Meet Meghan:
Meghan is a native of Danvers, Massachusetts who has achieved sustained success at all levels of her hockey career in international and collegiate play. Meghan graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she majored in biology and was a member of the women's hockey team where she won three national championships. She went on to be an Olympic and professional athlete after he college. With Team USA she went three Olympic medals, including the first Olympic gold in 20 years where she led the US Olympic hockey team as Captain. As a member of the US Women's National Hockey Team since 2007, Meghan won seven IIHF Women's World Championships.
A major topic in today's world is diversity and inclusion, can you tell our listeners how you decided to take a leader leadership role in this space?
For me, I think about a lot of different factors in my life, and kind of in the world, in general, that led me towards making this part of my everyday. In general, all of us right now are eager to be a part of a world or a company or an organization that is more diverse and more inclusive and to do that we need to seek systemic change. That's a change in behavior, culture, attitudes and we all know that there's a lot of challenges that lie within seeing those changes. For me, my passion and commitment towards all of this started back in 2017, when I was able, alongside my teammates to lead a successful strike by our national team against USA hockey, which is our national governing body of hockey at the time, for gender-equitable treatment for women in the sport of hockey, and in our program. That was a long battle, we learned a lot, we discussed changes privately with USA hockey behind the scenes that we wanted to see and to make in our program and we weren't able to make any progress with them so we came up with a very public boycott. It's quite a long story, but we were able to make some truly systemic change in our program and while we're still working on those changes every single day, it amplified the movement and all of that in my mind and my teammates’ mine. So from then, I committed to helping diversify hockey in general, whether that's for opening it up to more women or more members of the BIPOC community or LGBTQ plus community, that's very important to me. But also, seeking out other opportunities to help underrepresented groups in all aspects of life and to truly make a more diverse and inclusive world that all of us are eager to be a part of.
As a board member for USA hockey, what is it that you hope to achieve?
Going off of the question that we just discussed, one of the biggest things that I want to achieve that I'm, I'm working towards every day and in a few different capacities, whether that's in my board seat, or the different subcommittees and sections I sit on at USA hockey, or being a part of the NHL player inclusion committee, where we're working to diversify elite hockey, or being a board member with the Women's Sports Foundation as well. All of those kind of have a similar goal, in my mind, and the first is just to diversify hockey. As I alluded to in the answer to my first question, when we think about hockey, traditionally, I hate to say it, but you think about hockey traditionally, and underrepresented groups are anyone that is not white, straight, men. That is sadly what people associate with hockey. So in a lot of those positions that I'm in, what I want to do is make sure that underrepresented groups are welcomed, and are introduced to the sport of hockey. Hockey changed my life in so many ways, I was the only girl growing up when I was playing and but, I didn't let that stop me. I had really supportive parents, I had supportive coaches and teams, and I was given an earned opportunities. But there's a lot of people that don't feel welcome in hockey or don't feel that it's a sport for them....
