a way to talk about it. I think that initial fear has gone away and that’s gratifying, too.
