Goist finds new life with blind hockey

Doug Goist doesn’t have your typical hockey origin story, for a number of reasons.

The son of Dick Goist, a running back for the University of Cincinnati now in the school’s athletic hall of fame, hockey never really came on Goist’s radar.

Always an athletic kid, Goist played multiple sports growing up for Badger High School. Hockey, obviously, was not one of them. The game of hockey didn’t really enter Goist’s life until college, and that was just attending Carolina Thunderbirds games.

But almost instantly, the sport became a big part of his life.

Goist grew up with 20/20 vision, but throughout his 20s, his vision started deteriorating. By the time he was 30, Goist was fully blind.

In 2016, Goist, now based out of Alexandria, Va., was attending a professional mixer in the Washington DC area. A way to get him out of the house and interacting with people again. Something, by his own admission, he struggled to do after losing his sight. There, he met a man named Craig, who helped found the Washington Blind Hockey Club. They were hosting a try-it event for prospective players at the Capitals’ training facility and noting Goist’s size, thought he’d be a perfect fit.

Goist was skeptical. After all, hockey isn’t known for being the easiest sport to learn, with or without sight. He thought it was made up.

After some convincing, he went, but with no intention of going out on the ice.

“I still didn’t believe this was a thing,” Goist said. “I told him I’ll go to support any function like this. At least I could see what’s going on, because I still couldn’t conceive of it. Having watched it visually. It’s a very visual game. Obviously, you’re on skates, blades, boards, high speeds.”

Before he knew it, Goist was in the locker room getting strapped up in goalie gear. Arguably the position most impacted by sight.

“They brought a little kid out onto the ice, probably 8 or 9 years old, and he’s all excited. He’s been blind since birth and has never been on the ice. They lined him up with a puck to shoot on me. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I moved my leg pad so he could score it and he got all excited, so that’s kind of how it connected,” Goist said. “Where I realized that even though I’m brand new to it, maybe this is something that I can get involved in.”

Goist never looked back, and now he’s on the United States Blind Hockey team as a goaltender.

It’s been an extremely rewarding endeavor for the Goist, especially given his day-to-day life as someone who helps blind people find employment.

“Honestly, it’s given me essentially a second life in athletics,” Goist said. “One of the most personally heartbreaking things about losing vision was the fact that I loved playing sports and was very active, and not being able to find an outlet to be able to do that, even the ability to get on a bike or run through the woods, or anything. So through my 20s and 30s, I wasn’t aware that there was any type of sport.

“Finding a sport like this that gets you back with people of all ages (is special). We like to say the phrase ‘hockey is for everyone.’ For me, it’s fulfilling to be able to know that young kids, especially the younger kids, teenagers and younger adults, are able to participate in athletic activity that gets them out of the house, off the couch, gets you in shape and you learn to socialize with friends and teammates.”

Blind hockey is very similar to the game fans familiar with.

Five skaters and a goalie on each team trying to put the puck in each other’s net. It’s the same rules, just adapted to make the game more accessible for those without sight.

The most important difference comes from the puck.

Made from 22-gauge steel and filled with ball bearings to create noise, the adapted puck is also significantly larger than the traditional puck.

Traditional pucks are three inches across and one inch high, while the adapted pucks are five and a half inches across by one and two-thirds of an inch high.

Goist compared it to marbles in a tin can.

Nets are an additional foot shorter, three feet high as opposed to the traditional four, and there is a “point system” based around players’ vision as classified by the International Blind Sports Federation (IBSA). Each classification is given its own helmet color. Players with a B1 classification, like Goist, are almost exclusively goaltenders. In international competition, goaltenders wear an additional eye mask to completely block out light perception.

There are also B2 and B3 classifications for players with increased vision. B2 players wear white helmets, and B3 players wear black helmets.

Typically, players’ positions are determined by their classification. Forwards are typically classified as B3, and defensemen are classified as B2.

No team can have more than 14 “points” on the ice at a given time, unless they pull the goalie, in which the limit increases to 16.

Additionally, teams must complete one pass after crossing the blue line prior to being able to score, allowing defensive players more time to track the puck, Referees use a separate “pass whistle” to signal that the required pass has been made.

“If you watch it, it just looks like a pretty similar game of hockey, just with more compensation,” Goist said.

The goal is for blind hockey to become its own paralympic sport, but that requires more countries to form teams. Finland, Russia and Great Britain have multiple players, but aren’t able to field full teams yet. As of now, just Canada and the United States have teams, but the Canadian governing body is working to help expand the list.

Canada still has the edge, with blind hockey tracing its roots back to the 1970s in Quebec, and the traditional sport is the top dog in the Canadian sports world. Despite that, the sport is gaining steam in the United States.

Goist and the American squad will travel to Montreal for the International Blind Ice Hockey Series, a three-game series against the Canadian team. This marks the sixth year the countries have met up, dating back to 2018. Canada has won the gold medal each time.

Games are set for this weekend at Howie Morentz Arena. Friday’s game is set to start at 4 p.m.

All games can be streamed for free on the Canadian Blind Hockey YouTube channel.