“We plan to build girls’ ice hockey into one of the greatest ice attractions on earth. One of the ‘big’ [events] that plays all the big arenas here and elsewhere …. This will take earnest application and organization …. It will take high morale and vitality and determination. We know your girls possess all that …. They are magnificent—fast and skilled and full of teamwork—jet propulsion, no less.”
—Margaret Williams Parker of Encino, California, to Pearl Wylie, organizer of women’s ice hockey in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, 9 January 1953, in reference to the formation of a professional women’s hockey league in California.
HOCKEY IS AS MUCH A PART of a prairie town as the wheat elevator. For decades it has been one of the few, if not the only, outdoor activities in which people of all ages and from all classes and both sexes can participate. In the West, as in towns across the rest of Canada, hockey is the metaphorical hearth of winter life, kindling community warmth and fervour. It is a way to celebrate winter, rather than to simply survive it.
For decades girls have played alongside boys on the frozen sloughs or town rinks of Western communities. Isolated from one another by an endless expanse of frozen fields, female players have regularly braved bitter winter storms and hours of travel to meet raucously—joyfully—on a patch of ice. They have approached hockey with a hardy, frontier relish, which to this day characterizes their game.
Because the game springs from the small towns, the rural values of cooperation and inclusion are reflected in Western hockey. Female teams here do not possess the star quality of Ontario and Quebec teams; in fact, up until very recently, just a handful of players made it to the ranks of the national team. Rather, Western teams exhibit a collective work ethic not associated with more urbanized regions. Many of these players grew up on farms; they are mentally and physically tough and place more value on working cooperatively than on their individual performances.
After years of merely surviving, albeit with a pioneer verve and defiance, the female game in the West is ascending rapidly. Not only is the number of players rising, but so, too, are the quality and aspiration of these players. The first high performance centre for women’s hockey in the world was established in Calgary in 1995, the first female head coach of the women’s national team is a product of the West as are several of the highest-ranked players in the country. But as any prairie farmer can tell you, for something to grow so well, the roots must be strong. Thus any account of women’s hockey today in Western Canada necessarily begins with the Edmonton Chimos, a team that has endured and inspired for more than a quarter of a century. With their hardy union of prairie grit and flamboyant daring, not only have the Chimos set the standards for women’s hockey in the West, but they have also planted the seeds for its recent growth.
The Chimos came together as a team in the fall of 1971 after a local hockey organizer put out a call over an Edmonton radio station for women who were interested in playing hockey. The call netted enough women to form two teams, ranging from ages seventeen to fifty. While most of them had not played hockey since childhood—some couldn’t even skate—many had dreamed of being part of a real hockey team. The simple pleasure of slipping on team jerseys and lacing up their hockey skates thrilled them.
The Chimos originally referred to themselves as the “Tuesday night girls’ hockey team.” In the first season they met only a few times to face off against their competition, “the Sunday night team.” After games and practices, the women gathered at a local bar where they clanked their beer mugs together and shouted Chimo, an Inuit greeting, which means hello. The cheer evoked the affable spirit of the group and was adopted as the team’s name the following year.
What began as an assemblage of eager, if not particularly able, hockey players, rapidly evolved into a team of players with extraordinary determination. Commitment was vital. Although female hockey began to show signs of a renaissance in the early 1970s, public support for the sport was not widespread. This had not always been the case. From the turn of the century until well into the 1930s, female hockey in the West had enjoyed a host of tournaments. Rivalry was especially intense between the Calgary Grills and the Edmonton Rustlers, who both vied for the title of the Western Canadian Championship. The players left husbands and children behind to travel by train to the tournaments, booking several box cars in which they slept and changed for the duration of the championships. Crowds of up to three thousand cheered on the athletes for the more important competitions. With World War II, however, women were shut out of the rinks and encouraged to put any extra energy towards the war effort. The popularity of the game suddenly ceased to expand.
The renewed popularity of female hockey in the 1970s hardly matched that of the 1930s. Indeed, the Chimos encountered no such enthusiasm—not in their early years at any rate, and certainly not in larger centres such as Edmonton. As the team struggled to master basic skills, it did so at rinks in small towns outside the city; these were the only rinks that would allow it ice time. Practices were invariably scheduled during left-over ice time, often from 10:00 PM to midnight. Most of the players accepted that they were playing a male sport and gratefully took what they could get. The last thing the women wanted to do was compound the ridicule or scorn that they encountered when they revealed to acquaintances that they played hockey. As late as 1990, when a Chimos member told a co-worker that as part of the first Team Canada she was going to be on The Sports Network, he scoffed, “Why are they wasting air-time on female hockey?”1
Finding a coach who would take the team seriously was also no easy feat. After several years of half-hearted instruction from a variety of coaches, the team welcomed Dave Rehill, who reciprocated the Chimos’ devotion to improving themselves. Under Rehill the team honed its skills, pulling together into a tight, well-balanced unit. The Chimos learned to play intelligent hockey, always choosing crafty dekes over body-checking. Team captain Shirley Cameron also helped raise the level of play. Two decades later, she would take on the role of the team’s coach. Cameron had grown up in Bonneyville, a town several hours northeast of Edmonton. As a girl in the late 1950s, she had played shinny on a pond with her brothers, but had not been allowed to join an organized boys’ team. Like many of the Chimos women, she had never expected to play on a women’s team, let alone one that would eventually prove to be so successful. On ice, this tiny woman flew from end to end, digging ferociously in the corners when the puck slid into the defensive zone. “Every time Shirley took a face-off, it was like the last face-off she would ever take,” recalls a former opponent. “She wanted to win every little one-on-one battle with you. She would never quit.”2 Cameron took it upon herself to train off-ice as the level of competition rose, feeling fortunate she had the chance to put her skills to use. She set the goals for the team and through her own resolve, drew out commitment in others. If team members had partied late the night before and were lethargic on ice, for instance, Cameron would berate them in the dressing room between periods until their play improved. The players who initially lagged far behind caught up and the even calibre of the team soon became its key strength.
