Hockey requires coordination and precision, but the Central Alberta Bullseye blind hockey team proves that you don’t need sight to be a sharpshooter.
Playing hockey while visually impaired might sound impossible, but the members of the Bullseye have been playing the sport competitively for five seasons.
The team was founded by Dustin Butterfield, a Lacombe resident and talented blind hockey athlete. He competed with Team Canada for the 2022 Canada vs. USA Blind Hockey Series.
Butterfield was born with a genetic eye disease that left him partially sighted with some peripheral vision.
“I played minor hockey from about the age of five or six until I was 11,” Butterfield told The Stettler Independent.
He didn’t know about blind hockey until he attended a dinner for Fighting Blindness Canada in Edmonton in 2017.
Here, Butterfield met a couple of people who played blind hockey in the city. He wasted no time, competing in his first blind hockey tournament that fall.
“Ever since, I don’t think I’ve missed an event. I’ve been to Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax multiple times for tournaments and various things,” said Butterfield.
Flash forward to the present and Butterfield is leading the Bullseye blind hockey team into its sixth season.
According to Butterfield, there is a mix of professional and recreational athletes on the Bullseye. For many of the players, blind hockey isn’t about winning or losing–it’s about “networking and interacting with people.”
“You meet all of these people who are having challenges, some similar to yours and some different. It’s amazing to meet them and to hear all of their stories,” explained Butterfield.
What is Blind Hockey?
Blind hockey isn’t too different from traditional hockey. According to Canadian Blind Hockey, the charity responsible for providing blind hockey programming across Canada, blind hockey is played by athletes “whose level of vision ranges from legally blind to completely blind.
Someone who is legally blind has about 10 percent of their vision or less, whereas someone who is completely blind has no vision.
People with 20/20 vision but less than 20 degrees of peripheral vision can also be classified as legally blind.
To help visually impaired athletes play blind hockey, the rules and equipment are changed slightly. The hockey puck used in blind hockey is larger and slower than a traditional puck and makes noise.
The noise allows low-vision or no-vision players to track the puck without sight. The nets in blind hockey are also slightly lower than regular hockey nets.
Over the years, the Bullseye have seen all sorts of people volunteer to help the team, including members of the Red Deer Polytechnic Kings like Arik Weersink, the King’s main goalie.
Weersink is a class act and tutored the Bullseye’s goalie as well as ran some practices for the team.
“(Weersink) was able to give our goalie the best tutoring he had had as well. That worked out really well – he was just awesome,” said Butterfield.
The Bullseye are constantly growing. Halfway through the last season, a woman joined the team for the first time, bringing the team’s member count to eight.
Butterfield is happy to see the Bullseye grow, but he would also like to see blind hockey as a whole grow, too.
“We could always use more. The biggest success we could have would be to have more youth out. It’s great for us adults to be out there having fun and playing, but we want to promote it and build it within our youth – they could also really benefit from the sport,” he said.
The Future of Blind Hockey
Research from Allianz shows that 50 percent of children with disabilities stop participating in sports by the age of 11. Sports are transformative for children with disabilities.
Almost 80 percent of parents of children with disabilities noticed increased confidence and self-belief in their children and almost 70 percent highlighted the importance of making new friends.
Programs like those run by Canadian Blind Hockey, events like the Paralympics, and teams like the Bullseye help motivate children with disabilities to participate in para-sports.
Blind hockey is played in 13 cities across Canada. The sport is also played in the United States (US), England, Finland, Sweden, and Russia.
However, only Canada and the US have national teams. Canadian Blind Hockey is working with its international partners to grow the sport with the hopes of creating a World Championship and a pathway to the Paralympics.
Blind hockey is one of the few sports seeing growing youth involvement, especially at the professional level.
“There is a bit of a changing of the guard and a youth movement underway with this year’s team. The six rookies are all in their early 20s except for Dante Giammarioli who’s set a record as the youngest player to ever make the National Team at only 15 years old. This sport and this team just keeps getting faster and better and I’m looking forward to coaching this group in St-Louis,” said Team Canada head Coach Paul Kerins.
Almost a quarter of the 2024 Team Canada roster is made up of Albertans, including Dante Giammarioli, Tristan Lindberg, Liam O’Callaghan, and Jason Yuha.
Giammarioli is an inspiration to us all. Autosomal recessive Stargardt disease has left Giammarioli with about seven percent of his vision.
Even when his vision started deteriorating rapidly in junior high school, the young athlete didn’t give up on his dream of playing hockey, leading him to discover blind hockey.
“It was a whole new opportunity. It was just astonishing for me to be able to play the sport I love for the rest of my life with adaptations for what I am,” told CTV News.
Now, Giammarioli is the youngest player to make Canada’s blind hockey men’s team. He proves that if you love something, never give up chasing it.
