WE CAN DO HARD THINGS:

I went into labor with my 2nd child when I was behind the bench coaching at the provincial championships.

Contractions started during the 2nd period. Nothing too bad – it was my 2nd child after all so I had (some) experience of what I was about to go through. Normally I am pretty animated behind the bench, standing on the bench with my foot on the boards, lunging forward in the way my college coach did back in the day. This particular game definitely warranted that level of animation. Both teams finished in the top 6 of the 20 team Provincial Women’s Hockey League, the highest level of girls hockey in the world for that age group. It was a back and forth high flying affair that ended in a tightly contested 2-2 tie. But instead of being foot up on the boards adrenaline pumping higher and higher with every big save and missed scoring chance, I was standing arms crossed, leaning against the wall behind me, enjoying watching my team play at the peak level of performance, knowing full well that it would be the last game I coached that season. The final buzzer sounded, I went in the room and did the post game wrap up of our performance and keys to success for our game the next morning, knowing full well that I wouldn’t be there. I walked out the front door of the rink, say goodbye to all the parents and fans on my way out and met my husband and father out by the car. I told them we would be going to the hospital on the way back instead of home. I texted my assistant coaches a few hours later to let them know they’d be running the show for the rest of the tournament. I emailed the players and families at 2am to let them know why I wouldn’t be at the rink the next day. My eldest daughter Sasha was born that night. I think she’s gonna be a hockey player.

We can do hard things. I’ve been doing hard things for much of my life – with a level of intensity and focus that is my calling card along with tremendous support of my family along the way.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN:

I first started playing organized hockey at the age of 13. I grew up in downtown Toronto, across the street from a park with an outdoor rink, and still never really laced them up despite being less than 100 meters away from the ice. I played soccer with the boys since the age of 5 and took quickly to any sport that was thrown in front of me. If my school offered it or the boys were playing it at the park across the street, I was in and I was pretty good at it pretty quickly. Back then, you would have called me a tomboy. So when I took up my new sport of hockey at 13, having barely ever playeded, I wasn’t exactly a rock-star, but I was determined to get better and be the best. I was always one of the best athletes at my school and being bad at a sport was not something that I was ok with. So I started playing house-league and went over to that outdoor rink constantly to accelerate my learning curve. I made a AA rep team the following year (which is the highest level of competitive hockey offered here in Ontario). Let’s not pretend I skyrocketed from my humble house-league beginnings to the top of the rep team in one season. Quite honestly, probably the only reason I even made it onto that team early on is because my friend’s dad was the head coach. So when I decided two years later at the age of 15 that I wanted to play college hockey at an Ivy League university, it was understandable that people thought I was crazy. This was back in the mid 90s, before women’s hockey was in the Olympics, and before you could just google things like “how do I play women’s hockey in university. I didn’t personally know anyone who’d played university hockey and had no rational reason to believe that I’d be even close to good enough to get there. But through a ridiculous amount of focus, determination and hard work, I was able to realize my dream three short years later – after having only played the game for five years.

WHY I DO WHAT I DO:
Exactly 10 years after I started my college hockey career in the Ivy League and 3 months after finishing my professional hockey career, I decided that I would start my own company, Total Female Hockey. I wanted to make my full-time living pursuing my true passion of empowering young female hockey players with the information and inspiration they need to drive their own success on and off the ice. I wanted to fill the massive void that had existed me as a young player. Back then. I was desperate for any information I could get my hands on about how to train off the ice, what to eat to perform my best on the ice, or to go to a hockey camp with other like minded girls who wanted to be their best. Back when I was growing up, the only training info out there at the library (pre-internet days) was how to body-build in order to be a 200 pound player that can throw their weight around in the corners (not really necessary or desired in the female game). The only female specific nutrition information I could find came from magazines like Shape which weren’t exactly geared towards aspiring young athletes who were burning thousands of calories a day running from practice to practice to game. I created my first off-ice training products and wrote every blog post for Total Female Hockey with the young version of me in mind. Every young version of Kim out there, desperate for information and inspiration they needed to drive their own success, was the target audience. Again, many people told me I was crazy. It was smack dab in the middle of the recession back in 2008 – not great timing. Not to mention the fact that I was creating a brand new business model in a tiny niche market focusing entirely on female hockey. But again, two years after starting from scratch and working just as hard as I did back when I set that goal of playing university hockey when I could barely play the game, I was able to build a successful company that I’ve now been running for 15 years. I do what I love, love what I do and am able to live the life I want as a result.

