Sports

Language barriers, culture shock, isolation: How NHL's loneliest players cope

Published

10 months ago

January 24, 2024

Language barriers, culture shock, isolation: How NHL's loneliest players cope

Alexandre Carrier looked over at the stone-faced new guy to his left on the Gatineau Olympiques bench and noticed that he had another teammate’s stick in his hands. Ever the helpful sort, Carrier politely pointed out Yakov Trenin’s mistake. Trenin turned his head, stared at Carrier for a moment, and responded.

“Yes.”

Confused but also curious, Carrier then asked Trenin another question, one in which “no” was the only possible answer. Trenin again eyed him, expressionless.

“Yes.”

“I’m like, OK, he has no clue what I’m saying,” Carrier recalled with a laugh. “This was going to be a work in progress.”

Trenin was 17 years old when he left Russia to pursue his hockey dreams halfway around the world in North America. He had done his homework, too, taking classes to learn some rudimentary English so he at least could have a hope of understanding his coaches and fitting in with his teammates. The whole situation was terrifying.

Then he showed up in Quebec.

“I didn’t know they only speak French there,” Trenin said. “I was preparing for English and I get there and they all speak French.”

Trenin can laugh about it now, nearly a decade later. His English is excellent, and he’s in his fifth season with the Nashville Predators, with perpetual teammate Carrier owning the stall just across the Bridgestone Arena locker room. But when Trenin first showed up in Gatineau, he was the only Russian on the team — quite literally a stranger in a strange land. He knew nobody. He didn’t understand anybody. It was hard to make out the words the coaches were saying in team meetings. It was hard to communicate with his teammates on the ice. It was hard to fit in, to make friends, to hang out with the guys.

Carrier and the other Olympiques did their best to make Trenin feel welcome. They coaxed him into a volleyball match after a practice. They invited him to the movies “even though he didn’t understand a thing,” Carrier said. They spoke to him in their own sometimes-broken English, and Trenin — who was still new to that language and not very comfortable in it — found it easier to understand them than native English speakers because he found their accents similar to his own.

“You can’t really have a big conversation with him, so you try to just do stuff with him to make him feel part of the team,” Carrier said. “Just get him out of the house.”

Hockey is a global sport, and every time you walk into an NHL locker room, you’re liable to hear three, four, five different languages being spoken at once. Inevitable cliques form, too. The Russian players will have their locker stalls clustered together. The Czech guys on every team will all hang out away from the rink, piling into Bistro Praha for a taste of home when they roll into Edmonton. The Swedes and Finns are taught English throughout their childhoods and are usually at or near fluency, but they still congregate together and hide their conversations from prying ears by speaking their native tongue.

But not everybody has that social safety net. Sometimes, you’re the only Russian in the room, the only Czech, the only Finn, the only native French speaker. And whether you’re a teenager in juniors with no command of English or a 30-something trilingual NHL veteran, it can be difficult to be the only one from your country in the room. It’s isolating. Lonely, even.

“Sometimes, you just want to talk in your native language,” said 34-year-old Evgenii Dadonov, a 10-year NHL vet and the only Russian in the Dallas Stars room. “I can talk English, but I act a little different in Russian. I’m myself more. I’m not thinking too much when I talk and relax. In English, I’m always thinking and it’s harder to relax. It’s just something you deal with over here.”

Few players command a locker room the way Pierre-Édouard Bellemare does. He’s a big personality with a big voice, a big smile and a big laugh, and he’s everybody’s favorite teammate. As one of just two NHLers from France (Columbus’ Alexandre Texier is the other), he speaks flawless French and English, and he is fully conversant in Swedish, too. Teammates headed for summer vacations in Paris pepper him with questions and requests for restaurant recommendations. Others regularly chirp him about how “bougie” and “arrogant” the French are, and he gleefully gives it right back.

Approaching his 39th birthday and on his fifth NHL team, the Seattle Kraken, there isn’t a room in the hockey world in which Bellemare couldn’t fit in.

“I can come into a team really easily, talking to the Swedish guys or talking to the French-speaking guys or talking to the English-speaking guys,” he said. “It’s been my superpower.”

