Some glide on their skates and others wobble, but in early November members of the new Huron/Skyline women’s high school hockey team are finally on the ice for their first week of practice. As Huron sophomore Miah McCallister takes a break on the bench, she smiles behind her face mask. “I didn’t realize how much fun it would be!” she says. New to hockey and the first in her family to try the sport, she’s among eighteen young women from the two schools on the inaugural combined team.

“It’s long overdue,” says Sandy Hurd, coach of Pioneer’s decade-old women’s team. Hurd led the effort to form the new team with a group of parents, students, coaches, and the three schools’ athletic directors.

The high cost of ice time and finding enough players to form the starter team were obstacles. Since women’s hockey is a club sport, the team receives no funding from the schools. Families must pay out of pocket–around $1,200 each–for the November-to-February season. But now, says Hurd, the high schools “have a place for all girls to play.”

“I’ve never seen schools come together like this–for the love of the sport,” says Alona Henig, a Community High senior. Henig played last season on the Pioneer JV squad, which was created as a feeder for the new Huron/Skyline team. After aging out of her Ann Arbor Amateur Hockey Association girls’ travel team when she turned fifteen, she missed the sport’s “perfect mix of aggression, grace, and skill.”

Skyline freshman Megan Taylor also played more competitive travel hockey, but says it “became stressful and expensive.” She’s relieved to have more time for academics and says she looks forward to the “school spirit and sense of pride” that comes from playing for her school. Plus, she says she thinks it’s pretty cool that “it’s a hard-core sport.”

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Kate Hallada Begeman, fifty-three, remembers when she was “the only girl” who played hockey in Ann Arbor. She grew up across the street from Las Vegas Park, and when the fire department flooded the field each winter, she played there with her older brother and his friends. Her father took her figure skates to the sporting goods store to grind down the toe picks for makeshift hockey skates. “I’d wait until they needed somebody–until they’d let me play,” she recalls.

For years, she says her passion for hockey “was my own little secret.” But in junior high, Begeman saw a photo of the Brown University women’s hockey team on a magazine cover and decided she too could play for an Ivy League school. After graduating from Huron in 1979 she went to Cornell, where she became the first girl from Ann Arbor to play college hockey.

Two girls skated with an AAAHA boys’ team in the late 1970s. Kathy Issel and Kathleen Brophy were five or six years old at the time. They went on to become founding members of the first girls’ AAA hockey team in Michigan, the Michigan Capitals, and went on to college hockey careers at Princeton for Kathy, and Providence College for Kathleen. And Kathy’s mother, Barbara, convinced Sue McDowell to get a girls’ program going at AAAHA.

McDowell grew up playing hockey in Massachusetts in the 1970s, with both boys and girls, and was on the women’s varsity team at Colby College in Maine. When she settled in Ann Arbor in 1990, she recalls, “I thought Michigan was like Canada,” where there’s “a girls’ team on every corner.” So “it was an eye-opener” for her to find that most local girls had no place to play.

By the late 1990s, McDowell made the AAAHA girls’ program a reality–even writing a personal check for more than $10,000 to guarantee ice time. McDowell also helped start a short-lived Huron High women’s team in 1997, but with pre-dawn ice times, low turnout, and high costs, it “never fully launched,” she says.

The AAAHA program took root and grew, and Detroit-area AAA hockey was an option for some elite players. But a women’s high school team remained a dream–until a tragedy rallied the commitment needed.

In 2003, beloved hockey coach and Pioneer parent Jeff Bourne died of a heart attack while playing in a hockey game. Other Pioneer parents, who’d long wanted a women’s team, decided to make it possible for his daughter Lexi to earn a varsity letter in the sport, just like her dad.

“We baked chocolate chip cookies and ordered a bunch of Domino’s pizzas and recruited girls [for the team] out by the flagpole after school,” recalls Natalie Grantham, one of the founders, whose daughter also played with the inaugural team. It was originally a combined team with Huron, but after four years the Michigan Metro Girls High School Hockey League–which includes fifteen area women’s teams–decided they’d become too good, so Huron was dropped. When Skyline High opened, it carved more students from Pioneer’s potential roster.

