Stewart knows importance of embracing adversity as a black hockey player

As just a kid, Chris Stewart felt he was different playing the game of hockey. He played the game like everyone else and was pretty good at it, too. But he still felt different.A

He couldn't help but feel different.

"You notice it right away," Stewart said. "You come to the rink, you walk in with your dad, my dad's Black and there's not another Black kid on the team. Right away, you kind of knew."

Stewart, a former Flyer and now a player development coach in the organization, once struggled with being Black while pursuing his dreams of professional hockey. Even as an NHL prospect and one of the star players on the OHL's Kingston Frontenacs, Stewart at times fought being himself.

"I remember my days in junior, whenever I was in Kingston and we'd go back to Toronto and play, my family would come," Stewart said in an interview with NBC Sports Philadelphia's Taryn Hatcher on the Flyers Talk podcast. "My dad's Jamaican and he'd always bring me some homemade food and things like that. It was curry goat and oxtail and things that there's not a chance a guy on my team would eat, so I'd always be kind of embarrassed or didn't want to eat that food on the bus or wondered if it smelled. That side of my culture that I was kind of afraid to show, but those are things that you've got to embrace.

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