Utica is hosting the Women's World Hockey Championship. Can it help boost girls' hockey?

The irony of Annika Zalewski’s ice hockey career is that she got to play women’s hockey closer to home in college than she did in high school.

Zalewski, 28, of New Hartford, played for Colgate University in Hamilton. Growing up, though, she only played on boys’ teams locally.

The crowd would watch her walk into games, her ponytail hanging out from under her helmet and know that she was different —a girl on the team, she recalled. 

“I only remember being the only girl on my team specifically,” Zalewski said. “And I would say there were maybe a handful of girls that played hockey within, maybe, I’ll say a 30-mile radius.”

To play on a girls’ team, she spent her sophomore year of high school at a Massachusetts prep school, played in tournaments with a girls’ team based in Buffalo (while playing on the New Hartford High School’s varsity boys’ team and a boys’ travel team in Morrisville), and moved in with a family in Buffalo for her senior year to attend a private day school with a girls’ team.

“That was what I had to do to get exposure as a girl,” she said. “There were still no girls’ teams around here. And when you’re a girl playing boys’ hockey, there’s no college scouts coming to a boys’ game to review you.”

Girls' hockey is growing nationwide

Times are changing, though. Over the past 15 seasons, participation in girls’ ice hockey nationally has risen 65%, according to USA Hockey.

Locally, young girls still skate in coed programs, but their numbers are growing. And both the Utica Jr. Comets and Rome Youth Hockey Association have girls’ teams starting as young as 12 and under.

Clinton High School has hosted a girl’s ice hockey team made up of athletes from several area districts — including this school year a girl from the Owen D. Young Central School District in Herkimer County — for eight years. 

And with the International Ice Hockey Federation Women’s World Championship taking place in Utica this week and next, many girls’ and women’s ice hockey advocates say the sky could be the limit.

“I think it’s amazing for the growth of hockey in this area,” Zalewski said. “For men’s and women’s hockey. I just think any time you have the best players in the world all competing in the same place, this is something really special. I actually think people maybe don’t even know how cool it is, maybe until they see a game and they get to appreciate the quality of play and how good these athletes really are.”

And girls now can aspire to professional hockey after their college careers.

“I tell my daughters that there are 180 women,” Eric Gooldy, a girls’ coach with the Junior Comets and dad to two daughters, “that are being paid at least $80,000 to play hockey.”

Loving the 'physicality'

Gooldy’s daughters, Shea, 12, and Eissen, 10, started hockey when they were two and have no plans to stop playing.

“I love the intensity and the physicality,” Shea said. “And it’s just great to be able to pretty much be with your friends all the time. It’s just very fun to be out there. It’s a great opportunity. And it could get me many different places when I’m older as well.”

“I just like being free,” Eissen added. “There's no rules except for if you get a penalty.”

Both girls said they want to play hockey through college and, if possible, professionally afterward, just like their dad who played in the Ontario League (part of the Canadian Hockey League) for a few years after his junior year in high school alongside Rob Esche, the Utica Comets president and a former National Hockey League goalie.

Gooldy was drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs but was injured and never got to play in a regular-season NHL game.

His daughters are thrilled at the chance to watch world championship play right in Utica and to work on the ice crew for some of the games.

“It’s like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Shea said. “I’m just so grateful to be able to experience it hands on. I’m still a bit shocked that it’s even happening because this is a big deal.”

Eissen said she hopes the championship will provide inspiration.

“There’s a lot of younger girls around where we live,” she said. “So if they go to see one game, they could be like, ‘Wow. That’s awesome. I want to try.’”

Shea said that she’s noticed a change in girls’ hockey even in her time in the sport. As a preschooler learning to skate, she wondered why there weren’t any girls’ teams, she said.

“There’s a lot more girls’ hockey teams and a lot more girls playing hockey now than when I was two or three,” she said.

There are still, though, some people out there who aren’t used to the idea of ice hockey as a girls’ sport. One day at the start of the school year Eissen was talking to a new girl who is now her friend, she said. “I was wearing my Comets jacket and she goes, ‘Who’s is that?’” Eissen recalled. “I said, ‘It’s mine. I play hockey.’ And she blinked like four times and said, ‘You play hockey?’”

Giving girls opportunities

Gooldy is very much a modern girl dad, driving his daughters to get their nails done over the weekend and taking them to hockey practice. This year, both girls played on the Junior Comets 12-and-under team, coached by their dad.

Shea also played on a coed Oneida County Hockey Club team.

In fact, hockey dads like Gooldy have largely made local girls’ programs possible. Programs and teams have come and gone over the years as groups of girls have aged out and their parent/organizers have dropped out with them, Gooldy said.

But then a new group of girls and parents come along, and take over or start new teams, he said.

“A lot of times they start with a dad or somebody that had played’ Gooldy said, “and had daughters and wanted to give them the opportunities the boys had.”

Even Clinton’s high school team started after a group of residents and parents approached the district about starting a regional interscholastic team in 2015, athletic director Robert Bentley said. They may well have had an easy sell because then Superintendent Steve Grimm’s twin daughters played ice hockey, Bentley noted.

The team, which included girls from eight districts this year, won the regional championship in 2019, 2020 and last year, he said. There is no state championship in girls’ ice hockey.

Steve Zezzo is another modern hockey dad, coaching several teams in the Rome Youth Hockey Association. He started his three daughters —Analisa, 18, Solana, 17 and Izzy, 16 — in hockey when they were about five.

He played hockey himself as a kid in the 1980s and early 1990s, but doesn’t remember girls playing back then.

“I never played against any or saw any when I was playing,” he said. “I’m sure there were.”