After several years of playing local men’s teams, the Chimos branched out into the rural areas in 1975, taking on men’s old-timers’ teams. In a manner reminiscent of the 1930s, the Chimos travelled around in an old RV gutted and outfitted with seats and a bathroom. On weekends the team set off to play as many as three games in a town. Word spread through rural Alberta about the “ladies’ team” and soon the arenas were packed with fans, the most ardent of whom were the local women, who hollered from the stands for the Chimos to
A proud Western legacy: the Edmonton Chimos, 1978. Shirley Cameron stands on the far left, second row.
cream their husbands. At the end of the event, a hat was passed around to cover the team’s travel costs. The Chimos invariably set off for home exhilarated and exhausted.
The weekend excursions proved invaluable to the evolution of the team. While ignored or ridiculed by urbane Edmontonians, Chimos members were treated as celebrities by rural Albertans. Hockey, after all, had its deepest roots in rural life. While city dwellers are generally viewed as more forward-thinking, people in the small towns far more readily accepted the idea that women could play. The rural support not only enhanced the team’s confidence, but also led to more competitive games. By the late 1970s the team had improved to the point of dominating the old-timers’ teams. The novelty aspect consequently wore thin and the light-hearted play that had characterized the early matches hardened into tense competition. In one game in the town of Glendon, a Chimos player decked a member of the old-timers’ team, who just happened to be the town’s mayor. Infuriated, the mayor slugged the player in retaliation as fans booed from the stands. “When we started to win the majority of the games, the men got angry,” sums up Cameron. “That’s when it stopped being fun.”3
Lack of sponsorship also detracted from the fun. The costs of equipment, gas, food en route to games and registration could tally as high as $3,000 in the mid-1990s. “Any men’s team that has been as dominant as we have I don’t think would be scratching for sponsorship,” says an agitated Cameron. “They’d have sponsors knocking down their doors to jump on board.”4 As late as 1996—twenty-five years after the Chirnos’ launch—the largest donation the team had ever procured was $1,000 from the Cheemo perogy company. It was enough to cover the expense of team hockey bags.
Throughout the 1970s most contact with other female teams took place at tournaments. In 1973 a rival team from Calgary called the Alberta Wild Roses formed and vied with the Chimos for the Alberta and Western championships. The next year the Wild Roses revived the Canadian Western Shield of the 1930s, which attracted sixteen teams from four Western provinces and twelve hundred fans for the final game. The Sweetheart Tournament in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, where female hockey had been extremely popular in the early 1900s, was also launched in the early 1970s. The Sweetheart’s appeal was fast, hard, full-body contact hockey, an element that propelled the tournament until 1986, when national rules were passed forbidding bodychecking.
Dozens of female teams from across the West flocked to North Battleford to take part in its February 14 Sweetheart Tournament. Townspeople embraced the event, hosting parties and dances and guaranteeing a packed rink of almost four hundred fiercely pro-Saskatchewan fans. Although the teams were there to play hockey, they hardly shied away from the social aspects of the event. All the women’s team members took rooms at the dilapidated Beaver Hotel, crowding the hallway as they waited at the antiquated stand-up register for their keys. A roomy bar downstairs served as the teams’ meeting place. There post-game parties carried on until sunrise.
For the Melfort Missilettes, the dominant Saskatchewan women’s team, the North Battleford tournament provided a rare opportunity to take on the Chimos, their staunchest competitors, before a partisan crowd. The Missilettes had formed in 1972 in Melfort, a farming community southeast of Prince Albert and a couple of hours’ drive from Saskatoon. On ice the Missilettes’ moves were basic, consisting of mainly chasing, dumping and forechecking. But the players were passionate about the game and as dedicated as the Chimos. Most of the Missilettes travelled long ribbons of icy prairie road just to make practices. Facilities were primitive: the temperature inside the team’s home rink often dropped lower than the temperature outside. The Missilettes wore toques under their helmets and rushed to a heated hut halfway through practices to thaw their frigid feet. The rink, called The Four Seasons, was soon dubbed “The Four Freezins.”
Most of the Missilettes’ games consisted of encounters within the Western university league—a league that resurfaced in the mid-1970s after an almost thirty-year hiatus. As in the rest of Canada, organized female hockey in the West was played first at universities. The University of Saskatoon iced its inaugural women’s team in 1913. The team competed both in a city league and in the Western Inter-Varsity Athletic Union until the league shut down during World War II, when the armed forces took over the rinks.5 The university league revived in the mid-1970s with the University of Saskatchewan team, the Huskiettes (later the Huskies), facing off against other Western teams in tournaments held at the universities of Manitoba, Calgary, Minnesota and British Columbia, and at their own tournament, the Labatt Cup. The Huskiettes, like the other teams, received no funding from their university, and wore uniforms handed down to their players from the men’s team.
While the university league provided some tournaments, no club league existed in Saskatchewan until 1982. In search of further challenges, the Missilettes would often drive to Winnipeg or Calgary, leaving at 5:00 PM on a Friday and arriving at dawn on Saturday. They would play all day and then turn around to go home. Because of the lack of funding or support from the provincial amateur hockey association, the Missilettes folded in 1979, only to be reactivated in 1982 under the name of the Maidstone Saskies. The next year the Saskies went on to represent the province in the national championship for the first of eight consecutive times.
