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Eyes on the puck - Women’s hockey continues to grow in Edmonton

by R. J. Hayes

You’d be forgiven by most female hockey players if you thought the women’s game had been started only in the last 10 years. You’d also be wrong.

Don Cherry’s loud and proud advocacy of Canada’s national women’s team, the medal successes at the last three winter Olympics, the appearance in NHL hockey circles of recognizable female hockey stars, Manon Rhéaume’s brief tenure with the Tampa Bay Lightning – they’ve all taken place in the last decade or so. But women’s hockey has a long tradition, one that is especially marked in Edmonton, and this recent renaissance is merely the pushing into prominence of a sport that has been played for many years.

Many Edmontonians have been aware of the Edmonton Chimos, four-time Canadian national champions and 16-time provincial champions, since the club was formed in 1973.

However, the history of Edmonton women’s hockey extends back to before 1900, and Edmonton’s record of supporting female sport at a high level goes back to the world-champion Edmonton Grads basketball club in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, and includes the many-time national soccer champion Edmonton Angels.

This attention to women’s sports, and in particular to female hockey since the national team’s appearance in the 1998 Olympics and their 2002 and 2006 gold medals, has also seen the spin-off development of youth hockey on the female side. Women’s hockey history is peppered with stories of how girls had to play on boys’ teams to be able to play. But that’s no more.

Female hockey has grown by leaps and bounds in the last 10 years, and registration now far surpasses explicitly girls’ sports such as ringette. But women’s hockey has been synonymous with the name Chimos in these parts. The club plays in the three-year old Western Women’s Hockey League (WWHL), which extends from the West Coast to Minnesota, and includes both the Chimos and the Calgary Oval X-treme. Both teams were part of the National Women’s Hockey League, which they joined in 2001, but got rather bored by playing a “season” against each other while the bulk of the teams in Ontario refused to get on a plane and fly west for a game.

“The teams in the WWHL actually fly to play against each other,” said Dee Bateman, Chimos’ president. “It’s a real league.”

The Chimos continue to be the flagship team in Edmonton, having come out of the Northern Alberta Female Hockey Association, but their on-ice dominance ended when the Calgary club began to recruit heavily from the players on the Canadian National Team. Attracting the likes of Hayley Wickenheiser, Danielle Goyette and Cassie Campbell, for example, to play for the Oval X-treme, made them a very strong team.

“It’s tough to play against a stacked team,” Bateman said, “but we continue to develop our players here, and the WWHL is a good league.”

Chimos goaltender Keely Brown currently sits third in the individual goaltender standings, behind only the two X-treme goalies, while four X-treme players lead the point scoring in the league.

Female hockey players have also earned a real cachet, to the point where they are a draw at NHL games. Goyette signed autographs at the November 24 Oilers’ game, and there was no obvious demographic to which she appealed more than any other. Wickenheiser had been an attraction at a game in 2005-6, and there’d been more buzz around her appearance than around a rather dull NHL regular season game.

On the other hand, players have had to work to avoid becoming a sideshow outside the real hockey world. Rhéaume has had to fend off offers from Playboy and Penthouse to appear in their pages, and that has little or nothing to do with her ability to stop a puck. Endorsements have not been an unmixed blessing for the players from the national team, either, but hockey legitimacy is inarguable in Edmonton.