Questions & Answers with Esther Madziya

If you’re a working media member that has covered Canada’s National Women’s
Team over the last four years, you know the name Esther Madziya.

But if you’re not and you don’t, you should.

A Hockey Canada communications manager, Madziya was part of the staff with
the Olympic gold medal-winning team at Beijing 2022, sandwiched around a
pair of IIHF Women’s World Championship gold medals, spending weeks and
months on end in bubbles and quarantines during the COVID-19 pandemic, away
from family and friends, with that singular golden goal in mind.

Outside of her Team Canada work, Madziya is an integral part of the Hockey
Canada family, and was recognized for her contributions with the Hal Lewis
Award as the organization’s staff person of the year for the 2018-19
season.

To celebrate National Women and Girls in Sports Day and Black History
Month, HockeyCanada.ca sat down with Madziya to talk about her journey and
how the industry has evolved for minority women.

HC: How did you get your start in sports media?

EM: I went to SAIT [the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in
Calgary] and took the broadcast journalism program. The program has evolved
since then, but it was called CTSR – Cinema, Stage, Television and Radio.
And then you could specialize in whatever you wanted to do.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do at school. Way back when, I wanted to get
into accounting, which is not my jam at all, but I always liked sports. And
I thought, ‘You know what, maybe I want to get into sports.’ So I took the
broadcast program at SAIT, with the hope of getting into sports broadcasting
and one day maybe being on TSN.

I ended up getting a job in radio. I did a practicum in Lethbridge, which
is my hometown, at the radio station. The station also had the broadcast
rights to Lethbridge Hurricanes games, so I was covering the intermission
reports and updating scores and stats, and it just evolved from there.

HC: What was the landscape like in sports media for women when you
came out of university?

EM: At that the time, there weren’t a lot of women in sports. There was
also not a lot of diversity, in broadcasting and in sports in particular.

Growing up, my parents always said, ‘No matter what happens, you are going
to have to work harder than the next person….