In 1987 the Saskies even managed to compete against Finland and Sweden. To get to Scandinavia, members signed personal guarantees for a sum total of $26,000 and held bingo fundraisers for two years after the tournament to pay off the loan. They could hardly afford ice time at home and would often practise late into the night on a frozen lake in Bud Miller Park in Saskatoon. Coach Bill Thon, a stern man who demanded discipline, oversaw the outdoor practices. “It’d be ten o’clock at night and Bill would have us just skate and skate and skate. We thought of ourselves as Rocky,” recalls former Saskie Cindy Simon with a chuckle. “We’d always wonder what the teams in Ontario are doing right now. And certainly the Chimos weren’t outdoors!”6 Occasionally the Saskies managed to get some ice time in “an ugly little arena” in a town call Hillmont. Driving home late one night in freezing cold weather, Simon’s car broke down. She and a teammate pulled their gear out of their hockey bags and put it on to keep warm. They trudged through the snow towards the nearest farm-house—hockey sticks in hand to protect them from any dogs. When they finally arrived, the farmer refused to open the door because he was afraid. His wife at last let them in and served them cups of hot chocolate while her husband went out to fix their car. In the end the cost of playing and travelling to games made it impossible for the Saskies to continue. The team disbanded in 1990, leaving a legacy of physical and mental toughness.
One team that did not struggle to exist from year to year, at least initially, was the Canadian Polish Athletic Club (CPAC) team from Manitoba. Although CPAC never matched the talent and fame of the Chimos, it set the pace of hockey in the province’s five- or six-team women’s senior league. The team was spawned in the north end of Winnipeg at the St. James Bord-Aire community club in the early 1970s. While other teams in the West grappled with financial worries, the Polish club raised funds through bingo games to pay for the CPAC’s equipment, ice time and travel costs. At the end of each year, the club even threw a banquet for the team. As former team member Sandy Rice, now in her thirties, comments, “You just thought, ‘Wow! This is what it would be like playing in the big time.’ You just had to sign your name at registration and never worry about money.”7
Many of its members were in their early teens, the core of the group formed by the three Sobkewich sisters and a then thirteen-year-old Rice. Dawn McGuire, who would later become the prominent defence for both the Chimos and Team Canada, also played on CPAC in the mid-1970s. McGuire grew up north of Winnipeg. She participated on boys’ teams until she was thirteen. A this point a coach barred her from the local team because she was a girl. Determined to continue, McGuire commuted forty minutes to Winnipeg, where she participated in the thriving girls’ league composed of almost seventy teams. Most of the games were held outdoors, the wind blanketing the ice with snow. The temperature often dipped so low that after certain games McGuire and teammates had to roll jam jars filled with hot water over their frozen feet as they wept from the cold.
CPAC took part in the Winnipeg Women’s Hockey League and played a thirty-game schedule against the Panthers, Angels, North Ends, and its fiercest rivals, the Rebels. The team also competed in the Sweetheart and Western Shield tournaments, as well as the Mid-Canada Tournament hosted by Manitoba, which ran from 1975 to 1981. With their youthful devotion to the game, CPAC members were provincial champions until the team folded in 1987, a victim of the declining numbers in girls’ hockey and the Polish Club’s decision to sponsor boys’ minor hockey.
By the late 1970s the Chimos, too, teetered on the verge of extinction. The team so overwhelmed its opponents—by as many as twenty goals a game—that all the other teams were placed in the B division. As the lone entry in the A division of the Northern Alberta Ladies Hockey League, the team became a virtual outcast in the league. Its members were now separated from the very thing they had sought when they joined the team: competition with other women.
In 1978 the Chimos turned to the east in search of higher stakes, the first to do so. By combining their savings and making up the rest through bingo games, raffles and dances, the players gathered enough money to fly to Wallaceburg, in Southern Ontario. It was a brave move given the trepidation the team felt towards its Eastern counterparts. Most of the Chimos had grown up in small farming communities and felt intimidated not only by Ontario’s bravado but also by the big-city sophistication—some would say arrogance—of its players. But the Chimos surprised themselves and everyone else by placing first in the competition. Although the players lacked the flashy moves of the Ontarians, they worked harder, passed more skilfully and performed more cohesively as a team. In short, their emphasis on cooperation and inclusiveness—values that stemmed from their rural background—ultimately paid off.
If the contact with the East did much to boost the morale of the Chimos, the first national championship held in Ontario in 1982 saved the team. The new level of competition supplied an invigorating challenge to the other Western teams as well. It also indirectly transformed the Western Shield into a B championship and maintained a high-level tournament for the teams that did not win the provincial championship. While the winning A team from each Western province proceeded to the national championship, second-place teams carried on to the Western Shield to face off against the winner of the B league. A Midget division was added soon afterwards, further expanding the event’s scope.
The 1970s and early 1980s also saw a substantial growth in girls’ minor hockey, much of which took place in rural areas. “Every small town had a team of girls in the 1970s,” remembers Lila Quinton of the Saskatchewan Amateur Hockey Association (SAHA). “Even the town of three hundred where I grew up [in rural Saskatchewan] had a girls’ team. It was a lot more acceptable than it is now. Our parents didn’t worry as much if it was womanly or not, and we never had the hassles that I’ve had as a senior player [with men] putting us in our place verbally if we did good against their team.”8
By the mid-1980s, however, the numbers began to decline. The drop in registration reflected a growing awareness of the violence in the male game, more than the existence of problems in the female game. A federal investigation into violence in hockey was launched, and soon hundreds of teams disappeared across the country as parents pulled their children out of the game. Coinciding with the protest against the violence in hockey was the introduction of ringette, a relatively new low-contact game touted as the “feminine alternative” to hockey. Droves of girls traded in pucks for rings. Behind the defection lay the wishes of the parents. Many wanted their daughters to play a safer, more acceptable game, as well as one that did not compete directly with the boys’ game. “It has often been the parents who are livid about girls playing hockey,” says Sandy Johnson, a prominent coach in Saskatchewan. “They’d say, ‘They’re taking the place of somebody’s boy. If she wasn’t playing, my boy would be. Go play ringette, that’s a girl’s sport.’”9
In 1990 the lull in female hockey abruptly ceased with the first official world championship whose final game flickered across a million and a half TV screens. Four of Team Canada’s members were from the West. Of these women, the three who were or had been on the Chimos shone in the media: thirty-seven-year-old Shirley Cameron was lauded as the oldest player; as the sister of the New York Islander Gerald Diduck, Judy Diduck was closely observed; and Dawn McGuire was celebrated as Team Canada’s most valuable defence player in the championship. In 1992 the announcement that women’s hockey would at last be included in the Olympics only enhanced the game’s visibility.
