She founded Philadelphia Blind Hockey. Now, Kelsey McGuire is a finalist for an NHL award.

In 2019, students from the Overbrook School for the Blind took a field trip to a Flyers practice.

Kelsey McGuire, a teacher at the West Philadelphia school since 2018, was well-known among her colleagues for her lifelong Flyers fandom. So it seemed like the perfect opportunity to tag along as a chaperone at the team’s training facility in Voorhees.

Her students had the opportunity to try on hockey equipment, and when the Flyers finished their practice, they got on the ice with the team. Each player partnered up to skate with a student.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia’s Kelsey McGuire named a finalist for the NHL’s Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award

“It was really cool to see Claude Giroux, to see all these guys that I look up to, I watch on TV — they’re real humans,” McGuire said. “They’re gentle humans working with these kids who have visual impairments. It was just so overwhelming, but so cool to see as a fan, but also as an advocator for those who are visually impaired.”

The field trip was the first time McGuire had heard of blind hockey or seen a blind hockey puck. While traditional pucks are solid discs of vulcanized rubber, the adapted puck is 5½ inches in diameter, made of thin steel, and filled with ball bearings that rattle, so players can use sound to track its location.

That day, the first seeds of McGuire’s organization, Philadelphia Blind Hockey, were planted. Now, the program that started in 2022 as a Google form has grown to nine athletes under the age of 18 and is planning to start an adult team this season. Free for all registered players, Philadelphia Blind Hockey is the first and only program of its kind in the region.

In recognition of her work, McGuire has been selected as a finalist for the NHL’s 2024 Willie O’Ree Community Award, created to honor those who have made an impact in their communities through the sport of hockey. McGuire, a Horsham native, is the first person from the area to be short-listed for the award, which will be announced on ESPN on Friday in the lead-up to the 2024 draft.

Blind hockey has been well-established in Canada since the 1970s and is a burgeoning sport in the United States with 19 programs across the country. All players are legally blind, though there are different classifications based on level of visual impairment.

Players with more vision tend to play forward, defensemen typically have less vision, and goalies have extremely low or no vision.

In addition to the adapted pucks, blind hockey also uses adapted nets only 3 feet tall and 6 feet wide, meant to keep the puck on the ice so players can track its sound easier. Before a team can score, they must complete at least one pass in the offensive zone, which provides an additional opportunity to track the puck.

Many blind hockey organizations in the U.S. are made up of adult players who lost their vision later in life. Not only does Philadelphia have the youngest team in the country, but most of its players were born with their visual impairments.

“This is giving them the opportunity to have kind of a typical, normal childhood, that they’re able to participate in sports that their siblings are doing, or having peers or friends outside of school, or outside of their classroom that they can connect to,” McGuire said.

The Willie O’Ree award is given twice each year to finalists in Canada and the U.S. The Canadian winner of the 2024 award was Mark DeMontis, founder of Canadian Blind Hockey and member of the Canadian national blind hockey team. McGuire was connected to DeMontis after her nomination and used the opportunity to do some brainstorming.

“I was bouncing ideas off of him like, ‘How do you get kids to stay involved and be involved?’” she said. “We’re hoping that we could help these other programs get kids out as well, so then they can finally have competitions, can go to these different tournaments and compete with people who are the same age as them.”

McGuire’s passion for supporting those with visual impairments can be traced back to her days at Kutztown University, one of only six universities nationally to offer an undergraduate program for teachers of the visually impaired.

Initially a special education major, she decided to specialize after a woman and a guide dog in training visited her class during her freshman year to share her experience in the field.

“I literally called my mom right after that class, and I was like, ‘I think I want to change my major,’” McGuire said. “And I went to my adviser after that class and became in the special ed field for visual impairments, and it’s been honestly the best decision I’ve ever made.”

Philadelphia Blind Hockey was a perfect marriage of McGuire’s passions. While she never played the sport herself, she has fond memories of attending Flyers and Phantoms games with her grandmother, who had season tickets, growing up.

When her program was just starting out, the Flyers helped her secure ice time at Voorhees. Now, they practice out of Hatfield Ice Arena in Montgomery County, which has a rink that is more visually appealing and helps players with low vision see the puck more easily.

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To be a finalist for an award named for Willie O’Ree was all the more meaningful to McGuire because of his backstory.

O’Ree is most notable for breaking the color barrier in the NHL as the first Black player in the league when he suited up for the Boston Bruins in 1958. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2018, the same year the NHL began giving the community award.

But before he made history, O’Ree was struck with a puck and lost 95% of his vision in his right eye. NHL bylaws prevented players with blindness in one eye from playing, so he had to keep it a secret, which he did until the end of his playing career in 1979.

“People don’t realize that he played his career with a visual impairment, and he had to hide it so they didn’t take advantage of that,” McGuire said. “Where our athletes can embrace their disability and embrace their difference to be able to play an adapted sport that he loves and was so passionate about, and he’s continuing to still change hockey. It’s just so cool to even have his name attached to our organization.”

McGuire will be on hand at the draft this weekend when the award will be presented and also will be there to watch her favorite team make some moves.

The nomination has already helped spread awareness of her organization and blind hockey in general. With Philadelphia Blind Hockey looking forward to the launch of its adult team this year, McGuire hopes her program will only see continued growth.

“I don’t want to limit it to just kids, and I don’t want to limit it to just adults,” she said. “Anyone in the area who has a visual impairment has the opportunity to learn how to play hockey and to understand it’s something that they can do. And there’s a whole community out there that backs them and supports them.”