But back in 2006, Bellemare was a scared 21-year-old on the phone with his mom back in France, trying to hold back the tears because he hated walking through those doors. He had left France to play in Sweden’s second-tier league, one of the first Frenchmen to do so, and the transition had been soul-crushing. He had the skills and he had the work ethic, but he couldn’t communicate with anyone. He didn’t speak a lick of Swedish or English at the time. About the only Swedish word he knew was the one for French people, and he heard it often, usually under his new teammates’ breath as they laughed among themselves about the new guy.

The team in Leksand sent Bellemare and some of the Finnish imports to a professor’s house a few times for some basic lessons, but it was pointless, because, “At that time, I didn’t understand s—.”

“My first couple of months in Sweden were terrible,” Bellemare said. “Everybody was like, ‘Why are we bringing in a French guy? France has nothing to bring in hockey.’ This is how they saw me.”

If not for Bellemare’s mom, Frederique, his hockey career might have ended right there. But Frederique told him to embrace the challenge, that he was in Sweden not just to further his hockey career but to broaden his cultural horizons. So Bellemare broke through the language barrier like he was the Kool-Aid Homme. He learned both English and Swedish simultaneously, and shockingly fast — mostly through subtitles on movies and TV shows, as so many other international players do to hone their English once they get to the NHL.

“I was kind of in a panic mode to learn the languages,” Bellemare said. “I learned both languages really fast because I had no choice. The brain is such a wonderful thing. When you’re in a panic mode, he knows, he recognizes and suddenly you get abilities to learn a little bit faster. Nobody spoke my language, right? So I had to learn fast.”

Bellemare had to overcome more than just the language gap, though. The French had that “bougie” reputation in Sweden, too, and he had to overcome that resentment. The funny thing was that the Swedish league was the bougie one compared to what Bellemare had in France, where he was one of the country’s top players but was hardly making any money. In Sweden, he had free gear and free food. He had three hours of ice time every day instead of one. It was a hockey paradise compared to what he had in France.

So that became Mom’s advice: “Show those guys that they’re the ones who are all spoiled.”

“Once I started learning the language, they saw and said, ‘OK, this kid is trying,’” Bellemare said. “I became the hardest-working kid, and the happiest kid because I was in a sick locker room every day, with all this stuff I didn’t have back home in France. And all along, my mom was like, ‘How cool is it that a year from now, you’ll be trilingual?’ I was like, ‘That ain’t gonna happen.’ But it did happen!”

All these years later, Bellemare’s wife is Swedish and his kids, ages 6 and 4, already are bilingual, and “really close” to adding French to their repertoire.

“Like I said, it’s been a superpower,” Bellemare said, beaming. “Even though it was terrible at first.”

Unlocking the human brain’s massive potential isn’t the only silver lining that emerges from that kind of isolation. Rookie center Waltteri Merelä is the only Finn on the Tampa Bay Lightning roster, and while he admitted that he’d love to have one or two more in the room, it’s forced him to go beyond his comfort zone and make friends he might otherwise never have made.

Early in the season, Merelä and his wife learned that they live in the same neighborhood as goalies Jonas Johansson and Matt Tomkins, so they started hanging out. Now their wives and girlfriends have become close, too.

“When it’s just you, you kind of need to go find the guys that you’re going to hang out with,” Merelä said. “You don’t have that one guy you’re always hanging out with.”

Bellemare says he hasn’t experienced the animosity, othering and xenophobia in the NHL that he faced in Sweden. In his experience, the European players in the NHL typically bond over their cultural overlaps rather than focus on the divisions. There are Finns who played in Sweden, Czechs who played in Finland, Slovaks who played in Russia, Russians who played in Germany, and on and on. By the time they get to the NHL, many Europeans have a history with their new teammates, or at least some shared heritage to bond over. Which leads to a lot of good-natured chirping, particularly when a tournament like the World Junior Championship is going on.

The Swedish-Finnish rivalry is as heated as it gets, and that allows a rookie like Merelä to walk into the room and start giving it to a future Hall of Famer like Victor Hedman.

“Yeah, I can talk s— with him,” Merelä said. “But he’s always talking s— to me about Finland. It’s fun, it’s just a normal thing. It helps make you a part of everything.”

English is the universal language in hockey, the skeleton key to communication between nations. Many Europeans come to North America fluent, but nearly all can speak the language a little.