These events had profound repercussions for female hockey in the West. Numbers suddenly ballooned. By 1995 more than fifty senior women’s teams were competing in Alberta alone. Just as significantly, however, the players began to perceive themselves differently. No longer were they in the game simply for friendship and fun: they were also in it to win.
This shift in attitude has been considerable and is manifested in players’ approach to nutrition, office training and mental preparation before games. The rowdy partying that often followed games in the late 1980s has given way to tame outings that wrap up by 10:00 PM. The family atmosphere with its inherent requirements of group sacrifice and devotion—the linchpin of the Chimes’ success—has steadily dissipated. “In the 1970s and early 1980s, you structured your life around hockey and made sacrifices and that was that,” explains Cameron, who now coaches the Chimos. “But now it’s very hard to sell the younger players the idea of team commitment.”10 The younger players are instead focussing on personal goals. In doing so they are raising both the athletic calibre and the stakes of women’s hockey.
It is no coincidence that at a time when the nature of the game and its players are transforming, national level coach Shannon Lee Miller has emerged as a powerful presence both in the West and nationally. As assistant coach Miller helped guide the Alberta team to victory in the first Canada Winter Games, which were held in 1991. After acting as assistant coach for Team Canada during the 1992 and 1994 world championships, Miller became the first female head coach of the national team. Also, in 1995, she led an inexperienced Calgary senior team to victory against the unbeaten provincial champions, the Chimos, and then helped the same team win third place at the national championship.
Miller is a short woman with jet-black hair and calm, penetrating blue eyes. She drives a sleek sports car that reflects her own high energy level. As a coach Miller projects composed authority and is most frequently described by players as intense and intimidating. “Sometimes it’s just the look she gives you,” says player Hayley Wickenheiser, blushing and laughing. “She sure speaks her mind!”11
It’s a description that both puzzles and pleases Miller. “I hear all the time that players think I’m intimidating, and on the one hand I don’t understand it because I go out of my way to be approachable,” muses Miller. “But I think part of it is that women aren’t used to coaches taking them seriously, even if a coach is excellent. It somehow comes out that male coaches don’t expect quite as much from the female athletes [as they would from male athletes].”12 Heather Ginzel, a former national team member, puts it this way: “It’s a trust thing. You know, we grow up thinking that men know more about hockey, which is true because they have more opportunity. But when Miller was coach, you’d get off rink and she’d make you feel so good.”13
Miller demands the utmost from her players, an attitude that stems from her own upbringing. Born in 1963, Miller grew up in the farming town of Melfort, Saskatchewan, the daughter of a high-school gym teacher. When Shannon was a girl, her father would take her to the park where he coached football and would encourage her to play alongside the boys. “In his opinion there wasn’t a difference between a little girl and a little boy,” says Miller of her father. “He never made me feel like there wasn’t anything I could do. Even today, I feel I can do anything.”14 While still in grade school, Miller spent her time after school training with the high school track and field team, which her father also coached.
At a provincial track meet when Miller was in Grade Seven, her father cautioned her to keep her eyes focussed forward on the curves or she would lose her lead. During the race Miller looked back—and was passed. As father and daughter walked from the track towards their car, Miller’s father placed his hand around her shoulder and asked, “Well, so why do you think you’re holding the silver medal?”
“‘Cause I looked over my shoulder,” replied Miller, sheepishly. Her father simply let out a gentle laugh. “He was demanding,” recalls Miller, “but always supportive and positive.”15 It would be the last time Miller was to be coached by her father; the next year he died of cancer.
At seventeen, Miller left Melfort to attend the University of Saskatchewan, where she coached and played on its club team and then played for the Saskies. Five years later she moved to Calgary, where she trained to become a police officer. In motivating players, Miller employs the most valuable skill that she acquired from crisis situations in policing: timing. “Everything in life is timing,” she declares. “When you speak, when you learn to listen, when you take action.”16 Miller is highly proficient at the technical side of coaching, but her real forte is motivating players, a skill that relies on this sense of timing. “She’ll give people a chance,” explains one player, “but if you cross the line and screw up, you’re in trouble.”17
In many ways, timing has been on Miller’s side. Sent by the Alberta Amateur Hockey Association (AAHA) to assess the first women’s world competition in 1990, Miller witnessed a talented Team Canada, one that she knew immediately she would like to coach one day. The championship motivated her to improve her coaching skills, or as she puts it, “to set goals and dream a bit.”18 Miller soon realized that it was within her reach to coach the national team. She offered her services on a volunteer basis and passed up many opportunities to advance within the police force in order to dedicate herself to hockey. The police force encouraged her to write a set of exams that would enable her to become a sergeant or detective and eventually fulfill her dream of working undercover. Instead, she opted to invest even more time into hockey schools across the West. She also made a commitment to continue developing Calgary’s freshly launched girls’ team. Miller had put the city’s only female Peewee team together in the 1988–1989 season. She remembers the team’s first game, in which it lost 19–0, as the most fun game she has ever coached. “Some of the girls could hardly skate three steps without falling over,” Miller recalls, grinning and shaking her head. “After the game, mothers were taking pictures and coming up to me crying with joy.”19
Miller invested two years of long hours to establish the team. The Calgary Minor Hockey Association initially resisted the idea of a girls’ Peewee team. It refused to help finance the team or give it ice time, although it provided these services to boys’ teams. The association endorsed the idea of girls’ hockey once the team was set up, only then permitting it to take part in the boys’ league.
