When Angel DiPietro ’06 was looking at colleges as a high school senior, there was one problem with Fairfield. It wasn’t the size of the school, the course selection, or the professors, though. It was that Fairfield didn’t have a women’s hockey team.
DiPietro decided to go to Fairfield anyway, despite getting offers from other schools to play on women’s varsity teams, and at the end of DiPietro’s junior year, Erin Hickey ’08, who launched the Stags’ women’s club team, gave her what she always wanted: a chance to play college hockey.
“Being president of a new club was tough, but I scheduled the games and practice times…and started practice when we got to school this fall,” Hickey said. “This season has been a huge success in all our eyes.”
The Fairfield program, though, is just one of a growing number of programs in one of the world’s fastest growing sports – a sport that is being played at the Olympic level for the third time in the ongoing Games in Turin, Italy.
Said DiPietro (no relation to Team USA men’s goaltender Rick DiPietro), “Women’s hockey has been a large part of my life. I went from thinking I was the only girl out there who played to seeing girls from teams develop all over the east coast.”
“It’s not just a men’s sport and I think it’s imortant that girls have challenged that because in a way it challenges a certain standard that society has placed restricting certain sexes to certain sports,” she added.
Though the sport has grown rapidly on the international level, its biggest success, in comparison to the men’s game, has been right here in the United States, where college varsity programs have sporouted up throughout the northeast and where the national team took home the gold medal the first time the sport was competed in the Olympics, at the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan.
Six countries participated in the women’s tournament that year: the United States, Canada, Finland, China, Japan, and Sweden. Though the tournament was highly dominated by Canada and the United States, thus producing lopsided final scores and generally uninteresting games, the gold medal game between the two was highly competitive and entertaining, with the U.S. winning 3-1.
The roles reversed for the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah. In another tournament dominated by North Americans, Canada overtook the gold defeating the U.S. 3-2.
The level of visibility – and the amount of airtime on NBC – that the sport recieved increased at Salt Lake and then again at Turin, where the Americans were upset by Sweden, which advanced to the Gold Medal game against Canada.
Going to school
The opportunities for girls and women of all ages to get involved in hockey continue to increase, particularly at the levels of college and high school.
Today, both Canadian and American colleges and universities offer Division I, Division III and club level with various divisions. The number of teams in Division I have tripled in the past decade to over 35 D-I programs for women’s hockey in the United States along. Amongst all the divisions and levels, there are over 110 women’s hockey teams at the collegiate level.
Though Canadian intercollegiate women’s hockey officially began in the 1980s and the NCAA recognized the game in America in 1993, women were playing in college much earlier. In the 1920s and 1930s, Canadian universities, such as the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, had women’s progams. There was even a Canadian Intercollegiate League formed, although it was disbanded in 1934 during the depression. In America, Colby College and Brown University had programs in the 1960s.
Andria Hunter played at both the University of New Hampshire and University of Toronto, as well as for Team Canada at the 1992 and 1994 World Championships. Hunter, now the operator of whockey.com, the unofficial home for women’s hockey on the web, says she’s optimistic about continued growth for the sport.
“It is becoming more of a norm for women to play hockey,” she said. “There has been a large increase in the number of leagues offered for women at all levels, especially here in North America, and hopefully that trend will continue worldwide.”
Another participant in the collegiate boom of women’s hockey is Joe Bertagna, the executive director of the American Hockey Coaches Association and commissioner of Hockey East, considered by many to be the premiere conference in men’s and women’s hockey.
Bertagna helped put the women’s program in place at Harvard, where he played goalie himself, and helped with structuring the Division I and Division III leagues in the U.S.
“Up until the women won the gold medal in 1998, I think the game grew on its own merits and, at the college level, with some help from Title IX,” said Bertagna. “I think 1998 had an effect on young girls the way 1980s ‘Miracle on Ice’ did for the whole game.”
Professionals?
In 1992, goalie Manon Rheaume became the first woman to play in the NHL when she played in a preseason game for the Tampa Bay Lightning against the St. Louis Blues.
Erin Whitten played in various minor league games and most recently Hayley Wickenheiser, star of Team Canada, played professional hockey in Finland, becoming the first woman to record a point in a professional contest. Wickenheiser had one goal and three assists in 12 games.
While there is no American-based professional league in place right now, and though no league rivals the WNBA, there are two low-budget professional leagues in Canada that could pave the way for more profitable leagues in the future.
The National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) was established in 2000 and consists of eight teams throughout Canada, many of which have Olympic players. The Western Women’s Hockey League (WWHL) is another Canadian-based league which has five teams competing. Similar to the NWHL, many high-level national players and NCAA alumni compete.
Hunter, also a former NWHL player, says there is a definite place for a professional women’s hockey and perhaps someday, for women in the NHL.
“Given that there currently isn’t a professional league for women, I would think that women who are good enough to play in the NHL would be allowed to play,” said Hunter. “The issue is because of the physical differences between men and women, there hasn’t been a woman to date who is good enough to have a regular position on an NHL team.”
“It’s hard to say when or if [a major women’s professional hockey league] will happen because it depends on a number of things,” she added. “Most importantly, the sport needs to be able to finance itself by having enough fan support to fill the arenas and to generate enough revenue through ticket sales and sponsorships.”
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