Hockey players in Nova Scotia are considering wearing neck guards more regularly, following Adam Johnson’s death last weekend that rocked the hockey community.
Sporting goods stores, such as Sportswheels in Lower Sackville, N.S., have seen a rise in neck guard sales this week.
“Even just today, a lady came in and bought one for her husband,” Jamie Munroe, a salesperson at the store, says.
“It’s kind of brought it back to light again, about the importance of safety and obviously if you’re skating on ice with giant blades on the bottom of your feet, you know, any piece of material that you can have to protect you against that’s good.”
Some hockey teams have started mandating neck guards.
“If they can make them mandatory to wear visors, I can’t see why they can’t make it mandatory to wear neck guards,” Munroe says.
For some players, like Conor Shortall with the Cape Breton Eagles, wearing a neck guard is second nature.
“I was doing a battle one time in front of the net with another player and he ended up falling over,” Shortall says.
“His skate came up really high and was around my neck area and I was lucky to have a neck guard on.”
However, for other players beyond the age of junior hockey, neck guards are a thing of the past. Adam Shtern says he hasn’t worn one for four to five years.
“You’re not gonna really tell these guys, like full-grown adults, what to do,” Shtern says, gesturing at the rink of older players behind him.
“But if the NHL players look good — you know, a little Tomas Plekanec turtleneck style — then maybe I’ll rock one, too.”
More and more NHL players have been speaking out on the neck guard issue. In a Facebook post, Pittsburgh Penguins defenceman, Erik Karlsson, says he’s going to try a neck guard out for the foreseeable future.
“If you can wear a small piece of equipment to hopefully prevent something like that again, I think that’s a win,” he says in a statement.
Another professional player sporting a neck guard on the ice is Washington Capitals’ right winger, T.J. Oshie, who says he’s wearing it for his kids.
“I think it’s definitely a great move by them to enforce neck guards and I think it’ll help younger kids also realize that it’s definitely an important piece of equipment to wear,” Shortall says.
In Bedford, even casual players at the HRM 4-Pad say they are considering wearing a neck guard more often.
“I usually didn’t wear a neck guard when I came out here, and I always wore on my regular season games, because like here I felt it was more casual,” Lewis Jarvie says.
“But then, after thinking about it over the weekend I was like ‘it’s still hockey, and a lot can happen.’”