It was through this team that in 1990 Miller met twelve-year-old Hayley Wickenheiser. A small, wildly aggressive player who had just moved to the city from Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, Wickenheiser had skated since she could walk. She showed finesse with the puck and an ability to anticipate plays that was beyond her years. She was also a firecracker on ice, explosive and greedy with the puck. Accustomed to playing with boys only, Wickenheiser felt frustrated by the level of this new girls’ team. After shifts she would smack her stick against the boards and swear, angry that a teammate had missed a pass or failed to score. Miller, who herself had been a testy player in her youth—once, she had removed her glove on mid-ice to give the crowd the finger because it had cheered after she had been hit and knocked out—kept Wickenheiser on the bench when she needed to cool down. When Wickenheiser played for Team Canada in the 1994 world championship, her temper again flared up. Although bodychecking was officially banned, Wickenheiser got slammed into the boards. From the ice she hollered at Miller, “I thought there was no fucking bodychecking!” “Apparently there is,” Miller laughed, “so go out and hit somebody.”20
While Wickenheiser’s temper at times has detracted from her ability on ice, off ice she is impressively mature and focussed. At school she receives high grades and at home she is precociously independent. “You never have to get on her and say, ‘Let’s go, work hard,’” says her father, Tom. “She works at a top level all the time.”21 Wickenheiser’s drive, however, concerns her mother, Marilyn, who thinks her daughter is growing up too fast. Tom worries about this, too. “It’s been a lot harder on her being isolated as the only girl [on boys’ teams],” he explains. “She missed out on a lot of socializing and that was tough. She’d have to get changed in the skate sharpening room or the bathroom or some place. She was never really with the team except on the ice.”22 Tom Wickenheiser’s fondest memory of Hayley is connected to a scrimmage in Shaunavon. The town had rounded up a team to play against a team from Medicine Hat. “Hayley played in net by third period because after scoring goal after easy goal, I realized we couldn’t let her skate,” recalls Tom. “I told the guy from the other team that I’d move her back into goal, but she had fun. It was light and there was no pressure and it was good for her.”23
In her Calgary home, Wickenheiser inhabits a basement bedroom that she chose for its privacy and autonomy. Its walls are checkered with posters of legendary hockey players and motivational messages handwritten on cue cards. “Focus awareness! Be mindful in tough situations,” “Fake it!” “Energize! Pump!” “Intimidate and Annihilate!” “I have made the choice to be positive,” the slogans exclaim. Similar messages are found scribbled in the margins of Wickenheiser’s journal: “Relax!” “Explode!” “Focus!” “Bang!” “Snap!”
After two years with Miller’s Peewee team, Wickenheiser switched to an elite AAA boys’ Bantam team. Now that she had turned fifteen she wanted the challenge of full-contact hockey, which came with the boys’ league. Wickenheiser was no longer the petite player who darted frenetically between her opponents: she was growing into a towering, broad-shouldered woman—she would be 5 ft. 9 in. (174 cm) 170 lbs. (75 kg) by 1996—who could return the toughest bodycheck. In 1993, the year in which Wickenheiser returned to the boys’ league, she received an invitation to try out for the Canadian national women’s team. After some hesitation about her age—at fifteen she would be the youngest player to make the team—Canadian Hockey Association officials decided she was too talented a player to pass up. In winter 1994 Wickenheiser joined Team Canada in Lake Placid for the third world championship and brought home her first gold medal.
The next season Wickenheiser returned to Miller’s female team after being cut from an AAA Midget boys’ team. When she received the news that she had not made the team, she was bitterly disappointed. In her diary she wrote:
Today was the last game of try-outs. They posted the list of the forty-five guys that would continue on from this camp. My name wasn’t on it!! I got shafted big time! Politics sucks! I shouldn’t have been so naive. I should have expected this. No matter how good I played, the coaches couldn’t pick a first-year sixteen-year-old GIRL! There were guys that were picked that I surpassed last year. I trained all summer and was in better shape than most guys there!24
Once she returned to Miller’s team, however, Wickenheiser became a role model for other young women in the sport. “Hayley has been a very long project,” says Miller. “It’s been like taming a wild horse.”25 During games Wickenheiser is now less selfish with the puck; during practices she will team
Hayley Wickenheiser, now one of the top players in Canada, takes instruction from coach Shannon Miller.
up with weaker players, pointing out improvements they can make. Now that she has crossed over into the world of women’s hockey, she is less wrapped up in her performance. The intensity that Wickenheiser feels for hockey is no longer manifested in childish outbursts. Instead, it is poured back into the game. Under the guidance of Miller, and others, Wickenheiser has sharpened her game. At the national team selection camp in the fall of 1995, she was ranked as the top forward in the country. Still in her teens, she is an imposing presence in the game of women’s hockey.
A surprising turn of events has also offered Wickenheiser the training that she hoped she would get with the top Midget boys’ team. In September 1995 Shannon Miller left her policing job to become a full-time coach in the first-ever high-performance female hockey program at Calgary’s Olympic Oval. There Miller provides an intensive training program to Wickenheiser and five other high-performance female players, as well as eighteen Midget-aged girls. Not only does the program provide an unprecedented opportunity for both the players and Miller—who is the first full-time paid female hockey coach in the country—but it also indicates just how pivotal Alberta has become to women’s hockey. Numerous players from the Olympic pool are planning to move temporarily to Calgary to train under Miller, who will also most likely be appointed as head coach of the Olympic team.
The elite program for female players in Calgary is only one of the West’s success stories. Girls’ minor hockey has developed rapidly in other parts of Alberta and the West since 1990. Albertan female leagues have tripled in size since the late 1980s. In 1995 there were more than 2,200 senior and minor female players. In the same year fourteen teams attended the Midget provincial championship, up from three the year before. In Edmonton nine girls’ teams compete within the city’s minor league and seven female Midget teams have formed their own league.
The growth is in part due to the inclusion of female hockey in the Olympics. Its effects reverberate throughout minor and senior hockey leagues across the country: a new legitimacy has been cast on the sport, replete with some of the dreams and aspirations of male hockey. But in the case of Alberta, other factors have come into play as well. In 1992 the women’s national championship was held in Edmonton, exposing many girls and their parents to the female game for the first time. Following the championship, a Fun Day was held. Any girl who wished to play hockey was invited to do so. Five hundred girls showed up, and organizers were obliged to book ice time to accommodate the numbers. The inclusion of girls’ hockey in the semi-annual Alberta Winter Games in 1994 and in the Canada Winter Games in 1991 also opened the doors for girls. The training programs for the games helped Alberta Hockey track its promising players. Moreover, it allowed girls to play with their peers; in smaller communities the only option available is to play with boys’ or senior women’s teams.
