‘Buffalo Soldiers’: Jamaican ice hockey team to be memorialised in Canadian sports yearbook

Jamaica’s senior men’s ice hockey team’s historic championship win at last year’s Amerigol LATAM Cup is memorialised in a Canadian sports yearbook published earlier this year.

The team copped the championship in its first international outing against teams from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, and defending champions Colombia, whom they beat to take the title.

The tournament invited over 400 players and 21 teams from Latin America and the Caribbean across four major divisions.

National team coach Cyril Bollers organised the creation and publishing of the yearbook, aptly titled after the Bob Marley anthem Buffalo Soldier, which influenced the team’s nickname during the tournament. “The inspiration was really just to capture the memories for a group of 18 men coming together for the first time, just creating this moment in history. It’s really a keepsake for the team to capture the memories of a lifetime,” Bollers said.

Each participant is introduced and profiled in the 68-page book, which features photos and their memories of the epic five days of competition in South Florida.

The content includes submissions from the all-volunteer coaching staff, as well as all the players, parents, the general manager, and the equipment manager.

Jamaican Olympic Ice Hockey Federation chairman Don Anderson, who provided the foreword for the book, commended Bollers for the initiative, which he says fully promotes the work of the team and Jamaica’s standing on the world stage.

The work is the build-up of efforts by the squad to document the euphoria that surrounded the experience of team members and their fans and also to garner support for the sport both locally and overseas.

The book is now available for order online.

Team Jamaica co-captains Teegan Moore and Jaden Lindo travelled to Jamaica after the tournament to participate in a series of speaking engagements and meetings hosted by Anderson with local sporting entities.

The coaching staff was preparing for the 2020 IIHF Latam Cup and planning evaluation camps in Canada when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

TEAM QUALIFICATION

The team is made up of players born in Jamaica, Canada, the UK, and the US who qualify to represent the country by virtue of their Jamaican heritage.

Since news of Jamaica’s championship win in Florida, a number of players of Jamaican heritage from North American and Europe have reportedly shown an interest in playing for the national team, pending naturalised citizenship.

There is also great interest from the national team players to attend Heroes Day celebrations in Jamaica later this year.

Anderson says a plan to start a grass-roots street-and-roller hockey programme to introduce the sport to Jamaica has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We have had to put that on hold. We had an MoU (memorandum of understanding) with GC. Foster College to have them help with training and teaching the rudiments of the sport, along with the local field hockey that involved going into the various schools and clubs across the island with a view to having them transition into ice hockey training,” Anderson explained.