Color of Hockey: Kibui teaching game's basics through videos

William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog for the past eight years. Douglas joined NHL.com in March 2019 and writes about people of color in the game. Today, he profiles Chris Kibui, founder of Hockey Tutorial.

For Chris Kibui, the journey began watching "D2: The Mighty Ducks" as a teenager.
"Seeing the Black guy (actor Kenan Thompson) on there that did the knuckle puck, seeing Mendoza (actor Mike Vitar), who was Latin American, I'm like, 'OK, brown people play hockey, I can do it too,'" Kibui said. "I know the power of film and video, because watching that silly little Disney movie completely altered the course of my entire life and those around me."
And how. The Nairobi, Kenya, native who lives in Cambridge, England, has gone from a movie-watcher to novice player to the content creator of Hockey Tutorial, a multimedia platform that provides skating and playing tips, product reviews and stylishly produced motivational videos from around the world.

Since its founding in 2008, Hockey Tutorial's 511 videos have generated millions of YouTube views worldwide, attracted 149,000 subscribers to its YouTube Channel, amassed nearly 69,000 Instagram and 28,000 Facebook followers and hundreds of thousands of devotees to Hockey Tutorial's website.
"I didn't really have any insight on how long this would last," Kibui said. "All I knew that it was something that I enjoyed and provided that people found relevance in it, I would do it as long as I could."
The 31-year-old's operation has grown from just a guy with a camera to a six-person team that worked to capture hockey stories in Kenya, the Himalayas, all of western Europe, most of central Europe, and cities large and small in the United States and Canada.
He said shooting videos in so-called non-traditional hockey countries are a critical part of his mission as "an ambassador to the greatest game on Earth" by highlighting its diversity.
"Until we start showing people that have different color skin, different facial features that also love the game just as much as the Americans and the Canadians do, you can't really expect more people to adopt the sport," he said.
That philosophy is what convinced the Hockey Foundation, a nonprofit group that uses the sport to build character, improve the quality of life and empower children in less fortunate regions of the world, to sponsor a Hockey Tutorial video trip to India in 2016.
"He's built a great following because he's made hockey accessible and made people feel that hockey is accessible to them," said Adam Sherlip, foundation's creator. "Even as something as simple as a video on how to stop. Some of those videos were trying to bring hockey to people that didn't have access or didn't know where to start, all around the world. When he arrived in India, people knew his videos in that hockey community."

Growing up in East London, Kibui didn't put on a pair of skates until he was 16. Getting around the rink was hard. Getting help and tips from more experienced skaters at his local rink was harder, he said.
"I quickly discovered that all of the people that were really good skaters normally were quite older than me and, at the time, did not want to spend two minutes to help the newbie learn how to get on his edges on the ice," he said.
That's when Kibui had an idea.
"I thought, 'There's got to be other people in this position,'" he said. "So instead of having them go through what I did, I thought to myself, 'When I learn how to stop, I'm going to show other people how to stop.' So we filmed a video, and it's just grown from that."
He learned how to play hockey by watching NHL games and movies.
"I got myself a stick, a puck I could use off the ice and spent a lot of time stick handling," he said. "Then I got a goal and then I used to practice shooting. I just tried to develop the basic skill at home, and then I went in and just started playing."

Kibui's avocation became his vocation. He quit his day job at Apple to dedicate himself to the Hockey Tutorial website and videos that his friend, Dan Fry, began helping him shoot.
"Being an immigrant is something that definitely added to it," Kibui said. "When you have to move from country to country, you have to be adaptable. Doing something that made me uncomfortable or that bared risk was never something that I was completely alien to. It was like, 'Okay, it's either going to work or it won't.' If I eliminate the factor of a safety net, then I have no choice but to make this successful."
Kibui hasn't forgotten how "D2: The Mighty Ducks" inspired him to get in the game.
"That's why I put so much seriousness in the content we put out," he said. "If that movie did that for me, why can't the videos I'm doing help push people into doing something that they might fall in love with?"
The only downside of Hockey Tutorial's success? It gets in the way of Kibui's hockey.
"At the start, when things were kind of starting to grow, 2014 to 2017, I was playing a lot of hockey and I was able to get a lot better than I was when I first started," he said. "What's slowly happening now is I'm playing less and less and that's just because of the amount of time that we need to produce the content we produce."