The Oilers don’t play again until Saturday, so I thought today would be a good time to share a conversation I had with Ben Scrivens about his new mask.

Scrivens unveiled his first mask on October 20th, and along with it his new “Ben’s Netminders” program.

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Gregor:

Who came up with the idea about your mask (s)?

Scrivens: Well I kind of had the idea; I

had been bouncing around with people in my network and wanted to try something

new. I think I wanted to wait until I was a little more established in the

league before drawing any more extra attention. I wanted to make sure that I

was a good hockey player and ready to play well so that all of the stuff

wouldn’t be compounded as a distraction or anything like that.

You’re still always going to have people on

the outside, the naysayers, who are all ‘so and so should just stick to doing

what their job is,’ and ‘why aren’t they in the gym working out right now.’ You

always kind of dismiss that. It’s kind of fun to hear that sort of stuff now,

people who clearly have no idea what they are talking about when they are

throwing out lines like that, it’s pretty easy to dismiss.

But I had had this idea for a little while.

I had thought about it last year, but it wasn’t the right time or place in LA

and I felt like it might be something that could work this year. So I ran it by

— first and foremost I ran it by the organization — to make sure that they

were on board with it, that they were good, that they didn’t think that I was

trying to do anything other than play hockey first and foremost and this was kind

of an auxiliary part of the season for me. Once they were on board and they

knew what my thought process was, and what my plan was, the rest fell into

place pretty easily.

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The Edmonton Oilers foundation has been

instrumental in helping set everything up, helping get the mask actually

ordered and painted and a lot of the leg work has been done by them. So it was

great to have the organization on board and then actually finding the artists

and getting their work to a place where it was ready to be put on the mask. A

lot of that work was done through the artist and through The Schizophrenia

society of Alberta

and CMHA which is Canadian Mental Health Association. So I’ve definitely had a

lot of help already with this program and then I think that’s what you need any

time you have something that you want to be successful, you need buy in from a

lot of different people and I’m very fortunate that a lot of people that that

this was a great idea and helped me out with it so far.



***This is the mask Richard designed***



Gregor:

You’re going to have four different masks made and the artist who designed the

first mask is actually dealing with schizophrenia?

Scrivens: Yeah and that’s the distinction

to make as well. Again, part of the awareness campaign is to teach and learn

and everybody makes mistakes. One of the first mistakes I made was saying ‘it

was a schizophrenic artist’ which is not the correct way to do it. It’s the

same way that hockey players don’t like to be labelled as ‘all he is a hockey

player’ I’m a person who plays hockey, it’s the same way that you approach

that.

He’s a person; he’s an artist who is

diagnosed with schizophrenia. So that was the first mistake that I made, but

once I got my the education part of it, dealing with him has been fantastic.

He’s a hard worker, extremely gifted artist and I kind of gave him as much

carte blanches as I could, aside from keeping with the colour scheme and making

sure that the league would approve it to be put on the mask, and I think that

he did a great job. There is a lot of symbolism within the mask that kind of

comes out once you get a closer look at it, but I think that Richard did a

fantastic job with designing it.

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Gregor:

Have you had a chance to meet Richard and all of the artists face to face, do

you sit down and go over some of ideas or did they send you drawings via email

with pictures, how does it work?

Scrivens: Yeah, so I sit down with them and

explain the program before they even put pen to paper. So we sit down, we chat,

they kind of show me some of their other work and devise a bit of a plan about

what they might have in mind. It’s by no means an expedited process this

program. I guess we started laying the foundation in early August, that is when

I reached out to the schizophrenia society of Alberta. They started looking around and

they found Richard not too long after that.

It’s probably been the better part of two

months in the making now for just that first mask to come out. But we did a lot

of the ground work and a lot of it was approval and logistics of it, figuring

out the timelines and who was going to paint it and how all of that stuff was

going to work.

Now I think that we have a pretty good

system in place. I think these next three masks should be able to be pumped out

as soon as the artist is happy with their work. It’s been a learning experience

for me, but so far it’s been a great one and I’m looking forward to what these

other artists can come up with as well.

Gregor:

What was the motivation for you to be involved with the schizophrenic society

and promote awareness, why has this one

touched close to you?

Scrivens: Honestly, this is not a cause

that affects me directly. A lot of times you have, and not just hockey players,

people become involved with movements and with organizations that they’ve been

directly affected with. My wife and I have been very fortunate that we’ve had a

pretty good run. We haven’t had any real health issues, our families are all safe

and healthy but that wasn’t a good enough excuse for us not to do anything.

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My wife, Jenny,

works at the Ronald MacDonald House here in Edmonton, it’s another fantastic

charity, but we have a lot of down time once we get home from the rink and I

don’t really like to sit around and do nothing. There is only so many times in

life where you can actually use your voice when it’s got some clout behind it

to use it in a positive way.

So I thought that since I’m interested in

psychology and how we as people operate socially and how our brains are

programmed and all of that, I find it quite interesting. And that led me into

mental health and the fact that one in five Canadians are affected by mental

illness shows that this is not a small problem, this isn’t a small problem that

we can just brush aside and not pay attention to it at all. Your neighbour,

someone in your family, someone that you are close to and you don’t even know

that they have an issue, or they are trying to deal with something. Those are

the people that we’re trying to help with this campaign; trying to reduce

stigma so that people are more comfortable asking for help and when they do ask

for help, you actually have some resources and some empathy and a bit of an

idea of how you can help them.

