Kendall Boyd-Tyson is among growing number of Black executives in the National Hockey League
March 24, 2023
Before Gary Bettman became the National Hockey League (NHL) Commissioner in 1993, the corporate head office and clubs’ executive staff were all White.
While there has been change in the last three decades, much more still needs to be done.
Kimberly Davis is in her sixth year as an NHL Senior Vice-President, Mike Grier became the first Black manager when the San Jose Sharks hired him last July and a few other Black executives are in high-ranking positions with clubs, including Kendall Boyd-Tyson who is the Seattle Kraken Vice-President with responsibility for strategy and business intelligence.
When the league’s newest franchise began play in the 2021-22 season, nine Blacks occupied key roles with the Kraken outfit, making it the most diverse front office with people of colour holding executive level positions.
Boyd-Tyson credits the club’s Chief Executive Officer Tod Leiweke with driving the change to ensure the organization reflects the community it serves.
“It starts with him,” she said while in Toronto for the second annual Carnegie Initiative Summit. “He believes strongly in having diversity throughout the organization and that has proliferated. When you look at our leadership group, whether it is women or people of colour, we are not just there because of what we look like. We are there because we are truly rock stars. He believes in putting that extra effort to go and find those people and bring them to the organization.”
A chance meeting between Boyd-Tyson’s younger brother – Kyle Boyd is the Kraken’s Director of Fan Development – and Leiweke at a rink in the Seattle suburbs in 2019, led to her association with the franchise.
Both of them were skating when Leiweke approached the young man, who was teaching History at a high school at the time, saying, ‘You are a very good skater and you don’t look like the people I typically see who are very good skaters’.
While sharing his story with Leiweke, Boyd mentioned that his dad worked for the Minnesota Wild.
Dr. Joel Boyd, who did a fellowship at Western University in southwestern Ontario, was the NHL’s first Black team physician when the Wild entered the league in 2000. He was also the first Black physician for the United States men’s Olympic hockey team at the Nagano Winter Games in 1998.
“Tod, very casually, told my brother our father used to work for the Wild,” said Boyd-Tyson who was then in Seattle working on corporate development and strategy for TopGolf that is a global golf entertainment company. “They took a photo that was sent to my dad who remarked he didn’t see Tod in years. During a phone call a few minutes later, dad told Tod, who was the Wild first President, that his daughter worked in sports and ‘we should meet up for a coffee’.”
Growing up in Minnesota, Boyd-Tyson played a year of organized hockey and captained the club team at Yale School of Management where she graduated in 2017.
Sensing there might be a job opportunity with the Pacific Northwest franchise, Boyd-Tyson prepared to make the most of the coffee meeting.
“I had notes and was pitching Tod on why I would be great to work for the new organization,” she recalled.
After making a strong case in about 10 minutes why she would be an asset, Leiweke was sold.
“He said, ‘Kendall, you are great, I will introduce you to our COO and I think you will be good for the organization’,” she recalled. “The remaining hour we spent there, Tod talked to my brother about how to grow the game of hockey in low-income and minority populations. That is his passion. He also convinced my brother to join the Kraken.”
As a 13-year-old, Boyd-Tyson and her two brothers attended the Minnesota Wild first home game 23 years ago when Darby Hendrickson scored the team’s first goal in a 3-3 tie with the Philadelphia Flyers.
Just happy to be part of history, the racial makeup of the fans wasn’t something she paid attention to at the time.
“I didn’t think about it then,” Boyd-Tyson pointed. “At the same time, I was not looking in the ways that I look now. When I think about that first game, I do so more about what it meant to the hockey community in Minnesota more broadly which was a coming-home of the NHL. I always tell people that hockey is to Minnesota as football is to Texas. To not have an NHL team there was hard, so to get a team back and be able to attend the first home game was quite the experience. The passion and pride in the arena were off the charts.”
The Wild was the first NHL franchise in Minnesota after the North Stars moved to Dallas in 1993.
Drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the fourth round of the 1990 NHL Entry Draft, Hendrickson, who played two seasons with the University of Minnesota, was taken by the Wild in the 2000 Expansion Draft.
“To see him come home and then for him to score that first goal, you are not thinking about race, gender or sexual orientation,” she said. “In those moments, all you are thinking is I am a Minnesotan. I think that is the difference in the power of sports. In those moments, through the excitement and tears, the other stuff doesn’t matter. You are high-fiving everyone. Where they live and what their background is don’t matter. We are all Minnesota Wild fans and I couldn’t be more proud.”
Part of a panel at the Carnegie Initiative Summit that discussed sustainable growth for women in the sport, Boyd-Tyson learnt of Carnegie through research.
Kendall Boyd-Tyson was in Toronto for the Carnegie Initiative Summit (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
“I was trying to find out where does my background and culture fit into this sport that I love,” she said. “The access to information now is incredible and organizations like the Carnegie Initiative are creating opportunities for people to write books and engage in research about the history.”
Boyd-Tyson first job in sport was a ball girl for the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) Minnesota Lynx for three years.
She graduated from Emory University with a Sociology degree and Georgia Institute of Technology (GT) with an Industrial & System Engineering degree. While at GT, she interned at Coca-Cola and was part of a recycling program at Turner Field that was then the Atlanta Braves home park.
After completing her Bachelor of Science certification in 2011, the middle of three siblings spent nearly four years transforming processes and re-designing organizational structures in a management consulting role at Accenture before enrolling at Yale to pursue a Master of Business Administration with a focus on corporate strategy.
“I was looking for a career change at the time, but I was not sure what I wanted to do,” said Boyd-Tyson who enjoys math, snowboarding and country music. “I wanted something where the degree and the school I went to would carry weight. I also wanted to be able to go anywhere in the world. So, I was seeking a degree that would make sense and mean something in any circle I am in around the world.”
While at Yale where she was introduced to Business Analytics that is a huge component of professional sports franchises, Boyd-Tyson interned at the LPGA and took golf lessons.
Though she has visited Vancouver, this was her first trip to Toronto.
