Nature of hockey is to send teenagers away to other cities, whereas in other sports, are you really doing that? Lack of parental oversight might be a big thing. Billets who don't know a teenager before they arrive won't really notice a change in their personality whereas a parent has a higher probability of seeing mood changes if something is bothering their child.
yeah probably this. these kids leave home at 15/16 and move to these small communities where they are gods. their surrogate parents are probably mostly good well intentioned people but they are also likely to be people with a stake in the social/economic hierarchy surrounding the team. (how does swift current happen? exactly that—everyone, host families, teachers, police, all basically worked/work for the broncos.)
it seems insane. i guess at least now you have more big cities vs relatively small communities than in the 80s or 90s but it’s still a lot of small places, which means the implicit and explicit pressure to look the other way and protect the team’s business as usual is probably exponentially magnified.
i’m sure that small community thing happens in lots of sports, esp football in the US, but at least those kids are in their parents’ homes and in the communities they have been a part of since they were (younger) kids.
in college i heard awful stories from kids, mostly boys who went to all boys schools, who went to boarding school, that disgusting cracker game and worse. this isn’t even in the context of team building or organized sports, just 13-17 year old boys who probably shouldn’t have been lord of the flies-ed away from their families so young.
i don’t want to compare this to the more extreme cases of family separation that we hear about like ICE in the US or the awful history of social services taking first nations and indigenous kids in this country but i do think you can probably port some of the research about those traumas and their effects on behaviour to the CHL, esp in the more outposty eras.