“The first few years, you just hang out with the Europeans,” said Buffalo’s Zemgus Girgensons, the only Latvian on the Sabres roster. “If you all don’t talk that great of English, you can talk to each other and help each other learn. You just manage, and try to learn English as fast as you can.”

In the rare instance when a player doesn’t speak any English at all, teams will sometimes go to great lengths to help them feel comfortable — especially for a potential star player. When the Blackhawks signed Artemi Panarin and brought him over from Russia for the 2015-16 season, they also signed Panarin’s buddy and SKA Saint Petersburg teammate Viktor Tikhonov, who grew up in San Jose, Calif., and speaks perfect English and Russian. Tikhonov could play, but he was brought over more to be Panarin’s friend and guide to America than he was to provide scoring depth. Once Panarin had his feet underneath him, Tikhonov was rather coldly traded to Arizona.

Some friends of the SKA Saint Petersburg program went so far as to set up Panarin with an interpreter, Andrew Aksyonov, who, along with his wife, Yulia Mikhaylova, were Saint Petersburg natives who had been living in Chicago. The couple picked Panarin up at the airport, took him into their home and showed him where to get groceries and the like. It was supposed to be just until Tikhonov arrived, but they became close, and the Blackhawks even hired Aksyonov to serve as Panarin’s interpreter.

Anything to make a player feel more comfortable because anxiety off the ice easily can spill onto the ice.

And that anxiety is real. Defenseman Nikita Zaitsev, now the only Russian in the Blackhawks room, said the hardest thing when he first came to North America, leaving Moscow in the KHL for Toronto in the NHL at age 25, was English slang and hockey vernacular. His English was quite good, but he kept hearing words he had never heard before, lingo that’s commonplace in the NHL but gets lost in translation. So he leaned heavily on the other Russian in the room, winger Nikita Soshnikov.

“You just want to confirm something, make sure you’re hearing the right thing,” Zaitsev said. “It can be hard. Sometimes you just want to talk to somebody in Russian. You need that. It’s always going to be hard, especially that first year.”

The culture shock, of course, goes beyond the language. If you come from a small town in Russia or Czechia or wherever and you land in, say, New York or Los Angeles or Toronto, it can be overwhelming. Merelä, for one, is grateful he ended up in Tampa — a real city, yes, but a more manageable one, with a laidback vibe.

“We don’t have really big cities in Finland,” he said. “There are a couple of OK ones, a couple hundred thousand people, but nothing like (North America). So this is probably one of the best places to play. You can figure it out pretty fast and it’s not that big. It’s easy to live here and the weather’s good and all the people are nice. Maybe if I went to some other place, it wouldn’t have been as good.”

Joining a new team is never easy. Joining a new continent is something else entirely. There’s so much to navigate, so much to absorb, so much to learn. And doing it while feeling isolated and alone is almost hard to fathom. So, in Girgensons’ words, “You manage. You figure it out.” Eventually, your new home becomes simply home, and teammates and friendships transcend borders and languages.

But still, even after fully assimilating into North American life, it’s always nice to have someone from back home at your side.

“It’s less of an issue now that I’ve been here a while, but it’s still easier to talk to somebody that speaks your language, and who you can talk to about the news going on in Russia,” Trenin said. “When (the team) brings someone from your country, it’s exciting. You stick together.”

Then he smiled.

“Even if you don’t really like them.”

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: John Russell, Bill Wippert, Christopher Mast / NHLI via Getty Images)

Click to comment

Sports

The rise of football’s ‘arrival fits’, putting player fashion in the spotlight

Published

5 hours ago

November 23, 2024

Press Room

The rise of football’s ‘arrival fits’, putting player fashion in the spotlight

Tom Marchitelli worked as an accountant for a hedge fund for eight years before setting up a side hustle that soon became his full-time business.

Marchitelli started a custom menswear clothing business called Gentleman’s Playbook a decade ago. Since then, he has accrued approximately 500 clients, the majority of whom are professional athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, and on the PGA Tour.

When The Athletic spoke with Marchitelli, he was heading to an airport in Dallas after a meeting with a baseball player.

