Puck pioneers-Girls hockey is growing in Rhode Island
The Winter Olympics of 1998 pumped up interest in girls hockey, spawning a crop of fledgling teams. That trend is likely to continue as next month's Winter Games get under way in Salt Lake City. BY TOM MOONEY Journal Staff Writer To play hockey, you have to know how to stop. Right? When the girls from North Smithfield glided onto the ice last month for their first ever hockey game, coach Bill Nangle orchestrated an illusion.
As warm-ups were about to begin, Nangle had all those players who could not stop (which were 10 stand on the goal line between those players who could (which were 9).
At the other end of the rink, the girls from Mount St. Charles Academy, one of the few girls' teams in Rhode Island with some competitive experience, were already carving up the face-off circles.
Nangle didn't want to expose his neophytes too early. So he told them: When you do your sprints to the blue and red lines, those who can stop, grab the shirts of those who can't. The girls giggled.
And so North Smithfield stood up to their first challenge.
It did not matter they would lose 12 to 1. It did not matter that Mount St. Charles would shoot 74 shots at their goal compared with North Smithfield's 4 in return.
When the game was over, parents rushed into the North Smithfield locker room. They hugged their cheering daughters and snapped their pictures.
They had won by being there; testament to the growing popularity of girls hockey.
That popularity is bound to grow even more following next month's Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. There the U.S. women's hockey team is expected to win another medal as it did in their inaugural Olympic appearance, in 1998.
Some North Smithfield players have never heard of Sara DeCosta, the now 24-year-old goalie from Warwick whose performance four years ago helped win the U.S. gold. But the girls, who are in middle school and high school, have the likes of DeCosta and other local hockey enthusiasts to thank: next year the Rhode Island Interscholastic League plans to sanction the high school sport of girls hockey.
ON THIS GRAY and raw Tuesday of last week, the North Smithfield girls have returned to Woonsocket for their third game against Mount St. Charles. In a rank locker room under the bleachers, Coach Nangle offers an unusual pep talk. "The score is meaningless," he tells his helmeted players. One girl gnaws on her mouthpiece while another whispers how happy she is to have tied her skates so well. "We just want to see a little bit of improvement."
Rather than be outshot 74 to 4, as in the first game, or 58 to 6 as in the second, let's try, Nangle says, to keep their shots on net below 50. "We're going to try to generate some offense, too" he says. "Let's get 10 shots on net." "And Rupal," Nangle says, grinning at Rupal Patel seated against the wall, "if you're offsides today, I may have to come over the boards." Confusion floods her face. "You remember what offsides is, right?" the coach asks. Her helmet twitches side to side. Nangle finds his blackboard and sketches a few lines over the hockey rink pattern. "The puck has to go over the blue line first," he says. "If you go over that line before the puck, you're offsides." "Got it," Patel says, as a teammate nudges her with an elbow. "Now let me hear some enthusiasm," Nagle says. "One, two, three . . . " "Northmen. . . . Northmen!" (Yep, that's what they call themselves, keeping with school tradition.)
MINNESOTA WAS the first state to sanction girls high school hockey, in 1994. Since then, other states and several private schools in Rhode Island, such as Mount, have offered the sport. But it wasn't until this winter that so-called "club" teams -- teams not yet fully endorsed by their towns -- began sprouting up in North Smithfield and Burrillville, communities with long hockey traditions; places where on any cold weekend you can hear the whack of hockey sticks echoing across a frozen pond until moonlight turns the ice blue. Four teams have already committed to joining the interscholastic league next year: Lincoln School in Providence, Mount St. Charles, and Burrillville and North Smithfield High Schools. And four other schools are considering it, says Richard Lynch, executive director of the interscholastic league: Bishop Keough Regional High School in Pawtucket, St. Mary Academy-Bay View in East Providence, La Salle Academy in Providence and Barrington High School.
Lynch attributes much of the growing popularity of girls hockey to the success of, and attention paid to, the U.S. women's hockey team of 1998. But he says the sport has also been pushed locally by people such as Nangle and his North Smithfield neighbor, Margaret Degidio Murphy. Murphy coaches Brown University's women's hockey team. Nangle played hockey through college and has coached boys youth teams.
For the last three years, the two hockey enthusiasts organized spring and summer clinics in northern Rhode Island. The clinics attracted between 80 and 100 girls of all ages. Many of those girls, including middle school girls, are now playing on club teams. One of the biggest challenges Nangle found -- besides finding available ice time to practice -- was outfitting the girls with equipment. Hockey can be expensive. Nangle had 19 players on his team. He sent letters to all his friends from his years playing hockey, asking them to search their attics and basements for shin pads and skates, shoulder pads, hockey socks and helmets. Many were glad to get rid of the stuff.
One November day, Nangle laid out all the equipment on the sidewalk and had his players take what they needed. There were questions. Hockey socks, for example, which go over the shin pads, are often held up with garter belts. "Coach," one of the girls told Nangle after searching the sidewalk, "there are no more gardening belts."
The North Smithfield girls had their first practice the day after Thanksgiving. Of the 19 players, "10 had never put on a pair of skates in their lives," says Nangle. And of the 9 that had skated before, only two played competitive hockey -- in boys leagues.
But it's because of the challenges his team faces that Nangle says, "I've never had this much fun." "There is no expectation, no win-loss worries. That's what makes this so wonderful." To his team, "it's just about playing a sport, being committed to something and getting families involved. They see this as an adventure." Not unlike, perhaps, the purest of Olympic achievement.
For almost two full periods, North Smithfield goalie Ashley Hutchins, who also plays for the town's junior high school boys team, is her team's saving grace. She swats and kicks and deflects one barrage of shots after another. After jumping on one loose puck that ricochets back and forth between her and the entire Mount team, several of Hutchins's teammates skate over to the goal and smother her with hugs. They haven't yet learned the more traditional tap of appreciation on a goalie's pads.
The Mount girls continue to swarm, though, and eventually three pucks slip behind Hutchins before the second period is over. Late in the second period, North Smithfield gets its first shot at Mount. Kristin Oakland, the team's newest player and its offensive ace in the hole (she plays on the boys varsity team, too) rushes into the Mount zone. Her shot brings the North Smithfield team to its feet. But the celebration is nothing compared with the noise the girls make moments later when Rachel MacDonald slips a puck in behind Mount's goalie. Team Captain Tara D'Andrea, a senior who for years yearned to play hockey with other girls -- who had skated only four times in her life before joining the team -- will say later that playing is not a matter of winning. "It's about going out there and doing our best. We just keep trying." But for now her expression of joy, her arms wrapped around Rachel MacDonald, says it all.
In the locker room, after what ends as a 4 to 1 loss, Coach Nangle says, "I am so proud of you. You were in it all the way. That was a hockey game." And eight shots on goal. Not bad. One of his players shouts out: Mr. Nangle, how many shots did they have against us? Nangle smiles. "Forty-four." When the cheering finally subsides, the girls from North Smithfield break out in song.