The unpaid work of women such as Judy Colpitts, the CHA Female Council representative for Alberta from 1991 to 1994, and Melody Davidson and Marilyn Wickenheiser, the past and present girls’ minor hockey representatives, has provided the impetus for these events. Davidson, in particular, has made a significant contribution: she has coached, held clinics, written manuals, run jamborees and served as a well-respected spokesperson for the sport. “Everything comes down to leadership,” Davidson says of the recent growth. “Ten years ago, senior [hockey] women were not involved. Then they started to see that their teams couldn’t survive without minor leagues. That’s when things started to take off.”26 Now senior players, including many current and former Chimos members, act as coaches, referees, administrators and instructors at summer hockey camps. With younger girls playing again, parents have become more involved, increasing the momentum of expansion.
Since girls’ minor hockey took off in the early 1990s, the minor system in Saskatchewan has emerged as one of the strongest in Western Canada. Most of Saskatchewan’s inhabitants have grown up in small towns or on farms and despite long distances between these communities—some girls play on teams that are based up to one hundred kilometres from their home—a love of the game at the grassroots level has persisted, ensuring its survival. “We don’t get mass population,” explains the female hockey representative for the province, Lila Quinton, “but we do get ones who are dedicated and driven. The girls are very good because they want to play, not because parents push them.”27
Currently, more than six hundred girls are registered with the Saskatchewan Amateur Hockey Association (SAHA), most of whom play on girls’ teams. Including girls who belong to recreational leagues, there are now almost eight hundred female players, whereas during the mid-1980s there were only one hundred. In the province’s biggest city, Regina, the women’s division of the Queen’s City Hockey League included twenty teams in 1995, an increase from two teams in 1991.
While the popularity of ringette helped produce a ten-year gap in the development of girls’ hockey in the 1980s, since 1990, ringette has begun to serve as a training ground for girls who later go on to play hockey. In the mid-1990s, for example, entire ringette associations in North Batlleford and Swift Current switched to girls’ hockey. But as in Alberta, the development program for the 1991 Canada Winter Games, called Sask First in this province, has proven to be the main attraction for new members. Saskatchewan has done well at the Games, taking home the silver medal in 1995. The rising number of female players reflects the program’s success, reports Games coach Sandy Johnson, because its development camps offer girls from six to sixteen a much-wanted chance to play against each other.
The Sask First program notwithstanding, the SAHA has generally ignored the female game. Lila Quinton, the chair of the association’s Female Division and the Female Council representative for the CHA since 1992, has fought hard to make her voice heard at meetings over the years. Quinton is equally critical of both organizations for their failure to support female growth at the grassroots level. “The CHA is very elite driven,” says Quinton. “All its energy and money seems to be going to the elite program. The cream always rises to top, but you need to look at the milk: it’s the milk that supports the cream.” Indeed, this province of only a million people has fostered its share of outstanding female hockey players and coaches in the country. These include Shannon Miller and Olympic team contenders Hayley Wickenheiser, Carol Scheibel, Fiona Smith and Kelly Bouchard. Ironically, however, Saskatchewan’s senior female leagues are among the weakest in the country. Most talented players head to Alberta in their late teens, where the level of competition and training is far higher.
Within Saskatchewan the central obstacle remains locating the myriad girls who play on boys’ teams. The SAHA has compiled lists of these female players in the Sask First program, but refuses to give them to anyone outside the organization. Consequently communities who wish to start a girl’s team have found it difficult to locate players in the surrounding area. Furthermore, rural boys’ teams are now urging girls to join their teams in order to boost their shrinking rosters. “It’s going to be a fight in rural Saskatchewan,” says Quinton. “The population is going down and the boys are going to want these girls to go make their teams [to help keep them afloat. But our numbers are so low that we [female hockey] need them.” To ensure that girls do not end up playing only on boys’ teams, Quinton managed to pass a rule in 1995 that bars girls from joining boys’ teams unless they register with a girl’s team first, provided there is one in the area in which they live. The rule has caused some confusion, and promoters of the female game such as Sandy Johnson think it may put too much pressure on youngsters. “I understand it’s to build numbers,” says Johnson, “but you’re forcing the girls to do something they’re not making a decision on. Many of these kids live in rural centres where they drive forty-five minutes in the winter when it’s blowing and snowing to play a game.”28 Quinton, however, insists the rule is the only way to guarantee that female hockey will continue to thrive in the province.
Next door in Manitoba, twelve hundred girls registered on approximately fifty female teams in 1994–95. Only two years earlier, as few as five hundred girls had played hockey. These figures do not include the number of girls on boys’ teams: as is the case across the country, this number is unknown because provincial associations do not keep track of these girls. Manitoba included female hockey in its provincial Winter Games for the first time in 1990 and this event, combined with the Canada Winter Games program, led to the resurgence of the game. Bev Drobot, the representative for female hockey in the province, predicts the female game will continue to grow as girls’ ringette teams in smaller towns switch over to hockey. In rural Manitoba, the first female hockey league was formed in 1995–96, partly in response to the rapidly spreading interest in the game, partly in reaction to the discrimination many of the girls’ teams faced in boys’ leagues. “It just didn’t work out with girls’ teams playing boys’ [teams],” says Cathy Allen, an organizer of rural girls’ hockey in southern Manitoba. “When the girls showed any aggression on ice, it was taken the wrong way. It seemed like it was O.K. for the boys to go after pucks aggressively, but girls couldn’t. The better girls were singled out by the players, parents and coaches of the boys’ teams and were called all sorts of names—‘bitch’ was a favourite. That’s the main reason we formed the female league.”29 Another reason why Allen formed a separate girls’ league was that the mixed minor leagues continually cancelled the girls’ ice time if a senior men’s team needed the rink for a tournament—a practice Allen says is not unique to her area.