Let’s just say I’ve never exactly done things the easy way on or off the ice. And the truth is that I never really doubted that I would achieve either of those big goals on and off the ice. I must be blessed with the perfect mixture of stubbornness and confidence. Don’t get me wrong – there were many points along the way where I doubted myself and found myself mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted en route to those goals. Going from house-league to playing university hockey in 5 years is not common and it certainly wasn’t easy. Starting a brand-new business during a recession that relied on online marketing and delivery back when people were still quite reluctant to use their credit card online wasn’t easy either. But I never gave up – even when everyone around me thought I was too obsessed and too driven (is there such a thing?). I know without a shadow of a doubt that I am doing EXACTLY what I was meant to be doing in this life – and it has been my experiences within women’s hockey for the past 30 years that have allowed me to realize my dreams.

I’m very fortunate to have had the opportunity to play at the highest levels of women’s hockey for over a decade, coach thousands of teams and players on and off the ice, and help countless members of the female hockey community take their performance to the next level. Empowering those players, coaches and teams with the tools they need to succeed on and off the ice, watching them challenge their limits and rise up to the challenge, whether their new to the game or vying for a spot in the upper echelons of our sport, is what keeps my fire burning as a coach and mentor. I didn’t have access to any of these types of resources or opportunities as I was coming up in our game and now I get to share my experience and expertise with the whole hockey world. There’s nothing like hearing from young player who has worked with you on the ice all summer that she made her first ever rep team or talking to a coach who used your training manuals & videos to take their team from group of good players to a well-oiled machine that won the provincial championship. I get emails almost daily from all over the women’s hockey world thanking me for helping them take their game to the next level and achieve their goals on the ice, but by far the greatest accomplishment I’ve had so far in this game is having players I’ve coached since they were 12 and 13 years old give back to the game they love as coaches.

Back when I first started TFH, I set some pretty lofty goals. One of those goals was to inspire more female players to get into coaching and mentor them along their new hockey journey. When I wrote that goal down back in 2008, I was fresh out of playing pro hockey, had never coached a single game behind the bench and had only been a part time on-ice instructor at summer hockey camps in between college hockey seasons. At that time, I only offered one female hockey player specific off-ice training manual and trained a handful of teams off the ice in the gym. So while inspiring and mentoring other female coaches is a massive part of what I do now, it seemed very pie in the sky back then. But for some reason I wrote it down anyways and as you may have now figured out from my previous tales of extreme stubbornness and relentless work ethic, this was a goal I was not going to leave unmet.

WE CAN DO HARD THINGS – PART TWO:
I was back on the bench coaching 2 days after giving birth to my 3rd child. After reading the first few paragraphs of my story, I’m sure this comes as no surprise. No one was making me get back to it that quickly, but no one was going to keep me off that bench either. By this time I’d been coaching junior hockey for 4 years and we were having our best season in team history. We were in the top 4 after the regular season, had the 2nd and 5th leading scorers in the league and the goalie with the 2nd best GAA and save percentage in the league. We had depth, balance and confidence that we could make a run a deep into the playoffs. Five days before I went into labor with child #3, we won our first playoff series in the history of our still young program. As luck would have it, I managed to go into labor before the start of our next series so if everything went smoothly, I’d be back on the bench for game #1. My youngest was born on March 7th and game one was on March 9th. We had one night at home with our newborn before hitting the road the next day to play the 1st game of the best of 5 series.

DISCLAIMER: For those of you who have had a kid, I fully recognize that this is not the normal post birth game plan. I’ve tried very hard not to be normal for most of my life, so I did what felt right for me on this one.

One moment in particular will always stick out for me from game 1 of this series. Once we got to the visiting team’s rink, the players got settled in the room and my husband and I made our way through the sea of parents & fans offering us their congratulations on our newest team member (while undoubtedly thinking, Kim is even crazier than we already thought). I brought my youngest into the room to meet the girls briefly before we all needed to start the pregame routine. The girls head off to do their warm-up while my assistants and I went over the game plan and any last minute adjustments and messages for the team. When the newborn cried, I fed her. Strangely, it felt completely normal somehow. I was neither stressed about the game nor about the baby. Right before we headed out for the first two periods (they only flooded the ice between the 2nd and 3rd period in our games), I fed her one more time, my husband took the baby and our team took to the ice.

