Parent
WOMEN-IN-HOCKEY Digest 81
Topics covered in this issue include:
1) Intro (and Any Other Refs?)
by email@hidden (Dark Phoenix)
2) Article on Women's hockey
by email@hidden (Laurie Sefton)
3) Can you help...
by Ray Barton
4) Erroll Lyn Weiss needs your help
by Byron Gottfried
5) Canada's women's hockey team (Forwarded Article)
by "Andria L. Hunter"
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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 02:26:03 -0400
From: email@hidden (Dark Phoenix)
To: email@hidden
Subject: Intro (and Any Other Refs?)
Message-ID:
Hi folks --
Just a note to introduce myself. My name is Ali Lemer, and I'm from New
York City. I've been playing ice hockey for about 4 years now, although
I've missed quite a bit of time due to lack of funds and injuries. I play
any skating position except centre. I played for Columbia University (my
alma mater) for a few years, on a club team (I was the only female skater
in an otherwise all-male checking league, and it wasn't easy, I can tell
you), and now play at open games and clinics when I can. I even went to
hockey camp for a few weeks (Huron Hockey School), where I was, naturally,
one of the only girls and subject to a fair share of obnoxiousness. I used
to play on house teams in the local rink in the summers, but don't really
have the time to do so anymore. I even assistant-coached this past spring
(a co-ed kids' team), but don't really have the time for that now, either.
It's really gratifying to see women's hockey exploding as it is now. When I
started, I was one of two women playing hockey that I knew of in the whole
city (the other was a goaltender who also played for Columbia), and I felt
pretty isolated. Now I see girls and women of all ages playing everytime I
go to the rink, and almost joined an all-women league! (The commute was too
hard, though.)
A new development in my hockey life is officiating. I just refereed my
first 2 games yesterday (got my official USA Hockey crest and card and
everything), and it's a lot tougher than I thought it would be (and I
thought it would be pretty tough to begin with). I was just wondering if
there were any other female officals out there who might be able to give me
some tips or share stories or what-have-you.
I'm very glad this list exists; it'll be nice to be able to talk to people
who won't exclaim, "YOU play hockey?!? I didn't know girls could play
hockey!"
:-)
-- Ali.
P.S. I'm also a dedicated Rangers fan, although I don't follow the NHL very
closely anymore (I'd rather be playing my own games than watching someone
elses!).
Ali Lemer -=-=-=-- ali at panix dot com -=-= http://www.panix.com/~ali-=-=-=-=
Joel: "The American Pants Association urges you to wear pants at least
three times a day!"
Tom: "Dolphins are one of the smartest mammals in the world! Do they wear
pants? No, but they wish they did! That's how smart they are!"
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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 06:55:17 -0800
From: email@hidden (Laurie Sefton)
To: women-in-hockey
Subject: Article on Women's hockey
Message-ID:
email@hidden (Joe Clark) wrote this article for the Village Voice
(NYC), which cancelled its sports section before it was able to be printed.
He's asked that it be posted to this list.
Any direct remarks or requests for reprints should go to
email@hidden. However, I'd be interested in general reactions to
this article--Laurie
--
Chix with stix
After only about a hundred years, women's hockey is finally getting some res=
pect
by Joe Clark
"When it comes to contact sports, the male argument always ends the same
way: 'What about her poor, floppy, delicate breasts?'" - From Amazons: An
Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey
League by Cleo Birdwell (nom de plume de Don DeLillo)
If a cultural issue gets lampooned on The Simpsons, you know it's arrived.
In an episode late last year, Lisa Simpson, facing a first-ever F on her
report card if she didn't take up some kind of sport, found herself being
groomed to mind the net for her brother's team. "Lisa," Homer says, "if the
Bible has taught us nothing else - and it hasn't - it says girls should
stick to girls' sports, such as hot-oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and
such-and-such." "I think women should be able to play any sport men play,"
ripostes Marge, "but hockey is so violent and dangerous!"
That pretty much sums up the conventional wisdom about ye olde
fairer sexe sharing the conceptual and Zambonified ice with Rocket Richard
and 99. But we live in the post-Manon Rh=E9aume era, a time in which women's
hockey is growing phenomenally fast - and the ensuing friction between the
old boys' network at all levels of hockey and female upstarts tends to
produce more heat than light. Herewith, an examination of some of the
prevailing id=E9es fixes of women's hockey.
