Anyone who has played hockey at any level, or has children who have done so, is familiar with the unforgettable stench that emanates from a ripe equipment bag full of sweaty hockey gear.
Pull back the zipper, and the aromas of old skates, shin pads and gloves that have been brewing in perspiration can generate a funk that hits the nostrils like a sucker punch.
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Every player who has made it to the NHL is familiar with the smell, as are their parents. Golden Knights defenseman Zach Whitecloud grew up in Brandon, Manitoba, where frigid winters made it impossible to fumigate hockey gear outside between the months of September and March.
“You couldn’t throw it in the garage either, because it would freeze,” Whitecloud recalled. “I used to air it out in the basement and it would smell up the entire house. So my parents can attest to how bad my gear smelled.”
But the inside of an NHL dressing room has no such stench. Following games, players toss their used jerseys and hockey socks into a giant laundry basket on wheels in the middle of the room. They hang their drenched equipment in their stalls, but you’d never know by the smell. That’s because, at the highest level of the sport, the care given to player equipment to maintain its integrity and cleanliness is exceptional, and the process has evolved over the years. It takes a lot to keep that stench out of the room.
The man behind that work in Las Vegas is Golden Knights head equipment manager Chris Davidson-Adams. Prior to joining the Golden Knights upon their inception, Davidson-Adams worked more than 1,000 games as a professional equipment manager for six teams, ranging from the IHL to the AHL and NHL. He even worked under Vegas coach Pete DeBoer in San Jose.
“He came on with us during our run to the Stanley Cup Final,” DeBoer said of Davidson-Adams. “Then he got the job in Vegas and really started this, boots on the ground, from the ground up. I’m not sure anyone worked harder to get this franchise up and running from day one more than him. He’s done a fantastic job right from day one here. He’s a huge, invaluable part of our staff.”
With more than two decades of experience, Davidson-Adams — or as the players call him, “Critter” — knows his way around hockey equipment as well as anyone. He’s in charge of not only ordering all the equipment needed to keep an NHL team running, but also maintaining it between periods and following games and practices. In the time he’s spent around professional hockey, the upkeep for equipment has changed drastically.
“It’s much more scientific now,” Davidson-Adams told The Athletic. “Rather than just hanging the gear up and putting some fans out, you have eco-friendly chemicals and different ways to sanitize the gear.”
Davidson-Adams cut his teeth in the industry working for the Houston Aeros and Grand Rapids Griffins in the IHL. In those days his postgame treatment didn’t include much more than turning on a fan to blow dry the equipment. Now the process is far different. He and the rest of the equipment staff wait in the tunnel as players exit the ice, grabbing gloves from each player and placing them on the coils of a glove-drying machine.
Gloves sit on the machine while a blower fan dries them out, so they’ll be fresh to use by the time the next period begins. Some players even rotate through gloves during games, allowing them to keep their hands fresh and dry.
“Mark Stone uses three pairs of gloves per period and rotates them every timeout,” Davidson-Adams said. “So his gloves don’t end up being that sweaty. We dry them after every TV timeout, and he goes to a fresh pair, so his gloves aren’t naturally that sweaty. They don’t get broken down, and they don’t stink as much as another player who uses one pair of gloves the whole game.”
Davidson-Adams hands Stone a fresh pair of gloves on the Golden Knights’ bench, and runs the used pair over to the glove drying machine, repeating that rotation all game. His intermissions are usually crammed with tasks like sharpening skates and cutting hockey sticks with a bandsaw, but he also uses the limited time to dry players’ equipment.
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“At the end of the day, Critter takes care of us, he spoils us and he makes sure that every guy has what they need,” Whitecloud said. “He’s one of a kind, honestly. He works hard and he looks after the boys at all times.”
When players finish up a game or practice, Davidson-Adams treats all of their gear with an eco-friendly sanitizing spray.
“If you leave your gear in a bag after it’s wet and sweaty, and you take it out whenever you play, naturally it’s going to stink,” he said. “It’s going to grow mold, or grow smells, and break it down more. We’ve evolved into studying what sanitizes gear, what kills germs, and that causes it not to stink.”
On top of the spray, Davidson-Adams also uses a machine called Sani Sport. The machine uses high-intensity UV lights to generate ozone gas, which sanitizes any equipment placed inside. The Golden Knights have two of the machines – one permanently fixed inside the practice facility, City National Arena, and another smaller portable one that travels on road trips with the club.
More than 25 years ago the founder of Sani Sport, Steve Silver, set out on a mission to rid hockey equipment of its smell.
“We started the process, which took about four years, to answer that question,” Silver told The Athletic. “We got to the point where we determined that the cause of the smell was really a plethora of viruses and bacteria, many of which were very commonly found in ordinary life. Things like MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or a form of staph infection) and E Coli.”