Gooldy has watched the growth of girls’ hockey first hand for decades, starting with his sisters, two of four siblings who all played hockey growing up in New Hartford. Gooldy’s oldest sister started with figure skating because there was nowhere for her to play until she was 15, he said. And then she played with girls from age 10 to age 18, not an ideal situation.

His other sister, who was 11 years younger than her older sister, played on a girls’ team in Syracuse because there weren’t any locally 20 years ago, he said.

Both sisters did go on to play college hockey.

“About 2000 to now, women’s hockey,” Gooldy said, “has really started to explode nationwide and in Canada.”

Girls’ hockey doesn’t, though, quite rival boys’ hockey yet in the number of girls who play or in the opportunities they have. Clinton may have a varsity girls’ ice hockey team, but its boys’ team doesn’t need to recruit students from other schools to fill out its roster, Bentley pointed out.

“Some of the other schools in Section Three are also in the same boat (for girls’ hockey,” he said.

Oswego, Skanneatles and Alexandria Bay all bring in girls from several other district to put girls’ teams together, he said.

And some area girls still choose to play hockey at a prep or private school during their senior year, Bentley said.

A long history of women playing hockey

Female hockey players are at least as old as the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup.

Lord Stanley of Preston, a one-time governor general of Canada, gave the cup to the people of Canada in 1892. His own four children, three sons and a daughter, had all fallen in love with ice hockey when the family moved to Canada, according to the International Ice Hockey Federation.

His daughter, Lady Isobel even convinced her father to build a rink in the family’s gardens and may have been the first girl photographed playing hockey in 1890.

The first all women’s hockey game on record took place in Ottawa in 1891, according to the federation, but organized women’s hockey games would remain rare for a long time.

Here are some highlights from women’s hockey history, according to the federation, USA Hockey and the History Center in Tompkins County:

• Canada held its first women’s championship game in 1921.

• Brown University organized the first American women’s team, the Pembroke Pandas, in 1966.

• The Tompkins Girls Hockey Association formed in 1972, the first all-girls program in the state and the third in the country.

• The Ontario Women’s Hockey Association began in 1975.

• Canada’s true national championship started in 1982 and the first world’s women’s championship in 1987 in Toronto.

• Canadian goalie Manon Rheaume played for the Tampa Bay Lightning in an exhibition game against the St. Louis Blues in 1992 making her the first woman to play in the National Hockey League.

• In 1997, the International Ice Hockey Federation mandated that all on-ice officials during the women’s world championship must be women.

• Women’s ice hockey became a medal sport at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan in 1998.

• Ithaca High School started the first girls’ ice hockey team in the state in 1998.

• The National Women’s Hockey League, the first professional league in the U.S., formed in 1999 and was replaced by the more clearly professional Professional Women’s Hockey Players’ Association in 2019.

• The NCAA held its first national championship for women’s ice hockey in 2000.

How is women's hockey different from men's hockey?

People involved in girls and women's’ hockey predicted that the championship in Utica will further the cause of women’s hockey and teach area residents one thing: anyone who thinks women’s hockey is in any way soft or sweet is very much mistaken.

The only major, obvious difference to play is that body checks aren’t allowed on open ice for girls, women or kids until age 14.

“The girls game is very physical,” Zezzo said. “Yes, there’s no open ice body checks allowed or anything like that. Girls, they lost their temper. They scrum it up and there’s definitely contact in the girls’ game as there should be. Heavy. I don’t think there should be a different standard for girls.

“They’re hockey players. I’ve never looked at them as girls. They’re hockey players.”

When Gooldy coached a coed team in New Hartford 11 years ago, he thought girls couldn’t shoot as hard as the boys and that their game suffered a bit because they just aren’t as big as boys, he said. “And I believed it when I said it 11 years ago,” he said.

But with the technology now and the sport-specific training women undergo, that’s certainly just not true, he said. 

Yes, men are still bigger and stronger, but that’s the only difference pretty much between men’s and women’s hockey, he said.

“The women’s game has come a long way and, really, the sky is the limit,” Gooldy added. “These women are super skilled.”

Zezzo said he’s noticed a bit of difference in coaching both genders.

“I think girls are a little smarter in terms of taking the coaching and trying to do it exactly that way, maybe very literally,” Zezzo said. “But they’re easier to coach. I’ve coached both girls and boys. I find them easier to coach. They want to learn it and try to do it exactly that way.”

And Gooldy does notice another, off-ice difference between the genders. Boys and men don’t always help the younger players to learn because they’re afraid the young ones will surpass the older ones someday, he said.

But women hockey players are generous about mentoring younger players, he said.

“There’s no selfish behavior, competitive,” he said, “where you don’t want the younger girl to get better.”

Zezzo agreed, noting many of his organization’s girls have gone on to play college hockey and come back in the summer to skate with the younger girls who look up to them as role models.

“They’re kind of in awe of them,” he said. “It’s pretty special to see that.”

A local role model gives back to the next generation

After leaving Colgate, Zalewski went on to play professionally in the National Women’s Hockey League in Buffalo and then a year in its replacement league, the Professional Women’s Hockey Player’s Association before deciding to move back home in 2020.

Now she’s focused on helping the next generation of players to grow up with more opportunities. She helps coach the coed learn-to-skate and mite hockey programs for New Hartford Youth Hockey. 

She’s also an aunt to six young hockey players, three nephews and three nieces, and works as a nanny, taking care of two boys and a girl, all of them hockey players.

And Zalewski launched her own mentorship program for girls between the ages of 10 and 12. The 10-or-so girls meet weekly, on the ice once a month and for off-ice workouts the rest of the time with discussions, too, on topics like nutrition, goal setting and general wellness.

“I launched this as a way to sort of empower younger hockey players, girls specifically,” Zalewski said, “because when I was growing up, I had no female role models that played hockey.”

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Women's hockey: Utica world tournament could help local girls' teams