The NHL team in Columbus is called the Blue Jackets, but it’s a hat that’s become a special part of every victory.
Whether home or away, when the Jackets win, before the locker-room doors open to the media, a replica Civil War “kepi” hat is awarded within the team to the player of the game.
“You have your three stars of the game,” Matt Calvert said. “A lot of times the kepi goes to those guys, but not always. It gives guys that aren’t in the three stars, but who do something big for the team, a chance to get a little recognition of their own.”
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Calvert, the longest tenured player with the Jackets, remembers when the kepi first showed up in the locker room three seasons ago. For the longest time, there was no award for player of the game that Calvert can recall. Then, about four years ago, a first attempt at a postgame award was a wrestling-type championship belt, but that didn’t stick.
And so, the idea of the kepi came about. Using a hat tied to the tradition of the Union soldiers of the Civil War, the same tradition that gave the franchise its name, seemed to fit the burgeoning Jackets’ culture just right.
Today, the kepi that gets awarded every night is the same hat from when the tradition started. It lives in the bench cabinet of the winning player’s stall until such time that it goes to the next deserving player after the next Jackets win.
If the team travels? The equipment staff is sure to tuck the kepi into the current owner’s bag of gear lest it otherwise be forgotten.
And when the team files into the locker room after securing a win, the player with the kepi pulls out the hat, makes a short speech, talks about the game, and hands off the kepi to the player he thinks most deserves it. There might be more than a few chants of “Speech! Speech!” before the recipient dons the hat and offers some remarks of his own.
Pierre-Luc Dubois won the kepi in the Jackets’ home opener this year, a 5-0 win over the New York Islanders. It was the rookie’s first NHL game and marked the occasion of his first NHL goal.
“It feels good, it’s fun,” Dubois said. “Obviously everyone’s happy after a win and then you get that little bonus and it feels really good. The guys are amazing, they support me. To get the kepi — that makes you feel even better.”
Winning the kepi is the easy part of the equation. Awarding it is the hard part. It’s not something guys are thinking about while the game is going on, but as soon as that final buzzer sounds, if you’re the guy who has to give the kepi away, your mind is churning.
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Sergei Bobrovsky and Joonas Korpisalo come away with the kepi a lot.
“It all depends on how the last couple kepis have gone,” Dubois said. “If a couple guys who score goals got the kepi the last games, a guy who played well on the penalty kill, or blocked a couple shots, or did things that not everybody sees but are as important as goals and assists (might get it).
“It really depends, if a guy scores a hat trick you can’t not give it to him! But, if it’s a 1-1 game, it might go to a big penalty-kill guy like Jack (Johnson) or Savvy (David Savard) for blocking shots. They deserve it just as much as the guy who scored the goal.”
And that’s what the kepi tradition is about. Calling attention to the things that matter but don’t always stand out to fans or media.
That’s not to say the kepi isn’t the source of a lot of fun, too. Joonas Korpisalo has joked the hat is too small for his head, but says it fits now. And sometimes finding the kepi after the award is a game in and of itself. While you’re supposed to put it on for your speech, afterward, it’s been lodged in the shelves of a stall, left on the seat in players’ lockers, and even stashed inside a pair of hockey pants after a game.
And while the content of any kepi speech is kept within the confines of the team itself, the best ones, according to Calvert, come from guys like Artemi Panarin who, while still learning English, always gives it his best shot.
“The speeches are very important,” Panarin said. “It makes everybody to be a part of the team and come together. Sometimes I don’t understand everything that the guys say, but it’s very important and as a result, it brings us closer together.”
And thus, the kepi travels around the Blue Jackets room, game after game, player to player. To date, no one has awarded it back to themselves two games in a row, “that would be selfish,” Seth Jones laughs.
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“There’s games where you do something that goes under the radar that maybe fans or the media don’t see,” Calvert said. “Getting the kepi lets you know your teammates are proud of what you did, it’s a small thing but it’s something fun we can do at the end of the win.”
— Reported from Columbus
Photo credit: Columbus Blue Jackets
