DC Mamba making hockey accessible to everyone
Told It Here!: 25 Iconic Years of Washington Capitals Hockey with Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin
NBC Sports Washington
4.8 • 528 Ratings
🗓️ 8 February 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As we celebrate Black History Month, this special Capitals Talk episode features the work of DC Mamba, a non-profit program that is aiming to introduce hockey in all neighborhoods at a low cost to the community, and now is partnering with the Capitals in a program called "Breaking the Ice". Nick Ashooh talks to Rock Ba'th, the founder of DC Mamba, about the program's philosophy of translating the game of hockey to kids, making it accessible and cost-friendly, and having a lot of fun in the process. Presented by Comcast Business.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on this special black history month episode of Capitol's talk presented by Comcast business. |
| 0:17.6 | We're going to talk to Rachman Rahim Ba' Baif. He goes by Rock. He's the founder, |
| 0:21.1 | president, and CEO of DC Mamba. It's a great story. It's an awesome program. I've already |
| 0:26.4 | recorded the conversation, so I can just tell you now it is worth the 15 minutes. This guy is |
| 0:30.4 | great. That's next on the Capitals Talk podcast. |
| 0:36.0 | Rockman Mahim Ba'iath, also known as a rock, which will go with the rest of the way, is the founder, |
| 0:42.0 | president and CEO of DC Mamba. And I made sure, by the way, to get that pronunciation right |
| 0:46.3 | with you, because when your last name is Ashu and it sounds like a sneeze, man, I've heard it all |
| 0:50.9 | my entire life. So I respect people's names very much so. |
| 0:55.4 | Look, I really appreciated the fact that you were able to ask and actually find it out, pronounce it correctly. |
| 1:01.5 | I'm like, you are already one of the top ones. |
| 1:04.7 | So explain to everyone just what DC Mamba hockey is and how it got started. |
| 1:10.3 | So DC Mamba is actually what we do is we fully go around to all of the spots in D.C. |
| 1:16.4 | We try to hit every neighborhood, every community. |
| 1:19.9 | And what we actually do is we want to open up more jobs. |
| 1:22.5 | And one of our ways of opening up jobs is actually throwing in a way of access and hockey. So growing up, |
| 1:29.3 | we were always able to kind of play hockey on street hockey. We were able to go anywhere. And the |
| 1:34.4 | one thing, once you wanted to get on ice, it just cost too much. So we were like, okay, cool. |
| 1:40.2 | Well, I love hockey. I played it since I was a child. What is the way for us to open up the access and actually still let kids play it, but be able to play it anywhere where there's in D.C. If everyone knows, there's only one ice rink. So in that one ice rink, every child in D.C. cannot play hockey. But our thing was, okay, cool, how do we make it where you can play anywhere? |
| 2:03.9 | And now one thing was, okay, let's start it out with just street hockey. And we'll start it out |
| 2:07.9 | with street hockey. We'll go to some of the community centers. We'll go to some of the elementary |
| 2:11.1 | schools and just grab a couple of kids, grab some like actual classes, trying to get a PE class |
... |
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