RI now has an all-girls summer hockey conference
07/31/2002
SMITHFIELD -- Two entangled hockey players float in fast and off-balance, shoulders hunched. Their skates screech on the ice, their jaws tighten, and together they smash into the rink's side-wall.
Hitting is forbidden in this league, the first all-girls summer hockey conference in Rhode Island. But the girls can make contact.
Denise O'Donnell, a hockey mom from Glocester, cringes only slightly as the players shake loose and skate back into a swarm of green and black jerseys, their ponytails flopping side to side.
Her daughter Ashley, 13, is playing defense tonight for the black-clad Maple Leafs. She's already made contact several times.
Denise isn't worried about the collision and doesn't fear for her daughter's safety. She knows the girls can take it because when they play in the mixed-gender leagues -- as almost all the girls on the ice do -- hitting is allowed.
In fact, the no-hitting rule is the only difference, Denise explains, between this new league and traditional ones that include boys. Otherwise, she says, the girls are equally skilled and equally aggressive.
"If you didn't see their ponytails hanging out of their helmets, you wouldn't know they were girls."
This seems true as hockey noise echoes off the rusty walls at the Smithfield Municipal Rink. On the ice, players chase each other in tight arcs and crash in car-wreck piles. They tap their stick blades in staccato codes, calling for passes. They fire long, wobbling shots down ice and some spit through the steel mesh of their facemasks.
Girls hockey has been around for decades, clinging mostly to the fringes of the male-dominated sport.
While the summer league shows how far girls hockey has come, the sport is only just arriving in Rhode Island.
"Girls hockey is just starting out now," says Don Armstrong, president of Rhode Island Summer Hockey League. "We tried to start it last year, but we had to wait."
Wait, Armstrong explains, for interested players, ice-time, community support and cash to congeal. It takes about $2,400 to support a team in the four-team girls league. The money buys jerseys and ice-time (at about $125 an hour) and pays referees and clock-keepers.
Until this summer, girls have played on mixed-gender teams during summer vacation. Girls can also join boys teams during the school year, at both the high school and junior high levels.
But the summer program lets girls compete in their own four-team league, on their own terms, says Armstrong.
Since the league premiered last month, more than 70 girls have played in nine games, most of them here at the Smithfield rink.
One night last week, Ashley O'Donnell's team battled Mid-State, a team they've played and tied twice.
Ashley's father, Bob, a Smithfield police lieutenant and coach of the Maple Leafs, assembled the 18-member team with skaters from Burrillville, Scituate, Smithfield, Foster and Glocester. He named the team after the state tree.
Bob O'Donnell stood in the team box on the far side of the rink, arms folded over his blue polo shirt. His head swung back and forth, following the game with the steady gaze of a detail-oriented man. In the next box, Fred Miller, coach of the Mid-Staters and a friend of Bob, stared in the same studied way.
Together their teams make up half the summer conference. The other half, the Mount Saint Charles Saints and Newport, competed immediately after the Mid-State-Maple Leaf game.
Back on the ice, Ashley blocked a pass early in the third period and broke away toward Mid-State's net. Two defenders tailed her, shoving their sticks at the puck.
Ashley snapped off a shot but Mid-State's goalie deflected it.
The game tempo shifted as girls dug into the ice to cut their speed and reverse direction.
Mid-State recovered the puck and girls surged toward the Maple Leafs goal.
Then Ashley swung in behind an opponent.
Halfway through the period, Mid-State scored its fourth goal. With only six minutes left on the clock, the Maple Leafs looked tired.
Just a few days earlier, Ashley was at basketball camp at Providence College. Her summer breaks down into a puzzle of sport events, although hockey lands on top for the moment.
Ashley has played for five years. Before that, she was a figure skater. She got her hockey start in the Rhode Island Wolves, a program designed to introduce girls to the sport through clinics.
Bill P. Nangle, one of the founders of the Wolves, explains that girls hockey has come a long way, and he says Ashley O'Donnell illustrates how much potential energy is locked up in the emerging sport.
But Ashley is also an exception, Nangle says.
"She's talented enough that she can skate and she can hit with the boys and not get hurt," Nangle explains. "But not everybody can do that."
For the sport to really mature, Nangle says, girls need more direction and more opportunities earlier in their lives.
"The real question is, why aren't more girls coming out to play?" Nangle asks. "The answer is, there are not enough programs that are offering the level that these girls are ready to play at."
Nangle says that for most of the last 20 years, girls hockey hovered at a very competitive level in the state, closing doors for girls who were interested in the sport but who hadn't started young.
Girls could join boys teams, but, "Once they hit the Pee-Wees, checking starts and the girls start to drop out."
Nangle says that many girls played up to high school and stopped there because the physical differences between girls and boys in size, weight and speed just became too great.
Adding momentum, the first interscholastic high school girls league will debut this winter, with three full teams, from Burrillville, North Smithfield and Mount St. Charles, and two co-op teams assembled from Bishop Keogh and Bayview and the Lincoln and Providence Country Day schools.
The league will pressure other towns to create teams, Nangle says. But girls hockey is still in a larval stage, and there are obstacles ahead.
On June 27, the day of the third game in the girls summer season, President Bush slid Title IX -- the 1972 law that enforced equality in education and is credited with launching women's sports -- under a federal magnifying glass.
Some supporters of Title IX fear that any reexamination could hobble girls sports programs in the U.S. and possibly trickle down to the high school level.
But girls like Ashley O'Donnell, together with their parents, seem ready to stand up for their ice-time.
In the Maple Leafs-Mid-State game, Ashley broke away again in the final seconds of the game.
She shot under pressure, tailed by defenders as before.
And as before, Mid-State's goalie was alert, quick. She knocked the puck away.
When the final buzzer sounded, the Maple Leafs had dropped the game to their rivals, 4 to 1. The girls filed back into the locker room and waited for Coach O'Donnell's post-game speech.
The tiny, cinder-block room stank of sweat, wet rubber and rust; odor is an equal opportunity problem for hockey players who spend the entire game wrapped in hot plastic pads.
The coach's talk was quick and to the point: If we play like that again, we're not going to win the championship in August, he said.
Later, in the rink's parking lot, Ashley stood next to an enormous blue duffel bag stuffed with almost $1,000 worth of equipment.
She had transformed herself from bulky defender back to small, slightly shy 13-year-old. Instead of a helmet, she wore a baseball cap, Instead of puck-proof body armor, she wore a tank top.
Her dedicated dad explains that girls hockey still needs to pass into the promised land of sports equality. Girls need more support from the community and more players to beef up team rosters, he says.
But Ashley's biggest worry is competition. She doesn't want to deal with different sets of rules.
"I just want a good game," she says. "It's so confusing going back and forth between boys and girls teams."
And of course, there's that issue of contact, the gray area in the rulebook that allows some smack-ups but forbids serious checking. Ashley wants equal checking opportunities.
After all, Ashley says, grinning, "you should see the boys cry after I check them."