* Women are new to the game: Not so - as Brian McFarlane's definitive book
Proud Past, Bright Future: One Hundred Years of Canadian Women's Hockey
documents, women decked out in sweaters and long skirts were playing shinny
(skirty?) as far back as 1891, and some evidence puts the earliest game two
years before that. And those women weren't klutzes, either: As the Ottawa
Citizen commented in 1896, "That the Alpha and Rideau Ladies Hockey teams
can play the game was well demonstrated at the Rideau rink last night=8A.
Both teams played grandly and surprised hundreds of the sterner sex who
went to the match expecting to see many ludicrous scenes and have many good
laughs. Indeed, before they were there very long, their sympathies and
admiration had gone out to the teams. The men became wildly enthusiastic."
In 1927, a female goaltender, Elizabeth Graham, wisely decided that
her nose, cheekbones, and eyes were worth protecting and donned a wire mask
- fully 32 years before Jacques Plante began wearing a mask in all his NHL
games. The Rivulettes, a team from Preston, Ontario, ruled the roost in the
1930s, with a flabbergasting won-lost record of 348-2.
In the wake of Rh=E9aume's 1991 ascension to pro hockey in Tampa Bay=
,
Erin Whitten's similar ascension to the Adirondack Red Wings in '93, and
, women's hockey has blown up like a sun
going nova. U.S. Amateur Hockey, the sport's Olympic-level governing body,
reports that women-only teams (composed of teenagers, usually) increased in
number from 149 in 1990-1991 to 417 in 1993-1994. Numbers of players grew
more sharply: 5,533 females in 1990-1991 versus 12,392 in 1993-1994. And
those figures don't include girls and women playing on boys' and men's
teams, which brings up another id=E9e fixe.
* "Integrated" teams will destroy women's hockey: That, at least, was the
contention of those opposing the 1985 case of Justine Blainey, a
hockey-loving 12-year-old who could find no all-girl teams in her suburban
Toronto community and lobbied to play on a boys' team, assuming she met
fair standards of competence. The team refused, and Blainey's family
launched a sex-discrimination complaint with the Ontario Human Rights
Commission, which ruled in her favour in 1986. Various appeals took the
case all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, but Blainey ultimately
prevailed.
The fight, however, did not merely pit male players and coaches
against women; women themselves disagreed sharply over the proper course of
women's and girls' hockey. "Full integration for all ages and in all sports
will mean drastically reduced opportunities for female athletes," wrote
=46ran Rider of the Ontario Women' Hockey Association in a 1988 magazine
article. "With uncontrolled emigration of girls to boys' teams, girls'
teams will fold, and many girls unwilling or unable to compete with boys
will have no chance to play. This is equality?"
Significantly, Blainey's supporters did not argue that all-female
teams should be prohibited, only that girls should be allowed to play on
boys' teams if they so chose and/or if there were no local girls' teams.
And no one was markedly in favour of a kind of reverse affirmative action
that would allow boys on girls' teams.
The dust has settled since that debate took place, and vocal
proponents on both sides of the question in the 1980s agree that girls' and
women's teams have settled into both integrated and segregated camps, with
neither side displacing or threatening the other. For example, at last
summer's Gay Games, ice-hockey events included all-female teams (numbering
nine), all-male teams (four), and mixed teams (seven); some women played on
both women's and mixed teams.
There are, of course, a host of reasons for a male/female split
beyond mere availability of all-girl teams. Says Helen Lenskyj, associate
professor in the department of adult education at the Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education and an early Blainey supporter: "You can say all these
wonderful things, as I sometimes do, on how the research shows that
female-only sports tends to operate on somewhat of a different ethos than
men's sport - there's more emphasis on fun and enjoyment and cooperation,
and less emphasis on competition, that sort of thing." Still, some girls
actually like competition, and Lenskyj says "it's not my role as a feminist
to say you shouldn't want to play that nasty competitive sport." And that
brings up another preconception.
