Kim Davis

Well, I’ll divide that question into pieces so that we don’t spend the entire time just talking about that. That’s a mouthful. But you know, the NHL and the sports and entertainment industry are my third and, I often say, final career pivot. I’ve been in the industry for over 40 years. I started my career in financial services. I spent time in both the insurance industry and the investment banking industry and then pivoted into consulting, and then ultimately as a consultant, the NHL was a client of mine in 2017 and I had an opportunity to meet the commissioner. 

The league had just gone through its 100th anniversary, and as many I know about the commissioner, Gary Bettman, who is the longest-standing commissioner in major sports, he wasn’t resting on the laurels of 100 years. He was thinking about what the next 100 years were going to look like, and what do I need to do to prepare, you know, for it and look around the corner. And ultimately, he hired me to help the league think about the future, particularly through the lens of what we now refer to, as our fans in waiting, those that sort of young, multicultural, female, tech-savvy, purpose-driven clientele that we want to attract and deepen our relationships with. 

I’ve always been a lover of sports. Althea Gibson was my shero. I played tennis in Chicago growing up and had the opportunity to work with Billie Jean King on the creation of the first-ever initiative that she founded in her name. And so it’s not surprising that I ended up in sports and entertainment, not because I played hockey, but because I believe that sports is a platform that brings people together. So it’s exciting. It’s exciting to be here.

I think there are a couple of notable things about the younger fan. Most important is that the younger fan is far more ethnically and culturally diverse, right? We know from demographics that, starting with Gen Z and Millennials, and, as we look at Gen Alpha, it’s majority-minority, right? And so both in the sport of hockey, but I think in the sports and entertainment field generally, we have to make sure that our sport is culturally available to these younger cohorts. 

And that’s not just the Black and brown and multicultural set, but it’s across all of the intersections, whether you talk about race, gender, sexual orientation, we have to make sure that our content is relevant and our sport is welcoming, also the way they consume is different, right? They may or may not find their way to our arenas. They may consume on a digital mobile application while playing street hockey. So we have to make sure that we provide all of the on and off-ramps to the sport that will make it interesting for that younger demographic.

One, I think we don’t, don’t know our history. A lot of young Black girls growing up in Chicago when I did in the 60s and early 70s knew about Althea Gibson because our communities were segregated. I say they were segregated positively because they focused on making people feel proud of their cultural heritage. You know, there were books that we read in public school that talked about the heritage of Black and brown people. 

And so it wasn’t shocking that I knew about Althea Gibson, and she was my shero. Fast forward 50 years, a lot of young people don’t even know about Martin Luther King. But it points to the intentionality that is required in our society to make sure that young people know where they’ve come from so that they know where they’re going. And I think that’s part of the job of sports, is to make sure that you understand the past, the present and the future.

Yeah, well, we have been very intentional about making sure that we understand how to attract just, not just fans, but represent. We know that representation counts. So, if a young woman is interested in hockey, seeing me is going to be a game-changer for her, right? And so we not only have to make sure that we represent women on the ice and the development and creation of the professional women’s hockey league is one way that we are contributing to that as a partner to that league, but also the way that we have embraced girls’ hockey and created a glide path for girls starting very young, to be able to see themselves all the way through the sport, but also in the C-suite, as you said. 

Making sure that we hire women across race, ethnicity, and gender, to make sure that, as you mentioned, have development programs for women who are interested in being coaches, so they can move into the professional ranks. So in every part of the ecosystem, we are intentionally focused on making sure that women are represented and women can see themselves.

 Well, I think we may be making a huge dent. I just think that we have to do a better job of amplifying the progress that we’re making. For example, today, we know that 40% of our fan base are women, and 25% of our fan base are people of color. That has grown significantly over the past decade, and it has grown because we’ve been intentional about our outreach across all of those dimensions that I just mentioned, across people being employed in the sport, women seeing a place and being able to play the sport, and women seeing themselves being able to work in the sport. 

And the same holds true with people of color and Black people. Part of the ways in which we have embraced that culture is for people to understand that Black people didn’t just start playing hockey. The history of Blacks in the sport of hockey goes back before the National Hockey League. It started with the Hockey League, as you know, in 1895 right? And so being able to amplify those stories, to be able to tell those stories, is an important part of the ways in which we’re going to continue to engage younger audiences, younger more diverse audiences, and younger Black folks.

That’s a wonderful question. And again, it goes back to my point about how we have to make sure that we get all of the progress that we’re making off hockey channels and into the mainstream. For example, we have invested, over the past 10 years, $190 million in programs to make the sport more accessible, and a significant part of those dollars has gone to minority communities through our Learn to Play and Learn to Skate programs. 

We provide kids with the gear for free, they get to take it home if they participate in our entry-level eight-week programs, and we’ve done a much better job over the past five years of making sure that those programs are available in high-density under-indexed communities. So the ways in which we’re going to grow our sport with these communities is to make sure that kids, very early on, have access to our sport. We know that ice time is hard. To get and as you said, it’s expensive. 

So we have reimagined our street hockey programs, particularly in rural and urban areas, so that kids who don’t have access to ice can still understand the game through street hockey. A lot of professional players started playing street hockey. They need to start on the ice again. It goes back to accessibility and being intentional about providing all of the on and off ramps for our sport that make the sport interesting and exciting for kids, because kids have choices right around the kinds of youth programming they want to participate in, and we want hockey to be at the top of that list.

Well, this is an important message, and this is one that we need to talk about all the time because I think often people somehow associate multiculturalism with socio-economics, and we know that people of color bring significant buying power. 