Today, Kate Begeman is an assistant coach for the Pioneer team, where her daughter plays as a senior. “It’s a great thing,” she says of her alma mater getting a team, “but kind of sad it’s taken this long.”

Though women’s hockey was slow to start, it’s rapidly gaining speed. Spurred in part by the Olympic medal runs of the U.S. women’s teams, the number of females playing organized hockey has grown more than tenfold since 1990, from 6,300 to 67,000, according to USA Hockey. Programs at the local level, including AAAHA’s new Girls Learn to Play program at the Ann Arbor Ice Cube, are designed to draw more girls to the sport.

“The future is very bright,” says John U. Bacon, author and former coach of Huron High’s men’s team. “Momentum is momentum–once you start playing you keep going. If an older sister is playing, you pick it up.” Bacon says the biggest thing Title IX–as well as girls’ hockey–has taught women “is how to lose and not give up … how to work as a team and overcome obstacles.” These are things that girls take with them into adulthood, he says, and have helped make women successful in business.

More women also now take up the sport as adults. Ann Arbor’s first senior women’s hockey team was the Steel Magnolias, and its first coach in 1992 was now-retired Ypsi High teacher Don Bartolacci. After coaching both of his sons’ hockey teams, he recalls being faced with a group of women with mixed skills–and a few who’d even “ask me at which goal to shoot the puck!” But the Steel Magnolias became a tournament-winning team and “one of the most fulfilling and fun-filled experiences.” Although the Steel Magnolias are no more, the Michigan Senior Women’s Hockey League has grown from four teams in the early 1990s to forty-three, with several of Ann Arbor’s women’s teams skating out of the U-M’s Yost Ice Arena. The Cube also hosts spring and summer women’s teams.

Over at Veterans Memorial Ice Arena, Michele Mudar and Camille Hutchinson formed their namesake Michele and Camille’s Recreational Hockey League in 1997 to provide a supportive place for women who wanted to learn to play the game. The average age is forty, and Pam Bennett, age sixty–aka “Stalker” on the ice–thinks she may be the oldest player. She hasn’t missed a season in sixteen years. “I’m gonna play as long as I can,” she says, adding that it’s a great place on a Friday night to “get some exercise, have some fun, and get a beer.”

That’s way off for the young players on the Huron/Skyline team. For now, coach Patrick Buckley is working on fundamentals, discipline, and unity. “We’ve got a tremendous variety of players,” says Buckley, who’s also an assistant coach for the U-M women’s team, “but they’re all athletes.” Huron junior Adira Cohen is a lacrosse player and a field hockey goalie who wanted a winter sport. She’s one of two goalies to mind the net for the new team. Cohen recruited four of her field hockey teammates, including McCallister.

Pioneer coach Hurd thinks it may be just a few years until Huron and Skyline have enough players to field their own teams. Until then, Buckley says the Pioneer and Huron/Skyline teams–which share ice time and other resources–will face off for the first time at a December 17 game at Veterans Memorial Ice Arena. “Oh, it will be a rivalry,” Buckley laughs. “It’ll be a great crosstown rivalry.”

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Hockey Mom

An earlier generation on the ice

I grew up about an hour northeast of Detroit in the leafy mud of Ontario … these days perhaps best known to the world as Alice Monro country. My mother would have been at home as a character in more than a few of Munro’s stories. She was a child of the last century, born at its onset and alive at its end, which made her a teenager in the First World War. During the war years, all the town’s male hockey players were in the army or over in France, but enough good female skaters were around to form a women’s hockey league.

Never a vain woman but attractive enough to be a regular in Little Theater productions, my mother became a reckless right winger in the women’s league. She was quite indifferent to the risk of a broken bone but very fearful of losing any of her front teeth, prosthetic dentistry being what it was in those days. She gladly turned in her gear at war’s end and would eventually marry, have several sons, and become a Hockey Mom.