Although advocates of the female game are pleased that the sport has grown in Manitoba, they worry that its roots are not strong enough. “The system is still fairly fragile,” explains Bev Drobot, “because we just don’t have the volunteer base yet. When I was watching the girls’ Provincials, [I noticed] all the coaches have a daughter on their teams. I wonder what will happen when the girls leave. Will the coaches leave, too?”30 This dearth of volunteers outside players’ immediate families threatens the game’s future. While the provincial amateur hockey association, now called Hockey Manitoba, has paid for skills clinics for girls, female organizers find they can only offer five or six clinics a year because there are so few people to help run the clinics. Most of those who do contribute to girls’ hockey are women playing on senior teams. Their time is already stretched thin.
Nonetheless, Manitoba has managed to produce a stable, if somewhat mediocre, senior league. Eleven teams play in the Winnipeg senior league. Two are classified as A teams: the University of Manitoba’s Lady Bison Team and the Sweat Camp Storm of Winnipeg, the 1995–96 provincial champions. The rest are B teams. Manitoba has so far produced only one national team member (excluding Dawn McGuire, who was playing for the Chimos by 1979): Susana Yuen. Yuen I played on the national team in 1990 and now manages the Lady Bison team. Currently, the only contender for Team Canada is Tracy Luhowy, who is now training with Shannon Miller in Calgary.
The situation could well change within the next five years thanks to the unexpected burst of female hockey on Native reserves in northern Manitoba. Without any tradition of organized female hockey, Cree communities such as Norway House and Cross Lake have fostered a thriving recreational league of girls’ and women’s teams. Located at the junction of several water routes 30 km (20 miles) north of Great Winnipeg Lake and over 500 km (300 miles) north of Winnipeg, Norway House was a hub of the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company fur-trade and supply lines in the early 1800s. It is now an Indian reserve with a population of five thousand. Since the time in 1991 when two young girls on the reserve expressed an interest in playing hockey, the community has spawned a Midget, Peewee and five senior female teams. Teams now practise up to four times a week on one of the reserve’s two ice rinks, an almost unheard-of luxury for female hockey players. The top players from the five women’s teams in Norway House also play on a senior all-star team. The team travels in the northern region, playing the ten other Cree teams from Cross Lake, Opasquiak Cree Nation (The Pas), Grand Rapids, Easterville, Split Lake and Pine Creek. Another Native team from Prince Albert in northern Saskatchewan hosts a tournament in early April, but so far the Manitoba teams have been unable to attend the tournament because it is too risky to cross the Nelson River East Channel, which may be partially thawed by that late in the spring. Due to distance and the prohibitive cost of travel, only the Midget team has ventured south to tournaments. That team most recently won the Borden Female Midget Hockey Tournament in March 1996, in which ten teams participated. The Norway House coach and organizer, Eric Halcrow, plans to put together an all-Native all-star minor hockey team to compete in the next Manitoba Winter Games. He and Jim Leary, another man who has been instrumental in the development of the female teams, say that given the drive and dedication of many of the twelve year olds, they would not be surprised if a Cree team soon represents Manitoba in the national championship. While both men are ambitious for the teams, they make their priorities clear. “We made a conscious decision to develop our kids as opposed to setting up a regional team and taking only five here and the rest from elsewhere because only those five will get us the title,” says Jim Leary, whose daughter Jaymie now plays at the University of Manitoba. “Female hockey is very closely tied to community development. Everyone involved is either friends or relatives. It’s an investment in our kids.”31
In other Native communities in the Northwest Territories, the first-ever championship for women of the Northwest Territories took place in March 1991. Seven teams met at an arena in Rankin Inlet to vie for the region’s title. The arena was not equipped with the amenities that arenas in the rest of the country have. It did not have an ice-clearing machine, and before they could skate, the women swept down the ice grasping ends of plywood to clear off the snow. Most of the players had small children, whom they brought to the tournament.32
While geography binds British Columbia to the other Western provinces, BC’s mild winters and laid-back culture mean female hockey holds nowhere near the significance it holds for its closest neighbours. Not only does the warmer climate mean that a host of sports is available to the population year-round, but the mountainous terrain and ferry crossings make teams think twice about travelling to tournaments in other areas. To drive from Prince George to the lower mainland, for example, takes twelve hours; to travel by ferry between the province’s two major cities, Vancouver and Victoria, costs about $40. As a result, many of the female teams are restricted to playing in small pods and experience little exposure to other teams in the province. Furthermore, the province suffers from a shortage of public rinks. Private rinks, which were built to exploit this shortage, charge as much as $200 an hour. This represents a rise in price of more than 50 percent since the early 1990s. Families who are worried about securing a place for their sons on the local hockey team (this is still many parents’ main priority with regard to hockey) have begun putting their boys on waiting lists when they are as young as age two. More often than not, women’s and girls’ teams end up taking whatever practice time is left over.
Karen Wallace, the current director of the CHA Female Council and a former director of the British Columbia Amateur Hockey Association (BCAHA) has focussed most of her energy on building the female sport from the bottom up. She believes in promoting the sport at the grassroots level in order to ensure the future of female hockey, and also to give girls the sporting opportunities they are not getting elsewhere. “When hockey started growing, the expense went up,” says Wallace. “At the same time, [subsidized] school sports programs were being wiped out and this especially affected girls. If you weren’t there pushing to get your daughter in hockey, she wasn’t going to be there.”33
Currently almost two thousand girls and women play hockey in this province which has a population of over three and a half million. Sixty-five percent of the female players are under eighteen. Since the early 1990s, the thirty-six Lower Mainland League girls’ teams have been facing off against each other. Other Peewee and Midget teams have also sprung up in Kamloops, Fernie, Cranbrook, Prince George, Victoria and other Vancouver Island communities, although these teams play against boys.