So for me, there wasn’t a distinct reason

why I chose this, like I’m suffering from this, but I thought it was a cause

that needs to be talked about and I thought it was a good way to use this mask

idea to promote a cause that really needs promotion.

Gregor:

I think you have three of the artists confirmed, Richard [Boulet] is one and

then you have a few others. You’re still looking for a fourth, correct?

Scrivens: Ahhh… yeah, we’re kind of in that

process though. It’s kind of a niche market that we’re looking for, but we’ve

been going through the schizophrenia society and they are obviously quite

tapped into the art scene and they’ve had a lot of outreach programs helping

people to deal with and express themselves going through their treatments and

expressing themselves with their illness. So we’ve had a lot of luck and a lot

of success so far going through both CMHA and the schizophrenia society so I

don’t think that we’ll try to fix anything that’s not broken quite yet.

Gregor:

Do you know who the second artist is and do you have kind of a date when you

think the next mask will be ready?

Scrivens: Yeah actually, the next artist is

a guy named Mark Munen. He’s another

local guy, lives in Edmonton.

He’s another fantastic artist. He actually just submitted his final design to

me and we’ve kind of been going back and forth for the last couple of weeks and

I think we’re almost ready to send it off to the painters, and have them start

to get it primed and ready to go.

My plan is to wear Richard’s mask for the

better part of a month here and then we’ll transition over to Mark’s and kind

of just keep going, a bit of a treadmill style but we’ve got a lot of other

plans to do with the masks.

Hopefully we can get them displayed

somewhere around the city or even in Rexall with some other work of Richard’s,

and as we get more artists and their masks finished and work and then retired

afterwards we can put them on display.

And again part of it is to show that even

people who are dealing with and suffering from different mental illnesses,

they’re normal people, they have skills, they have a lot to offer the world and

society. For these select individuals that I’ve been working with, they’re

extremely talented. It’s almost doing them a disservice to say that they are an

artist that is living with schizophrenia, if that’s an asterisk that needs to

be included. They are artists and they are fantastic at what they do and their

pieces really mean a lot and they are really quite exceptional.

You kind of battle with that a little bit

where you don’t want to hold their illness as a talking point too much because

you want people to see the skill and the talent that these guys have, that

completely beside the other asterisk that they are dealing with an illness.

Gregor:

At the end of it, you’re going to auction these off to raise money?

Scrivens: Yeah, that’s the plan. Obviously

it won’t be until later in the year. We’re obviously trying to make this a

yearlong endeavour where we’re trying to do as much as we can while still

making hockey the focus.

We’re going to try to piggyback with some

other events that are specifically going on around Edmonton, and obviously the Oilers’ website

and my twitter account will be giving more details and more information as we shore up all of those details.

But the first step was getting this mask

out, and we have the next one on the go and we’ve formed a lot of alliances

with different mental health organizations here in the city, and we’re looking

to continue fostering those relationships and seeing where

it goes.

Part

of the fun of this is that we don’t have everything planned out quite yet.

We’ve got a lot of ideas and we’re going to try to make them work as best we

can but it’s going to be touch and go a little bit, but I think that’s only

going to make the program better, we’re going to be able to adjust on the fly

and if that doesn’t quite work the way we wanted it, we’ll adjust it and if

something really takes off we can kind of run with it and make that a new focal

point. Like I said, I’m really looking forward to playing hockey first and

foremost but this is a program that I’m excited to put my name behind and my

efforts behind outside of the rink.

Gregor:

Are you a superstitious guy at all Ben? If you win four or five in a row with Richard’s

mask and Mark’s mask is ready to wear, will you wait until you lose to change it?

Scrivens: No, no, I’m anti-superstition. I

think superstitions are a horrible thing to bog yourself down with, especially

an athlete. And all of the young athletes out there I would strongly advise you

to steer clear of them as far as you can because they are nothing but trouble.

As soon as something goes wrong and all of a sudden you’re down the creek

without a paddle and you have no recourse after that to make you feeling better

when one of your superstitions goes awry.

Gregor:

You don’t have any routine that’s set in stone, like having to be in a certain

spot in the locker room at a certain time on game day?

Scrivens: No, no, I’m as far from that as I

can be. I obviously have routines where you stretch out where you’re doing your

different exercises and warmups to get your body feeling good and make sure

that you’re not going to pull a groin or hurt yourself going out there ice

cold. But routines and superstitions aren’t the same thing, but sometimes that line

kind of greys a little bit. You’ve just got to make sure that you’re cognizant

of the difference and you know why you’re doing certain things, and if it ever

gets to the point where you’re doing it because you think it’s going to be

lucky then that’s the time when you should probably just ditch it before it

gets into something that you’re hanging onto.

Gregor: Congratulations on a great initiative and helping people suffering with mental health. One in five people affected is a large number, and I’m sure many people reading this have being impacted by it through family, friends or on there own. Continued success with Richard and all of the other artists. We look forward to seeing the other masks.

Scrivens: Yeah, thanks very much. I just

want to encourage anyone out there if you’re going through anything, just know

that it does get better. There are people around you that can help, you just

have to take that first step and reach out and ask for help and there are tons

of people around who are willing and able to help you help yourself.



WRAP UP

I’m a huge fan of helping out various charities or initiatives, so I think it is outstanding what Scrivens is doing. I think Richard did a great job on his mask and I’m looking forward to seeing the other three throughout the season.

So far Scrivens is 4-1 with his new mask, and even though he isn’t superstitious, maybe there is a bit of good Karma in that mask. I’ll bet Oilers fans are hoping there is good Karma with the remaining three masks as well.

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