Editor’s Pitch

Is this Rocky on Ice? Well, maybe not quite, but when it comes to tails of beating the odds, facing up to your fears, and depending on those around you to give you the strength to carry on, it comes pretty close! This may be a story about Canadians but this is Hollywood-style no apologies made, hero worship through and through. It’s pitch perfect for these men who have made powerful choices after incredible misfortune and don’t waver from a goal that defines them from most people – disabled or not.


They are as different as the disabilities that brought them together as a team. Each man, whether born with a disability, or gained through accident, has learned to live through adversity. They joke amongst themselves about separating the “amps” and the “wheelies” into separate dressing rooms. But one thing is certain; they have bonded together into a unique and sometimes dysfunctional family with a single purpose – to be sledge hockey World Champions.

Sledhead is the story of Canada’s National Sledge hockey team and its quest to be the dominant force in this fast-paced game. The story begins long before Selection Camp – for some at birth, for others at the moment where an event pushed their lives into an unexpected direction.

Each of the players has a different story to tell, but all stories that speak of the day-to-day struggles of playing in a demanding sport and what it’s like to be a disabled man living in a world largely designed for the able-bodied.

Director David Mcllvride affectionate and overtly masculine tale of teamwork, friendship and joy in the face of adversity is a portrait of a close-knit family. The journey to the World Championships is a classic one, but it’s a path that helps forge these men’s identities and give each other strength.

And of course that strength doesn’t live in isolation. At the side of these men are the women who love them and support them – many who have stuck by them when fate has led them to some form of disability during their relationship. Personal diaries as well as life outside the ice hockey world show the men in states of vulnerability as well good humour.

Sledhead is a tale of adversity over indifference, laughter over society’s prejudices. Skating over ice is an experience that gives these men a sense of freedom they have nowhere else. Free from judgement, their mind in only one place – to win.