While the numbers appear encouraging, BC has consistently lacked senior players who are committed to developing younger players. Few senior women have shared their skills with the girls who are moving up the ranks. However, there are a few exceptions. Both Christine Gardner, a Midget coach and winner of the CHA volunteer award in 1991, and Becki Bookham, BCAHA female hockey representative from 1990 to 1994, have helped younger players. While more senior women have coached younger teams since 1993, the relatively low involvement of older players attests to a lack of tradition of the kind the Chimos have brought to Alberta. The fact that BC was not represented on the national team until the 1995 Pacific Rim tournament reflects this lack of tradition of older players bringing along younger ones. The senior system in BC has also suffered the same affliction that hindered Quebec’s league for many years: players have shown more interest in playing for the team that has the most promise of representing the province than in building up a solid league. Each new season has been characterized by a scramble to join the best team, which has in turn led to a disabling imbalance within the league, with the same few teams going to the national championship each year. In 1995–96, one team finally laid tampering charges against a coach in an attempt to end the team hopping. The BCAHA suspended this coach for six weeks for allowing players to participate in his try-outs without the properly signed CHA registration cards from their previous team. This action sent a message to coaches and players that ignoring the regulations designed to curb team-switching would no longer be tolerated.
The BCAHA has only recently begun to fund the girls’ game, sponsoring leadership and officiating programs. As all representatives for the female sport will contend, it has been a long struggle to get provincial associations to commit any funds to the female game. Bill Ennos, the technical director for the association, says it would be impossible to cite the exact amount of money that goes towards developing the female game because some girls participate in the association’s mainly male programs. His answer echoes those by representatives from other provincial associations across the country, most of whom refuse to release any figures that pertain to female hockey. Indeed, even most representatives of female hockey are not privy to their associations’ budget. Ennos does say, however, that the overall budget at BCAHA for development is more than $600,000 and that some of that money is put towards female development. “Our philosophy is that membership is membership,” he maintains. “All our clinics are open to anyone and we really don’t discriminate against male or females. But we certainly promote the female game more than the male game.”34
While Becki Bookham acknowledges that clinics are open to women, she nonetheless contends that the BCAHA is not spending enough money or time on female hockey. “Right now, there are not enough players simply because not a lot of money is spent on finding them and promoting their participation,”35 says Bookham. Johnny Misley, project coordinator for the BCAHA and a supporter of female hockey, defends the amount of money going towards its development, although he, too, says he cannot say how much money the BCAHA allots for the female game. “We do things to promote it [female hockey] and develop it, no question,” asserts Misley. As proof he points to the annual female hockey brochures and posters the association prints to promote the sport as well as the three female hockey seminars it has sponsored in the last five years. “But to put more money into it means we have to cut elsewhere and we’re already on a shoe-string budget and our funding’s getting axed more every year. To fund the girls’ program more might mean pulling out a special program on the boys’ side.”36 The same remark is repeated across the country: promoting the girls’ game takes directly away from the boys.
In 1990 the BCAHA initiated the province’s first-ever female development program, which runs every four years in conjunction with the Canada Winter Games. As in other provinces, the program has helped train and track athletes between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. The inclusion of girls’ hockey in the Games has certainly made girls feel that they are taken more seriously as hockey players. However, they still do not receive many of the perks the boys are given. For example, the boys competing in the Games benefit from an annual elite program called Best Ever. Their expenses are paid by the association and their equipment is provided by the program’s sponsor, CCM. A comparable program does not exist for their female counterparts.
The one girls’ program in the province that does enjoy sponsorship is the annual Dairyland Sportsmanship Jamborees. Eight- to thirteen-year-old girls partake in these yearly tournaments. Since the program’s first year in 1992, the number of participants in two of its events has risen from 137 to 300 in 1996.37 The Jamborees, which are sponsored by Dairyland milk producers to encourage clean play, functioned as a boys-only program for years. Players register individually—teams are not permitted to enter—and points are awarded to individuals for incurring no penalties as well as for scoring. Most importantly for the girls, the Jamborees provide them with the rare opportunity to play against other girls. During the regular hockey season, most of the participants compete against boys’ teams, or in the case of those who live in rural areas, on boys’ teams.
Also growing in popularity is British Columbia’s first female hockey school. Director Becki Bookham, the former BCAHA director for female hockey, launched the camp in Summerland in 1993 with two other women, Linda Fedje and Nancy Wilson. The camps offer women the chance to act as role models for girls and to develop their coaching skills, allowing girls who have felt ignored or not taken seriously at boys’ camps to improve their ability on ice.
As hockey camps and teams for girls and women proliferate across the West, it is important to recall that what has made the future so promising is the legacy of the past. Teams such as the Chimos planted the firm roots of Western women’s hockey, and their legacy has ensured its growth. For years teams such as the Chimos persevered with little or no support. Provincial hockey associations have been slow, painstakingly so in most cases, to back the female game. To this day, these associations’ attitude to the female sport remains highly ambivalent. But their resistance has not deterred the myriad female teams in the West. For perhaps more so than in any other Canadian region, hockey has not been just a recreational option here, but a way of life—an integral part of every prairie town.
So the small-town and big-city hockey leagues continue to survive and, with the hope the Olympics inclusion has injected into the female game, to grow. But even as female players become more numerous in the West and in the rest of the country it is important to recall the past. The fact that so many of the women who promote the game sprang from teams such as the Chimos and its rivals attests to the historic importance of this province in the development of the game. So, too, does the fact that Shannon Miller and Hayley Wickenheiser pursue their hockey careers here. And so, finally, does the fact that the first female high-performance program in the country has been established in Calgary. Female hockey is taken seriously here, more seriously it would seem, than it is by its reputed promoter, the Canadian Hockey Association. One thing is clear: female hockey is indeed rising in the West, and in renegade Western tradition, it’s not waiting around for the rest of the country to approve.
