William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and writes about people of color in the sport. Today, he profiles Randip Janda, a Vancouver Canucks broadcaster who is the NHL’s first full-time radio color commentator of South Asian heritage.
Randip Janda remembers being shocked when he first saw a Robin Bawa hockey card as a kid.
He didn’t know much about Bawa, who became the NHL’s first player of South Asian heritage when he debuted with the Washington Capitals against the Philadelphia Flyers on Oct. 6, 1989, other than him was a player in the League who looked like him.
“It opened my eyes to say, ‘OK, this is different,'” Janda said. “It showed me, either consciously or on a subconscious level, that, ‘If he can do it, maybe there’s a place for me in this game.'”
Janda’s place is in the broadcast booth as the color commentator on Vancouver Canucks games for Sportsnet 650 radio. Like Bawa, Janda is a history-maker as the first full time radio color commentator of South Asian descent in NHL history.
“I’ve been getting messages as far as India, I’ve been getting messages from Australia,” Janda said. “Across the world is one thing, but even if I go to a restaurant, somebody will come up and say, ‘Congratulations on the new gig, you’re doing a great job.’ A lot of folks from the Punjabi community are also messaging, saying, ‘This is so special to see someone from the community get the opportunity to do this.'”
Dampy Brar, a former professional hockey player, said Janda’s voice on Canucks broadcasts with play-by-play announcer Brendan Batchelor is significant. Brar is co-founder of Apna Hockey, a program that supports players of South Asian heritage and others.
“This is a big step in the right direction, especially with the demographics in British Columbia and Vancouver,” said Brar, who was the recipient of the 2019-20 Willie O’Ree Scholarship. Community Hero Award for his work. “There are a lot of South Asians that go to hockey games, a lot of them will listen to it on the radio. To have somebody from their community be part of that, being on the radio and talking about hockey, it’s just going to have more people interested in the game.”
Janda replaced Corey Hirsch on the broadcasts after the former NHL goalie left the station in June to focus on his work advancing. mental health initiatives.
Janda was already known to many hockey fans within Vancouver’s large South Asian community from his work as host of “Hockey Night in Canada: Punjabi Edition” for nine years.
He still works the “Hockey Night” broadcasts on the weekend and is thrilled to be able to show his range on an English broadcast during the week.
“I feel like when I started working with ‘Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi,’ it was seen as, ‘Yeah, that’s a hockey show, but it’s in Punjabi,'” he said. “As my story, as (play-by-play broadcaster) Harnarayan Singh’s story has shown, we can do this in English as well. We’re not isolated to one language, it’s not one language or the other, there’s an ability to do both. For us, that’s important because we can speak the game of hockey in two languages.”
Becoming a broadcaster wasn’t Janda’s goal when he attended Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, where he majored in history and minored in political science.
“My plan was originally to get involved in international relations and I wanted to work, you know, definitely be a diplomat,” he said.
But Janda also loved hockey and other sports and he wrote for a magazine and started a blog while still in college. He landed a job after graduation as an entry-level researcher for Omni Television.
“I enjoyed it, it was a fast-paced environment, and I started to work my way up,” he said. “Fast forward three years, I got promoted a couple of times. And then, in 2014, Rogers got the rights to ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ and Omni Television was owned by Rogers and with the opportunity ‘Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi’ popped up. up.”
Now Janda is part of a growing number of hockey broadcasters of color regularly seen and heard covering NHL games.
“It’s important,” he said, “because me being on a radio or TV broadcast or Kevin (Weekes) or Anson (Carter) … or you can go through the list of people that play or are on a broadcast, the fact that we are going to be in the public eye and there are kids out there saying, ‘There are individuals that look like me on a broadcast.’
“It does motivate you. It does show that there’s a place for us in the game.”
Photos: Randip Janda
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