In his role as personal designer, stylist and tailor, Marchitelli handpicks entire wardrobes for a clientele which includes Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. During the different pre-seasons across the United States’ various leagues, Marchitelli is rarely in one city for long. As well as working on a lookbook of outfits for specific events, the majority of his work centres around personalising entire collections of tunnel fits for the athletes he works with.

“Tunnel fits” is the phrase used to describe what sportsmen and women wear when they turn up at venues for games (‘fits’ being short for ‘outfits’).

Usually, athletes arrive in the tunnel beneath the arena wearing their best outfits, which is where the name derives from. Think of it as a pre-game runway, where players across sports in North America showcase their personalities through what they wear.

The most fashion-conscious athletes, such as Houston Texans’ Stefon Diggs or Oklahoma City Thunder’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, will go big, but others prefer to keep it simple.

Stefon Diggs arrives for an NFL game in January this year (Perry Knotts/Getty Images)

Kyle Kuzma was in the former camp, and is now the latter. The Washington Wizards forward recently announced his ‘retirement’ from the tunnel walk after taking the game to heights with choices including an incredibly oversized pink Raf Simons jumper and a black Rick Owens puffer jacket.

“I don’t want to be a part of that type of community where you have to put on a ’fit. I’m really taking a backseat to all of that,” Kuzma told Vogue in October.

While Kuzma has checked out and traded in a palate of high fashion for plain-tasting sweatsuits, in Europe, footballers are only just checking into the world of tunnel fits.

“It is a sport within sports (in the U.S.),” Marchitelli says. “Social media plays a huge role, because all major sports teams have media people who are in charge of photographing the players as they enter.

“That’s only been around, I would say maybe eight years, because when I first started, that (posting images of players arriving to games on social media) wasn’t a thing. And then it started becoming so visible.

Kyle Kuzma, pictured in 2022 (left) and 2021, has ‘retired’ from deliberate tunnel fits (Getty Images)

“You’re getting a close and personal look at what athletes look like when they’re not in their uniforms (team kit), and how they are choosing to express themselves. And, over time, players have taken more pride in how they show up for work.

“Another big factor that drives it is competition among players. These guys are trying to outdress guys on their team, guys on other teams across their sport, and even crossing over into other sports.

“When they show up to the arena, they’re given the uniform that they’re forced to wear, so they don’t have any real choices of self-expression other than their shoes, cleats (boots), maybe a wristband accessory or a headband. But the outfit that they wear to show up to the game, they’re able to express how they feel and how they want to look.”

Marchitelli could field a team in each men’s major sports league with the number of clients he has, but not a single one is a professional footballer despite MLS and NWSL teams having both dabbled in this subcultural movement.

In European football, tunnel fits are almost nonexistent. France international Jules Kounde led the way for Barcelona in recent seasons with his ensembled looks which blend vintage finds with high fashion. This season though, Barca players are no longer been allowed to arrive for games in their own clothes. This has led Kounde, a face now as recognisable in fashion quarters as much as football, capturing his fits to share with his followers on social media after matches instead.

Most teams have a strict club-tracksuits-only policy applied to matchday and this is one of the main reasons why pre-game tunnel fits have not yet taken off in football.

So where is the individuality? The answer to that does not yet reside in the underbelly of stadiums but in the car parks of the sport’s training grounds. Heading into training for your club or national team has slowly evolved into a time when players across the men’s and women’s games can showcase their style in the form of arrival fits.

Showing up for international duty, in particular, has become a moment for players to demonstrate their fashion prowess.

Last month, Liverpool defender Ibrahima Konate arrived at France’s training ground wearing a neon green hood zipped over his face while his international team-mate Marcus Thuram, often bedecked in Balenciaga and Chrome Hearts, is among those also paving the way.

Konate arrives for international duty with France in October (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)

Players of Argentina, Belgium and Portugal are three other standouts who consistently show up. Meanwhile, England — whose players include Louis Vuitton brand ambassador Jude Bellingham — are still strutting around in team-supplied Nike tracksuits, proving the trend has not completely caught fire everywhere.

“It was probably 2022 when that (arrival fits) wave really began,” Jordan Clarke, founder of Footballer Fits, a platform which celebrates footballer fashion, says.