The girls were FLYING from the 1st drop of the puck. Who knew that all you had to do is pop out a baby before starting a playoff series to get the team going! Now I’m not going to lie to you and say that I remember much of what happened in the game. I can tell you that despite my high levels of pure exhaustion, I felt like all of us were in a pure flow state. Passes were perfectly timed and weighted. Changes were crisp and perfectly timed. Execution was on point and intensity was through the roof and as a result, we were up by a few after the 1st two periods.

As we headed off the ice and back to the dressing room for the 15 minute flood break, I instantly flipped back over to mom mode. The baby was clearly hungry (ie screaming her tiny little lungs out) so it was time to feed her. The players went in their room and I went to the coaches room to do my other job. And quite honestly, the past 5 years of my life had constantly felt like this – hockey, kids, hockey, kids. Sometimes one took priority over the other. There was rarely (never) balance or a feeling of complete control. They just merged into each other constantly. Without the support of my husband and my dad, this would not have been possible. My kids were underfoot at every game, running around every rink in Ontario like the owned the place, and they were crying, laughing, and causing chaos in the background of almost every recruiting call, email and practice plan I made for 5 years straight. It was what it was and it sure wasn’t easy.

Which brings me back to that moment between the 2nd and 3rd period. There I am feeding the 36 hour old baby, and my assistants come into the coaching room to ask what I want them to talk about before the team heads back out on the ice. It was great of them to ask but either of them could have easily run the show as they both had head coaching experience. I thought about it for a minute and then I said something along the lines of, “Let’s go do it together.” So I walked back into that dressing room with a blanket draped over my shoulder and baby and gave the between periods speech to the team while breastfeeding my newborn. While that was certainly a unique experience for everyone in that room, what really stood out to me about that moment, is that the players all looked right at me, locked into game mode and ready to go back out there and make a statement with a convincing W in game one. Only one player was uncomfortable and she put up her hand and said, “Kim I’m not trying to be rude but I’m just a little uncomfortable so I’m going to look down at the ground instead of at you.” We had a little laugh and kept plowing through the key points before heading back out the door and onto the ice.

When I think back on that day – the long drive to the rink, the hectic pregame, the way the girls dominated from start to finish and the joy of bringing the new member of my home team to meet my hockey team – what really stands out to me as someone who has been fully immersed in the world of women’s hockey for 30+ years, is that moment in between periods. Back when I was 15, 16, 17 years old, I couldn’t have imagined having a coach come in the room to give an in-game talk while breastfeeding. I’m not sure I could have remained as focused and poised as my players did in that moment. While I’ll never really know what was going through all their teenage minds when I walked through that door, I do know that somehow I’d made bringing your family with you into the rink (no matter where and when) more normal. I have always seen myself as a role model for players ever since I started playing college hockey back in the late 90s. And I take that role very seriously. I want every player I work with to know that they can do both – they can love their work and love their family and if they want, they too can do the crazy dance of running a business, coaching a sport and having three kids at home. I want them to know that it IS possible. It may not be common and at times, it isn’t the healthiest to try to burn a candle at three ends for 8 straight months of the year during hockey season. But maybe one day they’ll find themselves in those moments of overwhelming craziness and think, “Kim did it so I can do it too.”

HOW I GOT GOOD AT HOCKEY:
I started playing organized hockey at the age of 13, but I became a real hockey player the year before out on the outdoor rink. When the hockey bug bit me, I become more than just a regular at that outdoor rink across from my house. I was there every chance I could get – for shinny, for open skating, for when the rink guy would let me on early or late when no one else was around. I can say for certain that the time I spent on that outdoor rink is what made me a real hockey player. Back then, they split up shinny times based on age. There was a under 12 group, a 12 to 18 group and adult shinny. That first winter, I started with the U12 group because I knew if I went to the 12-18 group, I would be a human pylon. I figured I needed to play with my peers in terms of ability even if that meant being the oldest on the ice and getting dangled by an 8 year old or two. So out I went with the youngest group, watching learning skating falling and trying to mimic what I’d seen out on TV out on the ice.