Suitable ponds for play in the 1930s and ’40s would shake off their snow after Christmas and serve us, with any luck, into early March. All my friends had skates and a stick but little else by way of equipment. I protected my shins with a couple of outdated copies of my mother’s glossy magazines rolled around my legs and held in place by long wool hockey socks. We did not call our game by today’s upscale term “pond hockey” but knew it as “shinny.” We dashed home from school most afternoons through winter wind and snow, for an hour of action in the dying light.

Two baked potatoes routinely waited in the oven for me after school, cooling from their baking, and no longer too hot to touch. Never foil wrapped, each would be popped into a skate boot, then the package of tied laces slung over a shoulder, while I grabbed my stick and headed for ice, less than twenty minutes away. At the pond’s edge, I would lace up my skates, having transferred the potatoes to each shoe inside their galoshes. Memories of those warm skates still stir snug winter feelings. When the light finally failed us, we would abandon the game, and I could insert both feet into comfortable shoes. Skates again tied and slung, I devoured the potatoes while trudging home.

I told this story to my son on one occasion, along with a couple of his teammates, after a school hockey game. They played at Ann Arbor High School, then the only one in the city, on its travel team, and parents would pool vehicles to get their sons to a distant rink on time. After a game, it was my practice to treat the lads to some fries and a Coke before we headed home. They were enjoying both a victory and the refreshments when I shared the tale of the baked potatoes. My son was humiliated. He listened in silence, eyes on the floor, then slowly shook his head, muttering, “Cheap, Dad, really cheap.”

My Hockey Mom lived a long and active life, still out on ice in her eighties, the skip of a ladies’ curling team. She wanted a doctor among her sons, and I obliged but never raised my own family more than a few hours distant. She survived my father and all her friends into solitary old age, hating hospitals and nursing homes, visiting the sick, and attending funerals. She extracted a promise from me on one occasion that I would let her die at home. In the event, regrettably, I couldn’t deliver. She tripped on one of her throw rugs and broke a hip into several pieces. While she survived its replacement, she failed to recover sufficiently to be discharged home. It happened in mid-December, and around my Ann Arbor retirement I was able to create free time to be with her most days in the hospital, in lieu of the failed promise.

Early Christmas morning arrived; I reached her room for my usual visit. She was in her 100th year and comfortable in a private room. She did not hear me enter and draw a chair silently alongside the bed. It had been freshly remade, and she was propped up by plumped pillows, her hair nicely fluffed, her eyes closed. Pale, blue-veined hands sat clumped together in her lap on the down-turned sheet.

She opened her eyes and recognized me then delivered a quiet order, “Hold my hands.” I grinned to myself, thinking, “Hockey Mom to the end,” while placing my warm hand on top of two cold ones. Her circulation was clearly failing. I added my other hand to the heap, and she smiled in pleasure, then closed her eyes. After a minute or two, her eyes still closed and her breathing steady, I gently withdrew my hands to slowly spread her right hand out on the sheet. I placed my own beside it to study them. Except for a difference in size, they were identical hands. A memory struck of an incident at a family gathering when I was perhaps eleven years old and everyone agreed that I had my mother’s looks and personality. It was a devastating consensus. I’d fled the scene in tears.

What a difference maturity now made, as I heard myself chuckle over the rediscovery and mumble to myself, “How I hope I have all your genes, Mother.”

It was enough to rouse her. She opened her eyes and plugged them into mine. “What did you say?” she wanted to know. Well, it seemed an inappropriate moment to get into genes and hands, so I leaned forward and whispered, “Oh, just that I love you, Mother.” A tiny smile creased her face, and still regarding me she added, “That’s nice.” She closed her eyes again, the smile trace still on her lips, and within the next minute quietly stopped breathing. I think I had just given my Hockey Mom permission to leave the game.