Clarke noticed that Premier League team Crystal Palace had started putting pictures on Instagram of their players arriving at their south London training ground wearing their own clothes. After starting a conversation with the club, Footballer Fits and Palace have been collaborating on Instagram posts to showcase what players are wearing ever since.

“Now we’ve done it with Chelsea, Nottingham Forest, Anderlecht in Belgium, we’ve done it with Brentford a lot, we’ve done it with Crystal Palace Women, Chelsea Women — there are so many,” says Clarke, who hopes that arrival fits are a precursor to tunnel fits becoming a regular sight in football.

“I don’t want to leave anyone out, but we’ve done it with so many clubs and now you’re seeing Liverpool, Newcastle United and Manchester City maybe not doing it in collaboration with us, but they’re doing it (themselves) now, and that’s amazing to see.

“With training, there is a lot less pressure. They (clubs) can release photos midweek and whatever happens on the weekend, unless you’re a super-negative person, I don’t think people are going to link back to what the players wore to training as the reason why they lost.”

Siobhan Wilson is one of the players who has featured on Footballer Fits’ Instagram page in collaboration with her club, Birmingham City Women, and she would welcome an escape from the traditional pre-match tracksuit.

“It actually annoys me, you know — especially when you see what they are doing in the WNBA,” says the 30-year-old Jamaica international with a laugh. “I wish we did stuff like that here. They just want us to all look like clones of each other, but it’s fine.”

Wilson used to deliver mail while playing part-time for Palace. She now combines a full-time playing career at Birmingham, who are top of the second-tier Championship, with being a fitness influencer to 1.3million followers on TikTok.

“It’s nice for the fans to see players express themselves through what they’re wearing and their style,” she says. “You get to see people’s personalities by doing that, so it would be something that I would love to see more of.

“For me, I feel like if you’ve got like a nice ’fit on, and a good pair of shoes on, you just feel good. But I get the other side (players arriving in uniform tracksuits) too. It is a team game. You’re there to play as a team, so I get it from that standpoint, but wearing your own clothes and feeling comfortable in what you’re wearing: it allows you to be yourself a bit more.”

Martin Odegaard and Arsenal arriving in team gear to play Chelsea this month (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

Algen Hamilton is a designer and stylist from south London.

His break in the fashion industry arrived when he started styling looks for footballer friend Reiss Nelson, the Fulham winger (on loan from Arsenal) who he met at primary school aged four. Hamilton’s client list includes Trevoh Chalobah (Crystal Palace, on loan from Chelsea), Kai Havertz (Arsenal), Joe Willock (Newcastle), Ben Chilwell (Chelsea) and Mateo Kovacic (Manchester City).

“I’ll work with them constantly throughout the season, whenever they want to — when they have an event coming up or they have an awards ceremony or they’re going to a premiere,” Hamilton, 24, explains. “When it comes to arrival fits, those looks normally come from the wardrobe I create and I’ll update it multiple times in a year.

“I speak to them first about what they want to wear and what the vibe is that we are going for, if it’s different to before, where they are travelling to et cetera. Then I’ll go off, make the outfits and send them a message. They will tell me which outfits they love.

“So, for example, I’m working with Trevoh right now. We made a whole bunch of outfits, which he picked, and then there are brands who want to gift some stuff for winter.”

Amadou Onana, left, checks in for Belgium duty in 2023 (Nico Vereecken/Photo News via Getty Images)

Having worked with Chalobah on a full-time basis since 2021, Hamilton has watched the progression of football and fashion’s relationship firsthand.

“When I first started, players weren’t really going out there dressing up like they do now, and it wasn’t just the Premier League — we are talking La Liga (its Spanish equivalent) and the Bundesliga (the top division in Germany),” he says.

“Also, brands weren’t really opening up partnerships to football players either. As time has gone by, the popularity has grown and supporters are tapping into the player outside of the training ground and off the pitch. I feel like now, those opportunities are happening more. Players are more open with their fits and want to show them off.

“We have watched the game change bit by bit and it is only a matter of time for it to get to that stage where it’s like the sports are in America. But let’s not mix a step forward with progress, because it can be a step forward seeing teams do that (post-arrival fits on social media) but it doesn’t mean it’s actual progression for the teams to change their minds.

“The Premier League is very traditional. They’ll probably be the last league that will change how things are.