People of color aren’t just poor and so understanding the opportunity to be able to engage audiences across the entire socio-economic spectrum, intersected by race, ethnicity, gender, is an important message of growing a sport, as opposed to thinking that the only way you can reach those communities is to go into poor communities and to provide charitable support. I think that being intentional about focusing one’s attention around the full opportunity across the socio-economic spectrum is an important message to send.

 Listen, anybody that’s been doing what I do for 40 years, would not be a truth teller if they said there had not been moments, yeah.

I mean, I can cite examples in almost every industry that I’ve been in, whether it was now being the youngest sales executive in the private bank at JP Morgan in the 90s, and, you know, managing a full team of white men who worked for me, and having to prove myself and handling that and coming out on the top of that being having the highest sales level ever in the history of that private bank organization. 

I think so much of being able to handle those challenges has to do with what my grandmother used to refer to as courageous leadership, fearless leadership. And I learned that from my grandmother, who was the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard in 1939 in their Ph.D. program. And I would always say that if she could endure what she endured, this is, tiddlywinks.

She always believed that the way that you change people’s perceptions is by doing the work. She said, “Don’t get preoccupied with worrying about them, not thinking you should be there. Be there. Stand in being there and show them why, why you are there.” And she called that fearless leadership. I have tried to model that, and I have handled many of the obstacles in my career because of that.

Well, you know, I’m going to say something that might be provocative to some of your listeners, but I’m going to say it, say it anyway, and that is, I think part of the reason that DEI is under attack is because we haven’t reframed it. We haven’t reframed DEI in a way that a lot of people who have preconceived notions about what that means can hear it, and what I mean by that is, throughout my career, in my careers, I’ve never had DEI in the title of any of my jobs. 

DEI is not part of my job right now– growth is what my job is about and I would say DEI is about growth, and that reframing of that for our owners changed the nature of the kind of conversation we were having, and I started with presenting them with the data and the facts right when I started this job, almost seven years ago. 

One of the first things that we did was we had the Brookings Institute overlay our hockey markets with their demographic longitudinal data. And what we learned was seven years ago, 23 of our markets were already in states and in locations where this idea of minority was a misnomer. If they were going to grow their business and grow their fan bases in those 23 states, they were going to have to embrace difference, and that alone– that data set, for our owners and our presidents, our CMOS, changed the nature of the conversation. 

We never once talked about DEI, we talked about demographic growth. Who your fan of the future is, and how are you going to position your business to attract that fan? And I think that if we reframe this conversation and start getting people to focus on who your future fans, consumers, stakeholders, and employees are, we might change the nature of how people are viewing this DEI moment.

Well, I’ll give you three. Starting with a good leader is a good follower. I think that humility goes a long way in strong leadership. I’ve always tried to be a leader who leads by example and with my values, not their lines that I will never cross, and I think a good leader stands for something or falls for everything. As my grandmother used to say, I think a good leader is purpose-driven. They understand who they are and what they are trying to accomplish on behalf of changing people’s views of things that they don’t understand. And I think that it takes courage to do that.

I think you have to be brave in order to be a leader who is a change agent. And I think leaders, thirdly, have to be change agents. You know, someone said to me, years ago, you change your pivot, or you die. And I think that has stuck with me for so many years because one thing we can count on in this world is change and ambiguity, right? And so you have to be ready to pivot and change. And get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And so good leaders are humble. Good leaders are purpose-driven. Good leaders are able to pivot. I think that those are really important characteristics of leaders for today and leaders of the future.

I mean, there are a lot of things I probably could have done better. I don’t know that I would have done anything necessarily differently, maybe I would have understood that change is a long game and that you have to be willing to go through a journey that came for you with time, experience, and maturity. I wanted everything to happen so fast, and I was impatient in many, in many cases. 

I now understand, and I try to lead by example, around this idea that the process of change is a journey. It’s not an event. That’s why you hear me often talk about this work in hockey being a movement, not a moment, and settling people on the fact that as much as you want to see change happen quickly, you have to measure progress in increments and not be dissatisfied with the fact that you may not ever get to the end of that journey, because it continues to evolve and change. 

What I always say is that I want to leave spaces and places that I touch better than I found them, and somebody will come behind me and do the next level of work, but my role is to come in and leave those places and spaces that I am part of better than I found them.

Well, this is probably where I’m not such a good model because  I don’t sleep a lot. I probably do my best work late at night. So I go to bed late and I wake up early. Yeah, I wake up at 4:45, every morning. I actually pray and meditate in the morning, and I exercise most mornings. 

And, you know, I plan out what my day is going to look like. I look at my calendar. I see if there are things on the calendar that however I’m feeling that day if I’m not equipped mentally to do them, I will have a call with my assistant at eight in the morning and say, let’s move this one around, because I don’t think that I’m prepared to do that.

I am a concert pianist. Maybe that’s awesome. I’m no longer playing in concerts, but, but I grew up playing concert music, and I still played the piano at my home for my personal enjoyment. It is relaxing for me, and that’s one of the ways that I wind down in the evenings, is that I just play the music that I love, which is R&B and Pop, and I have two young grandsons and I’ve been married for 40 years this year.

I’ll tell you something that I just read, and I just, I just love it. It’s called a good cry in its book about Nikki Giovanni, the poet, and it’s and she talks about the things that we learn from tears and laughter. And I just thought it was just a wonderful read. She and Maya Angelou were dear friends, and so they just shared many, many years of friendship and poetry. That was a really great book for me.

Kim Davis is a fearless champion, a wife, mother, and friend. She is a giver. She is a change agent, awesome. That’s who I am.