* Women aren't tough enough for hockey: Lisa Simpson was tough bordering on
cruel ("Look! Ralph Wiggum lost his shinguard! Hack the bone! Hack the
bone!"), but she's not exactly real. As McFarlane writes in his book, "Size
and strength may be important factors in basketball and football, but in
hockey they are both overrated, especially in women's hockey which, unlike
the men's game, is devoid of goons and enforcers=8A. What women lack in
strength, some athletes contend, they make up for in endurance and
toughness. If women can deal with the stress and pain of childbirth=8A they
can deal with anything that happens in a hockey rink. They have, in a word,
guts."
"You do get to that level from a strength and a power standpoint
[where] there are differences between the male and the female," says Karen
Kay, head coach of women's hockey at the University of New Hampshire and
head coach of the U.S. national women's team.
But, Kay points out, there are more variants of hockey than the
NHL-style rock-'em-sock-'em that seems to dominate the popular conception
of the game. Take women's elite amateur hockey, in which Canada has taken
the gold, the U.S. the silver, and Finland the bronze in each of the world
championships in 1990, 1992, and 1994. In the '92 playoffs in Finland,
Canada whumped the U.S. 8-0. Manon Rh=E9aume made it to the all-star teams i=
n
'92 and '94, the same year Erin Whitten was named best goalkeeper of the
series. The women's elite game, unsurprisingly, compares favourably with
the men's elite game - more physical than recreational hockey but marred by
rather less wilful brutality than the NHL.
"We don't have full checking, but we do have body contact," Kay
says. "You see a lot of riding out on the boards and angling people off,
same as you do in the men's game, but you don't see the fighting or the
follow-through you see in the men's [pro] game." And it's not as though
there isn't incidental but potentially bruising body contact in women's
elite basketball and soccer, including the European pro leagues. NHL hockey
per se may literally be king of the hockey hill at the moment, but itis not
the only standard of comparison whether you're talking about sex-segregated
or -integrated teams - and that brings up the final stereotype.
* On a guys' team, women are too small to play anything but goal: It's no
coincidence that Rh=E9aume, Whitten, and Dyer play goal in the NHL and not
some other position. It's a widely-held belief that, between the goalposts,
size and brute strength are less valuable than quick reflexes and agility.
Goal, the Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno wrote in 1992, is "the only position
in hockey where an adult female can realistically keep up with an adult
male." While strength is not readily quantifiable without exhaustive tests,
the results of which would likely not be made public, size is quantifiable
and the stats are available.
Tallying up the heights and weights of current NHL players and all
the women on the medal-winning Canadian, U.S., and Finnish world's teams
(filtering out duplicates) reveals that not all NHLers are Shaquille
O'Neal-esque, nor are all elite women Linda Hunt-esque.
Average Minimum Maximum Median
Women Height, in. 65 48 70 65
Weight, lb. 139 92 172 139
H+W index 205 140 242 203
Men Height, in. 73 66 78 73
Weight, lb. 194 155 235 195
H+W index 266 223 313 266
("H+W index" assigns one point for each inch of height and each pound of
weight. It's a way of averaging out the relationship between height and
weight.)
There are 35 NHL players smaller (in H+W index) than the largest
world-championship woman. Now, that's a small fraction of the NHL's 600-odd
men, but it ain't zero. On the other hand, the smallest NHLer is bigger
than 90 elite women. While these results do suggest that stereotypes about
the impact of body size on hockey carry some weight, they also show that
exceptions exist. If there's room in the NHL for 35 woman-sized men, there
ought to be room for a similar number of woman-sized women. NHL coaches,
owners, and scouts (including the first female scout, the San Jose Sharks'
Deborah Wright) are quite simply running out of excuses. But we're not
holding our breath here: By the time women in pro hockey are commonplace,
Lisa Simpson will be grown up enough to try out for the Springfield Squids
of the NHL. Buy your season tickets early.
- 30 -
Joe Clark
email@hidden
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
email@hidden
"All the best defencemen have goalie eyes."
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 95 14:58:00 PDT
From: Ray Barton
To: email@hidden
Subject: Can you help...
Message-ID:
Can you please send the details of subscribing to the Women-in-hockey mailing
list to ...
email@hidden
Its my wife Gill Barton and she has been trying to subscribe for months but
keeps getting it wrong.
It would help even further if you could manualy subscribe her.