“It would be nice for the progress to be meaningful; for it (wearing an arrival outfit) not to be looked at as a distraction or as a moment where players aren’t focused on what the team objectives are, but to see it as an opportunity where players are expressing themselves.”

GO DEEPER

Footballers, modelling and the power of expression

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Kelsea Peterson)

Sports

Jason Kelce to host new late-night show on ESPN

Published

6 hours ago

November 23, 2024

Press Room

Jason Kelce to host new late-night show on ESPN

Jason Kelce is expanding his media resume.

The future Hall of Famer, who is a podcast host and “Monday Night Football” analyst, announced Thursday he will host a late-night show on ESPN.

Kelce made the announcement during an appearance with Jimmy Kimmel, a future rival.

Jason Kelce says being a father is one of the highlights of his life. (Andy Lewis/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

“I loved late-night shows. I’ve always loved them. I remember sleepovers watching Conan O’Brien with my friends,” Kelce said on Kimmel’s show. “We’re going to have a bunch of guys up there — legends of the game, friends that I played with, coaches, celebrities.”

The first four episodes of “They Call It Late Night With Jason Kelce” will be broadcast in front of a live audience at Union Transfer in Philadelphia, where Kelce played all 13 of his NFL seasons with the Eagles.

Jason Kelce waves to fans at the 18th hole at the 2024 American Century Championship at Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course July 14, 2024, in Stateline, Nev. (Isaiah Vazquez/Getty Images)

The first episode will be taped the evening of Jan. 3 and will be broadcast the following morning at 1 a.m. ET. ESPN will record four more shows, and the final broadcast is scheduled for Feb. 1.

Kelce and his younger brother, Travis, launched a podcast, “New Heights,” in 2022, a few months before facing each other in the Super Bowl.

After Travis won that Super Bowl, he hosted “Saturday Night Live,” and Jason made an appearance. Travis is also the host of the show “Are You Smarter Than A Celebrity?”

Jason Kelce poses for a photo with Kylie Kelce during the “Kelce” documentary premiere at Suzanne Roberts Theatre Sept. 8, 2023, in Philadelphia. (Cooper Neill/Getty Images)

Kelce’s wife, Kylie, announced Friday she is pregnant with the couple’s fourth daughter. In his career, he made seven Pro Bowls and was a six-time first-team All-Pro selection.

Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.

Sports

North Hollywood's Ananya Balaraman wins girls' cross-country title in City

Published

7 hours ago

November 23, 2024

Press Room

North Hollywood's Ananya Balaraman wins girls' cross-country title in City

On a cool Saturday morning at Pierce College, Ananya Balaraman of North Hollywood High did something she has been dreaming about for years. She won the City Section Division I girls’ cross-country title with a personal best time of 17 minutes, 38 seconds.

The straight-A student who attends North Hollywood’s Highly Gifted Magnet finished sixth in last year’s race in 19:18. She credits her improvement to increasing her mileage workouts.

Granada Hills won the Division I girls’ title.

Paul Tranquilla of Venice won the City Section DI boys’ race with a school-record time of 14:44.60.

(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)

In the boys’ race, Paul Tranquilla of Venice raced to the Division I title with a time of 14:44.60. Last week he ran a personal best of 15:03 at the preliminaries, so he put together back-to-back weeks reaching peak form. He set a school record and was the 800 City champion in track.

Palisades won the boys’ Division I team title.

It was a big day for the Montenegro family. Jorge helped Monroe win the Division II boys’ title and his sister, Trinidad, was a member of Granada Hills’ Division I championship team.

Griffin Kushen breaks record

Griffin Kushen of Tesoro, a recent Duke signee, had a memorable Saturday morning at the Southern Section championships at Mt. San Antonio College. He set a Mt. SAC course record with a time of 14:38.5 in Division 2. Glendora won the team title.

Beckman won the Division 1 boys’ team title. Maximo Zavaleta of King took first in 15:00.8.

Trabuco Hills won the Division 1 girls’ team title behind Holly Barker, who ran 16:40.7 to take the individual title.

In Division 2 girls, Sadie Engelhardt of Ventura won in 17:31.9. El Toro captured the team title.

The top teams and individuals advance to the state championships at Woodward Park in Fresno on Nov. 30.