Once Silver discovered the source of the smell, he began testing methods of removing it. He knew traditional forms of washing wouldn’t be an option because submerging the equipment in water breaks down the protective components of the gear. He tried six or seven different processes, from heat vacuums to air pressurization and even charcoal.
Located in Quebec, Silver partnered with the nearby Concordia University hockey team. For months, he would drive to the school and pick up three or four sets of used hockey gear to bring back to the lab for testing.
“I’d have this gear in my car, and it was impossible to drive the 15 minutes to the office because of the smell,” Silver said. “It would be brutal. I would have all four windows down in minus-10 degree weather. I’d have the coat, hat and gloves on and ride out the cold, because you couldn’t really ride out the smell.”
Then one day the drive didn’t smell so bad, and Silver found his answer: Ozone gas, produced by UV lights.
Ozone is a naturally-occurring gas found in the atmosphere, and it’s a contributor to the familiar smell outside after a rainstorm. That clean, fresh smell following a shower comes from a combination of water from the rain, and compounds like ozone, geosmin, and plant oils. Silver discovered it has a similar impact on hockey equipment, not only ridding it of the smell but also eliminating a vast majority of the bacteria.
“When we started to work with ozone it became very clear from not only an odor standpoint, but also from a lab-testing standpoint, that this was the way forward,” Silver said.
They began producing the machines, and have been supplying them to professional sports teams for more than two decades. The larger Sani Sport machine in Vegas is a giant, metal cabinet standing over five feet tall that can hold equipment for two players – skates, helmets, gloves, chest protectors, shin guards, etc.
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Once the equipment is inside the cabinet, UV lights and fans run for 12 minutes and kill up to 96 percent of the bacteria present. That is followed by a tea tree oil fog that attacks remaining bacteria, and the equipment is finally sealed with a scented bactericide. The machines are used by 28 NHL teams and several NFL and MLB teams, as well as military and law enforcement.
In the NHL, gear is generally sprayed with sanitizer at least every other day and is placed in the Sani Sport machines after every home game, as well as when the team returns from a road trip. It nearly eliminates all smells and decreases the likelihood of a player getting sick from bacteria on the equipment.
“There have been players who have gotten MRSA through gear in the past when it’s been dirty or not cleaned,” Davidson-Adams said. “The equipment has bacteria in it, then they have an open cut from getting cut with a skate, or a compression cut, or getting hit with a puck and that opens their skin. So it should be taken seriously.”
Silver didn’t originally intend to make a device that makes equipment safer, but that aspect of his machines has actually taken precedent over the odor elimination. But nevertheless, the end result is an NHL dressing room that smells nothing like the rooms most of these players grew up dressing for games in.
“Even when I play summer hockey here in Vegas (in the offseason), when you walk in that room you get all kinds of smells,” Whitecloud said with a laugh. “Sometimes my gear has been sitting in my bag for a week until the next night I play. It’s funny when you get a good reminder of what gear is supposed to smell like. It brings you back to reality a little bit.”
“What’s funny is no one really acknowledges their own bad gear smell,” Whitecloud said. “My shin pads don’t smell bad to me, but if I put them in a room with whoever else, they would probably have to leave the room.”
The biggest “dose of reality” for Davidson-Adams is the yearly development camp, in which rookies from all across the globe descend on Vegas for a week-long training camp. Coming mostly from junior hockey, the equipment those players bring to City National Arena hasn’t been treated like that of the NHL players.
“You know it right away,” Davidson-Adams quipped. “You know the kids that haven’t gotten anything new for a while, because they don’t have those outlets. They don’t have an equipment manager ordering them new gear every month, or using multiple sets of gloves or new sets of underwear. Development camp is usually an interesting time for us because you can see where habits are developed. Who is airing out their gear in the summer. Who is washing their underwear frequently, and who is not.”
When those players eventually make it to the big leagues, those scents disappear thanks to the work of Davidson-Adams and other equipment trainers around the league. The technology to clean equipment is always evolving. Head equipment trainers attend seminars in the offseason to better their practices.
“We actually have a Society of Professional Hockey Equipment Managers, and we have meetings every summer,” Davidson-Adams said. “We have vendors that come out and present information to us. Their studies, what they find, and new products. They study all of this stuff. Hockey and other sports like football look at that science and how to better things and how to evolve.”
Davidson-Adams says one of the new technologies that could be coming to dressing rooms in the future are UV lights that can sanitize and kill bacteria in an entire room. The lights only come on when no one is present and can sanitize all of the equipment simultaneously rather than putting each set of gear inside the Sani Sport machine one at a time.
“Especially with COVID-19, you’re seeing a lot more healthcare systems come out with things like that,” Davidson-Adams said. “We try to keep up with healthcare system technology. It’s costly, but you want to preserve people’s health. Because that’s what we’re talking about: Players’ health and wellbeing.”
(Top photo of Chris Davidson-Adams: David Becker / NHLI via Getty Images, courtesy of the Golden Knights)
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