Regards
o
\____/|) Ray Barton G u i l d f o r d
/> Head Coach / /
z z / /_
/ /
/ /_
/__ /
/ /
/_ /
/ /
// LIGHTNING
//
Internet:-) email@hidden Compuserve:-) 100074,1640
Web Page :-) http://www.catalog.com/hockey
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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 11:47:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: Byron Gottfried
To: email@hidden
Subject: Erroll Lyn Weiss needs your help
Message-ID:
Hi, gang. My name is Susan and I'm not Erroll. Erroll, you see, is a woman
I created in '93 to star in a book I was writing, about a girl who gets
recruited to play men's Division I ice hockey at a school suspiciously like
the one where I was doing my Master's degree.
Turns out that my agent wants me to write a series of books about Erroll,
for young adult audiences (ages 11-16). We're going to start with her in
eighth grade and follow her through her sophomore year of college.
I have rough plot ideas worked out for each book, but any stories or
ancedotes, good, bad, or otherwise, that you can send me will be greatly
appreciated. Any Web addresses will be great, too. My agent and I have
talked about launching a Web page to correspond with the publication (and
possible screen rights) of the book(s).
The underlying message I'm trying to convey is that it's tough to fit in,
but it's worth it in the end. :)
Thanks in advance!
Susan
Susan Helene Gottfried
One neighborhood over from Mr. Rogers
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Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 13:28:39 -0400
From: "Andria L. Hunter"
To: email@hidden
Subject: Canada's women's hockey team (Forwarded Article)
Message-ID:
Hello!
I am forwarding a message from the rec.sport.hockey newsgroup. It was
posted by Phil Legault from the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA). It
provides details about the times of the games and practices at the
women's national training camp.
Andria Hunter
----------------------- start of forwarded article -----------------------
* From: Phil Legault
* Newsgroups: rec.sport.hockey
* Subject: Canada's women's hockey team
* Date: 16 Oct 1995 13:09:20 GMT
* Organization: Canadian Hockey
CANADIAN HOCKEY
RELEASE
Friday, October 13, 1995 NR69.95
THE ROAD TO NAGANO BEGINS FOR NATIONAL WOMEN'S HOCKEY TEAM
OTTAWA - The 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, are over 26
months away, but the road to building a gold-medal contender in the
women's ice-hockey program begins this Saturday, October 14, at Teen
Ranch in Caledon, Ont., as Canadian Hockey brings together the national
women's team coaching pool and 50 hopefuls for a week-long training camp.
At the beginning of August, the national women's team coaching pool
invited 53 players to attend the first ever evaluation camp for the
national women's team from October 14-20, 1995. Of the original 53
players named, only Virginie Bilodeau of St-tienne-de-Lauzon, Que.,
Winnipeg's Laura Vanderhorst and Denise Caron of Montreal declined the
invitation because of career or health concerns.
"It's been a challenge for us to establish yards-sticks for comparing
players across the country with so few competitive opportunities," says
Bob Nicholson, Canadian Hockey senior vice-president, hockey operations.
"But our coaching pool has put in a lot of effort over the past season
in evaluating players and reviewing the information gathered from our
branches.
"We're in an important development period for the women's program," adds
Nicholson. "The core of Canada's teams for the 1997 World Women's
Championship in Kitchener, Ontario, and the 1998 Winter Olympics, should
come from this group, and our evaluation process of today will affect our
programs into the next century as we look to the 2002 Olympics."
The coaching staff will use the camp to evaluate each player through an
interview process, fitness testing, on-ice skills and initiation to
international style hockey. The information will be put in the national
women's team database, allowing the staff to monitor the players over the
next few years to Nagano.
>From this up-coming evaluation camp, the coaching pool will select 20
players to represent Canada at the 1996 Pacific Women's Hockey
Championship scheduled for Vancouver from April 1-6, 1996.
"We'll outline to the players the commitment necessary to wear a Canadian
jersey at the 1998 Olympics, and challenge them to set goals to meet
these expectations," comments Nicholson.
