Twenty-one Guys, Forty-four Skates, and Me: Female Adventures in Masculine Sport

Abstract

Title TX introduced me to ice hockey, and thirteen years later, breast feeding brought me back to it. Although I was fortunate enough to be among the first to benefit from Title IX, the lack of other female hockey players in my age range has meant that it is only through an ususal progression of life events and circumstances that I have been able to make the ultra-masculine sport of ice hockey a part of my life. For a woman of the in-between generation--given the right' to play, but no other women to play with--the men's recreational leagues are literally the only games in town. As a result of my love for playing ice hockey, I have had the opportunity to be (more or less) accepted on equal terms in what is still an all-male athletic environment. This creates a life of interesting contrasts--I spend my working days encouraging female students in Women's Studies and literature classes at Ithaca College, my afternoons at home nurturing my two children, and three evenings a week sweating, cursing, and swilli ng beer with the guys in pursuit of the most satisfying athletic experience on the planet. In 1979 (one year after the courts had ruled to enforce Title IX), when I was a first year student at Hamilton College, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, that venerable institution found itself in desperate need of a women's ice hockey team. Their solution was to encourage the members of the women's field hockey and soccer teams to give ice hockey a try. As a pre- Title TX woman who had already taught herself to play soccer, I was undaunted by the idea of starting a new sport at eighteen. Although I had never held a hockey stick before, I had spent many hours of my childhood skating on the frozen swamp behind the corncrib on my parents' upstate New York farm. That first year, Hamilton provided the team with helmets, five hours of ice time a week, and, on game days, they permitted us to borrow equipment belonging to the men's junior varsity team. A male student who had played hockey in high school was our coach--and he certainly had his work cut out for him--only three of our players had ever played organized hockey, a quarter of the team had never skated before, and a third of the rest of us (including myself) had never worn hockey skates. In the next two and a half years, I was introduced to the mechanics of skating and puck handling, (but never mastered the slapshot or fully understood the rules for icing). More importantly, while at college, I fell in love with playing ice hockey, finding that it combined the physical intensity of soccer with a higher rate of player involvement, and the heady aspect of speed. The universal symbol for hockey may be its sticks, but the heart of the sport lies in the joys and hazards of ice skating. To learn how to skate well is to develop a different relationship with the physics of momentum. When you know how to skate, changing directions is faster than going in a straight line. Most magically, at the moment when you are totally exhausted after that sprint for the puck, you raise your head and stretch out your legs and let your momentum carry you effortlessly down the ice. That soaring sense of power in the midst of adrenaline-fueled collapse is the sweetest sensation of all. Aside from skating, hockey is also one of the most technically challenging sports--the puck travels so fast, the sticks are so long, and the configurations of bodies on the ice change so quickly, that ever y completed play is a triumph of human will over natural laws. At the moments when it all comes together--the shot, the pass, the poke-check, you are exhilarated by your body's capacity to perform a miracle. These isolated moments of perfection are what keep beginners going, weathering the mandatory stretches of supreme incompetence in the belief that it will come together again. I was just beginning to get this sense of the game when a financial crisis necessitated my leaving school in the spring of my Junior year and a soccer injury deprived me of my senior season in ice hockey (the first year that Hamilton supplied its women's team with a coach). …