Merrill, NHL Player Inclusion Coalition launch Hockey's Beauty Club

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Jon Merrill describes the hockey slang term "beauty" as someone who does something great, something extraordinary on or off the ice.

To Merrill, an ally to a marginalized group is a top-tier beauty. That's why the Minnesota Wild defenseman, in collaboration with the NHL Player Inclusion Coalition, announced the start of Hockey's Beauty Club, an initiative to help remove bullying in the hockey community.

"We're creating an environment where we're helping each other," Merrill said Sunday before the announcement. "We're using the tight-knit hockey community as our advantage and leaning on each other to be better people. To ask questions of each other and to have conversations with each other about better ways to handle bullying incidents or handle different players on different teams that maybe you're not familiar with and you can reach out to us to help."

Sunday was the club's first official chapter meeting with a panel including Merrill and Mike Hafertepe, a member of the Mosaic Hockey local diversity program, with Twin Cities Pride executive director Andi Otto as moderator. More than 20 people in attendance received hockey bag tags with the slogan "No Hate, Just Beauties" with a support email that will be manned by Merrill, his wife Jess and Otto.

"To have the bag tag on your bag, to walk into the rink, I think it shows somebody on your team that person's a beauty. That person's got my back," Merrill said. "He, she or they are going to stand up for me. The bag tag comes with some responsibility. When you wear that bag tag, you're opening yourself up to be a sounding board for those people that are struggling."

Merrill has long been an active member in LGBQT+ communities. He's manned the Wild float in the Twin Cities Pride parade, officiated various LGBQT+ hockey games "in a tutu" and even worked other pride events in full drag.

This initiative takes those efforts a step further.

"Hockey is a sport that teaches us so many great life lessons about working together as a team," Merrill said. "I genuinely believe we're creating better human beings because of this game of hockey. So, if we continue to break down barriers that hockey players are one specific mold, or that you have to be a certain type of person or look a certain way or be a certain thing to be a hockey player, we're going to be better for it as a sport and as humans.

"I look to the future and hope that we watch the 4 Nations Face-Off in 25 years, and we see a plethora of different races and sexualities, whatever it might be. That we just see a true representation of the world in hockey."

The NHL Player Inclusion Coalition is a group of current and former NHL Players and women's professional hockey players who work to advance equality and inclusion in the sport of hockey on and off the ice. Coalition members are advisers, ambassadors and catalysts in the growing movement for inclusion across the hockey community. Since 2020, members have led and contributed to initiatives that accelerate social change through and within hockey.

The Player's Inclusion Coalition will hit $250,000 in community grant donations with Merrill's $15,000 grant for Hockey's Beauty Club.