The on-ice sessions are open to the general public. Canadian Hockey, in
conjunction with the Hockey Hall of Fame, is also hosting a women's
hockey festival on Thursday, October 19, 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., with
information booths and seminars. The evaluation camp on-ice practice
schedule is as follows (sessions are at the Ice-Corral Arena at Teen
Ranch):
Sat., October 14:
Players arrive
Sun., October 15:
Practices 4:15 pm - 5:30 pm; and, 5:45 pm - 7 pm
Mon., October 16
Practices - Group 1 9 am - 10:15 am; and, 2:15 pm - 3:30 pm
Practices - Group 2 10:30 am - 11:45 am; and, 3:45 pm - 5 pm
Practices - Group 3 12 noon - 1:15 pm; and, 5:15 pm - 6:30 pm
Tue., October 17
Intra-squad scrimmage 9:15 am - 11:15 am
Practices - Group 3 2:15 pm - 3:45 pm
Practices - Group 2 4 pm - 5:30 pm
Practices - Group 1 5:45 pm - 7:15 pm
Wed., October 18
Practice for goalkeepers 10 am - 12 noon
Thur., October 19
Practices - Group 2 9 am - 10:30 am
Practices - Group 3 10:45 am - 12:15 pm
Practices - Group 1 12:30 pm - 2 pm
Intra-squad scrimmage 7 pm - 9 pm
Fri., October 20
Round-robin games 8:30 am; 9:45 am; and, 11 am (1-hour games)
The list of 50 players include double gold medalist Manon Rhaume; five
members of the 1990 world gold medal team; 13 players from the 1992
winning squad; and, 15 of the players 1995 Pacific Women's Championship.
All but two players from the 1994 World Championship team are listed.
Andria Hunter and Nathalie Picard, members of Canada's '94 squad, retired
from international competition because of injuries.
NATIONAL WOMEN'S TEAM EVALUATION CAMP
COACHING POOL - Melody Davidson, Castor, Alta.; Julie Healy, Montral;
Karen Hughes, Agincourt, Ont.; Shannon Miller, Calgary; Danile
Sauvageau, St-Eustache, Que.
GOALKEEPERS (7) - Brenda Deneault, Barrie, Ont.; Danielle Dub,
Vancouver; Lesley Reddon, Mississauga, Ont.; Nikki Ree, Bentley, Alta.;
Manon Rhaume, Charlesbourg, Que.; Marie-Claude Roy, Brossard, Que.;
Chantal Toth, Vancouver.
DEFENCE (14) - Bobbi Auger, Ponoka, Alta.; Justine Blainey, Toronto,
Ont.; Therese Brisson, Montral; Cassie Campbell, Guelph, Ont.; Judy
Diduck, Sherwood Park, Alta.; Rebecca Fahey, Sackville, N.B.; Geraldine
Heaney, Weston, Ont.; Stephanie Parent, Belledune, N.B..; Cheryl Pounder,
Mississauga, Ont.; Nathalie Rivard, Cumberland, Ont.; Carole Scheibel,
Wilcox, Sask..; Fiona Smith, Edmonton; Laurie Taylor-Bolton, King City,
Ont.; Christianne Tremills, Toronto.
FORWARD (29) - Kelly Bechard, Sedley, Sask.; Laura Bennion, Vancouver;
Amanda Benoit, Welland, Ont.; Martine Brub, Montral; Kari Colpitts,
Calgary, Alta.; Nancy Deschamps, Montral; Nancy Drolet, Drummondville,
Que.; Lori Dupuis, Williamstown, Ont.; Caroline Gelinas, Trois-Rivires,
Que.; Danielle Goyette, Sainte-Foy, Que.; Marianne Grnak, Richmond Hill,
Ont.; Lisa Hanlon, Etobicoke, Ont.; Mel Haz, Edmonton; Angela James,
Thornhill, Ont.; Laura Leslie, Beaconsfield, Que.; Luce Letendre,
Brossard, Que.; Tracy Luhowy, Winnipeg, Man.; Kathy McCormack,
Blackville, N.B.; France Montour, Grand-Mere, Que.; Karen Nystrom,
Scarborough, Ont.; Margot Verlaan-Page, Kitchener, Ont.; Caroline Proulx,
Bois Brand, Que.; Jane Robinson, Edmonton; Laura Schuler, Scarborough,
Ont.; France St. Louis, St-Hubert, Que.; Amy Turek, Castor Centre, Alta.;
Somer West, Bowmanville, Ont.; Hayley Wickenheiser, Calgary; Stacy
Wilson, Moncton, N.B.
For further information, please contact:
Phil Legault - Ottawa
work (613) 748-5613, ext. 1-2306
----------------------- end of forwarded article -----------------------
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End of WOMEN-IN-HOCKEY Digest 81
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