I've spent my entire life in the theatre. I started performing at age five and from there, I immersed myself in every dark and tiny corner that the world of theatre had to offer. Vocal training, speech work, dance class, piano lessons – any and everything I could get my hands on. I dove into each new world, each chance to begin again as something new.
When High School Musical hit the stage, my high school was among the first in Michigan to obtain its rights and perform it. For the spring musical, just like clockwork, we would go to a Kalamazoo Wings game, as a cast. I did my best to pretend to be over it, covering that part of me that still had my heart race when anyone rushed the net.
By then, it was too late. Though I spent my afternoons rehearsing it line by line, the meaning of the High School Musical had been lost on me.
Gathering a group of theatre kids and taking them to a hockey game was an interesting decision made by our director every year. Though he never said it, I think he was trying to teach us something that took years for me to finally figure out.
Sports are theatre.
Sports are improvisational theatre where the rules of the game are the only constant circumstances. There are narratives that build on each other, that result in emotional payoffs because you're invested in this story and its players. The audiences ooo and ahh in unison, an experience unique to live storytelling. And every game, every season, they get to start over.
See, the real point of High School Musical isn't that Zac Efron could be both a basketball player and an actor. It's that there's so much more overlap to those two worlds than we're willing to allow ourselves to imagine.
I went to school to study playwriting and learned how to create characters, how to build narratives. In my time at Western Michigan University, I watched future NHL players take the ice at Lawson Ice. As they would skate out, I remembered being a wobbly child, my dad holding my hand as we lapped around Wings Event Center. I imagined myself as they were, skating out to all of the fanfare WMU had to offer and just like waiting backstage for the curtain to rise, I would hold my breath.
The ice is their stage, a black box theatre with the audience on all sides -- so close it’s as if they’re part of the show themselves. Their lines are are nicknames, shouts, the frequent “That's right, boys!” over the special effects of a goal horn sounding in the distance. Their stage directions are learned with a dry erase marker and carried out with knives strapped to their feet.
With hockey in particular, there's a performative nature. There's a culture, not all too different from the one I grew up with here in rural Michigan. There are villains, there are good guys, there are redemption arcs and every one of them is relative to your own experiences. It's an unending sea of narratives, ready and waiting for the next move to set them in motion. It’s pure theatre, where the audience is just as much a part of the story as the actors, who are giving everything they have to tell the right one.
“The best thing about live theatre,” my high school drama teacher used to tell us, “is that it’s live.” This was usually wrapping up the story about a broom catching fire onstage during a production of The Wizard of Oz, or the ten year old lead piecing her mic pack together on stage, mid-song, during Seussical.
Isn’t that the same thing we love about sports? No matter how many times you rehearse it perfectly, live storytelling is unpredictable by nature.
I always thought I wanted to be a playwright.
But when I fell back in love with hockey, I found new stories to tell. I found what might be the most theatrical team in the NHL to love and write about for SB Nation's Fear the Fin in the San Jose Sharks. I returned to my roots to cover my hometown Kalamazoo Wings for The Nation Network's Canucks Army. I found a league that didn't always love people like me, that I could work to change for the better by always refusing to just "stick to sports."
I now hold the title of Managing Editor of Fear the Fin, and with SB Nation, have had the opportunity to cover the Stanley Cup Playoffs for their NHL site. I've been credentialed with the AHL and the ECHL and attended events such as the 2016 Calder Cup Western Conference Final and the 2018 ECHL All-Star Game. I've had radio spots with SB Nation Radio and TSN 1040, as well as multiple podcast appearances. I co-host and produce the Sharks podcast Blood, Sweat, and Teal.
I've traveled coast to coast for the sport I love more than anything.
I always thought I wanted to be a playwright.
I’ve spent the last three years writing about hockey, finding new narratives in the ever-changing world of sports, and I don’t feel too far from that desire.
Frankly, there's no better story I'd like to tell.
Contact: siemorley@gmail.com
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All photos © Sie Morley.