For Akim Aliu, Hockey Diversity Alliance’s commitment remains its ‘grassroots program’

Akim Aliu grabs the football like a well-schooled quarterback – four fingers across the laces, index finger at an angle – and spots Luke Willson, the retired NFL tight end, trotting along the edge of the turf field at Canoe Landing Park in downtown Toronto.

He cocks the ball by his right ear as Wilson, fresh off an early morning flight from Winnipeg, raises his right hand. It’s football semaphore that speaks two words.

“I’m open.”

Across 13 seasons in pro hockey, Aliu earned an on-ice reputation as a bruising power forward. He’s listed at 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds, and the muscles bulging out of his sleeveless white t-shirt hint that, even though he’s a free agent at age 37, he might not be finished playing. Then he unspools a high-arcing spiral that Wilson reaches high to grab with two-hands, snatching the ball at a high point, the way well-schooled pass-catchers do.

A few dozen kids and parents witness the cross-sport pass play, which unfolded early in the Hockey Diversity Alliance’s (HDA) second annual Summerfest. Other participants were busy with drills run by volunteers from the Peel Panthers and Durham Dolphins football programs, and by Marshawn Lynch, the retired NFL star in town to lend the HDA some much-needed support.

The half-day football clinic is a new wrinkle for an organization devoted to promoting diversity in hockey, but the move is less a shift in focus than a programming adaptation that highlights the power of networking. Corporate North America may have cooled to the HDA’s mission in the six years since the advocacy group first formed, but fellow athletes still believe in its purpose.

Saturday’s gathering is a case in point.

Two retired NFLers joined forces with current and former NHL players for a