Color of Hockey: Kenya elated by membership into IIHF 

William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and writes about people of color in the sport. Today, he profiles the impact of Kenya being granted International Ice Hockey Federation associate membership on Sept. 26.

Benjamin Mburu says he skates with a little more pride in his stride these days.

The captain of the Kenya Ice Lions is still elated after the East African country was granted associate membership into International Ice Hockey Federation on Sept. 26.

“We've been dreaming of this, we’ve been wanting this,” Mburu said. “So having them admit us was a very big milestone for us because it means more growth, more energy moving forward, more focus and bigger dreams as we proceed.”

Part of the dream is playing in an all-Africa tournament. Kenya’s IIHF admission has reignited conversations on staging an African Nations Cup ice hockey tournament with the Ice Lions and teams representing Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and South Africa in June in Cape Town, South Africa.

Most of the players for Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Egypt live abroad. Kenya and South Africa largely consist of players who live there.

“Kenya becoming a member of IIHF is important for ice hockey on the African continent, for the future growth of the sport,” South African Ice Hockey Federation president Jason Cerff said. “South Africa, as the only country on the continent to be part of the world championships with IIHF, we don’t get a lot of travel to be able to compete because we’re so far away from the rest of the world when it comes to ice hockey.

“For us, it’s so important to have other countries on the continent to compete against on a regular basis instead of a just once-off every single year when our national teams travel overseas.”

Kenya became the fifth African nation in the IIHF, joining Algeria (2019), Morocco (2010), South Africa (1937) and Tunisia (2021). Egypt hopes to gain IIHF membership.

Ice Lions general manager and coach Tim Colby said the IIHF membership proves that Kenya isn’t a hockey anomaly.

“We’re not some outlier. It’s not like when ‘Cool Runnings’ came on and everyone jumped up and said, ‘Wow, look at that, Jamaican bobsled,’” Colby said of the 1993 Disney comedy loosely based on the Jamaican bobsled team debuting at the 1988 Calgary Olympics. “The same thing happened to us -- they compared us to ‘Cool Runnings.’ We’re in it for the long haul and this (IIHF membership) legitimizes that long haul aspect.”

Players and coaches in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, have been preparing to take on their African neighbors and the world for some time.

Limited to three-on-three games because their rink inside Nairobi’s Panari Hotel is square and about one-third of the size of an NHL rink, several Ice Lions players trained in Cape Town in August and participated in full ice games for the first time in a tournament sponsored by the Friendship League, a sports tourism group.

“We did kind of a mini development camp that was tied into a tournament,” said Pete Kamman, a coach from Montana who is founder/director of Elevated Hockey and ran the training sessions with the Kenyans. “Every day was a different theme, and we worked on different skills, from skating to shooting to gameplay and body contact.

“They struggled with that a little bit, but they made some adjustments, and then they ended up winning all the rest of the following games and won the trophy at the end of the week,” Kamman said.

Colby, a Canadian expat living in Nairobi, said being quick studies is a hallmark of Kenyan hockey players.

He traces the roots of ice hockey in Kenya to 2006 when some University of Manitoba students visited for a research project and learned about the ice rink. They brought their hockey gear on a return trip and began showing inquisitive locals how to play.

“It snowballed from there,” Colby said.

The Ice Lions gained international attention in 2018 when Tim Hortons sponsored their trip to Canada where they played with Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon, a moment that Mburu still treasures.

“Getting to skate on the same line, passing to them, it was such an amazing experience,” Mburu said. “It gave us that morale of, ‘Guys, we have done it, so we can actually do it even bigger and better when we get back home.’”

The attention from the skates with Crosby and MacKinnon helped make Kenya a hockey tourism destination. Retired NHL players like Johnny Oduya, a Swede of Kenyan heritage, Bernie Saunders, who became the NHL’s fifth Black player in 1979-80, and Hockey Hall of Famer Viacheslav Fetisov, have made the pilgrimage to play with the Ice Lions.

Now with IIHF membership, Mburu and Colby said there’s more work to do beyond entertaining guests. More fundraising is necessary to help cover cost of IIHF dues, and more recruitment is needed to keep the pipeline of players flowing.

And work on and off the ice is needed to prepare for the pending African Nations Cup.

Kamman said he’s headed to Nairobi in January to help coach the Ice Lions again.

“I'll be running daily practices with the adult Kenyan team, working on couple practices with a group of somewhere between 40 and 50 younger kids,” Kamman said.

Mburu, an architect and former field hockey player who switched to ice in 2015, said he can’t wait to show Kenya, Africa and the rest of world what the Ice Lions can do.

“Hockey is something not easily found on the equator, so for us to be able to do it shows that you can conquer anything you want to,” he said. “We are very, very resilient and learn very fast.

“This means we will come to the hockey world, we want to conquer it and own it,” he said.