The GTHL and You Can Play

COVID-19 changed my life … in the best way possible. Strange, I know.

I was out to my family and close friends for a couple of years before the
pandemic hit. But I lived in this world where I was running around, pushing
deep thoughts to the back of my mind, saying, “I’ll deal with that later.”
It was a fear of combining my personal life and my professional life.

But when COVID hit, I got to go home to Victoria. The world stopped, and so
did my life as I knew it. The phone wasn’t ringing and the emails weren’t
coming. The things that kept me occupied. It gave me the chance to sit down
and have honest conversations.

I remember talking to Tyson Barrie, who was a client of mine and a good
friend going back to our days growing up on Vancouver Island, and saying,
“Hey, you know what? I think I’m going to come out.”

I thought maybe I’d just do an Instagram post, something simple. But Tyson
and some other important people in my life thought I could really do
something impactful, that I could be a face for the queer community in the
game, because it was something hockey desperately needed.

So that started my journey. I began coming out to others, to big names in
the game who I had crossed paths with through the years. When I told Connor
McDavid, his response was simply, “Okay, that doesn’t matter.” I got a text
from Sidney Crosby, who congratulated me and let me know he was there if I
ever needed anything.

On Nov. 5, 2020, with the help of an article in The Athletic by Pierre
Lebrun, I came out publicly.

Without discrediting how important my coming out was for my mental health,
nobody really cared. It didn’t change how the hockey community saw me.
Instead, it was … “Hey, you’re Bayne. You don’t judge us on who we date or
who we’re attracted to. So why would we judge you?”

I got my foot in the door with Hockey Canada as an intern in the finance
department in 2009 (I’m not much of a numbers guy, but it was the only
position available at the time). From there I joined the hockey operations
department in 2011, and my first assignment was the 2012 World Juniors in
Alberta. I was travelling the world with Team Canada, riding these highs of
winning gold at the Olympics, the IIHF World Championship and the World
Juniors. And I was hanging around with a who’s-who of hockey,…