Playing shinny on the ODR was challenging (and wonderful) for a few reasons. First and foremost, you may not know anyone out there and you were for sure the only girl. I can say that in the 6 years that I made that ODR my home every winter, there was another girl out there less than 1% of the time. Now I’d grown up playing sports with the boys (and fairing quite well) so this didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, I’m not sure that I even thought about it as good or bad back then – it was what it was and I simply wanted to get better by whatever means necessary. Another big challenge with shinny is that you don’t have uniforms and you don’t necessarily know your teammates. This means you have to remember who is actually on your team out there amongst the sea of hooded sweatshirts and toques. And when you wanted to pass to them or get a pass from them, you couldn’t always use their name because even if they told it to you, you were never really quite sure if you were using the right name for the right person in the moment. I truly believe that playing hockey with a random group of people without matching uniforms or knowing each other’s names, mixed with not really playing positions or knowing how each other play, is a great recipe for developing hockey IQ. You had to really pay attention and be proactive if you wanted to be successful on the ODR. This wasn’t an environment for shrinking violets who didn’t want to call for the puck or steal it from someone you’d never really met.

For the first few little while on the ODR, I was a passenger, not a driver. I’d skate around with those young kids, be involved with the play without ever really making a true impact on the results and generally be fine, but not good. In addition to those almost daily shinny games, I’d be out there on my own working on my skills. There were a lot of open ice times on that little rink as it was tucked away inside a neighbourhood and it didn’t get a lot of foot traffic beyond the after school, evening, weekend hours. So I’d go there before school or rush home after school and the rink guard would let me on as long as I promised to shovel it for him. I loved being out there on my own. I started making up little drills for myself to work on skating, shooting and passing. One of my all-time favouurites that I still use today with the players I work with is puck to puck passing. You have two pucks and you shoot one out into the open ice. You then try to pass the 2nd puck so that it hits the first puck. And you repeat repeat repeat. It’s like playing pool/billiards out on the ice.As you can imagine, when I first started playing around with this drill, I was doing a lot of puck chasing and not having a very high success rate. But over the weeks, my passing accuracy went through the roof. And soon I started to challenge myself even more by adding things in like making all the passes while I was moving, or passing the puck without stickhandling it first and eventually using my backhand to make the pass. As I moved up into the higher levels of hockey, I was always an excellent passer. And the hours and hours I spent with this drill, and other drills like it, honing my craft, was why. Nowadays, a lot of players only work on their skills in a highly structured environment with a skills coach running them through drills. While there is nothing wrong with working on skills in this way, it doesn’t promote creativity or problem solving in the same way as free unstructured play does.

Which brings me back to those shinny games. After a month or so with the U12 crew, I decided I had to go play with the 12-18 year olds. I had watched them play after I got off the ice with the young kids, I started to believe that I could keep up out there. I wasn’t under any illusions of grandeur but I figured I wouldn’t be the worst one out there. But I definitely was. Those first few games were brutal. I could tell that those boys didn’t want me out there and definitely didn’t want to see my stick picked out of the pile and thrown to their side when the teams were made. I knew a lot of them from school and knew they all played high level rep hockey. I don’t blame them for not wanting the house-league girl on their team.
Luckily for me, I always had more confidence than I should have and hated to be bad at anything. Especially since I played all the other sports with these same boys off the ice and was always in the top third. I just knew I wasn’t going to stay at the bottom for long – so I had to figure out how to dig out of the hole.

I distinctly remember walking to the rink one day and setting a simple goal for myself – touch the puck 10 times today. Given my lack of ability, no one out there was going to willingly pass me the puck. So I had to go out and get it for myself. I had to create turnovers and steal it for myself. I learned how to use my stick to take away passing lanes, to get stick on puck while angling the player off and how to do an effective stick lift. And I started stealing a lot of pucks (and pissing off a lot of my classmates as a result). Now that I had the little black thing, I could start using my ever developing passing skills to distribute it. This sure made me more popular with my teammates as I had no desire to carry it end to end and try to deke out the whole team as many of them did. I was being a good teammate – get it and give it. I started to figure out how “give and gos” worked so I would pass it, jump into open space and ask for it back. And slowly but surely, they started to give it back to me. Not every time, but enough that it made me think I was starting to be a bit more welcome out there. The boys no longer made faces of disappointment when my stick was thrown on their side while picking teams. They started to pass me the puck more often because I was open and I was getting pretty good. The goals I set for myself as I walked to rink changed accordingly. I was thinking about scoring goals and stopping one on ones now. I saw patterns in the play and knew when to move the puck and when to keep it. I became one of the guys – I knew their names and they knew mine and while it still took a few years for them to want me on their team, I had made some significant leaps in the right direction. Without coaching, without cones, without drills and without any feedback other than my own. I’d set the goals, I’d get the goals and I’d push myself relentlessly to get better every day. It’s no mystery how I went from a houseleague player at 12 to a rep player at 13 – I did the damn work when no one else was watching. And that’s still how I get better as a coach, teacher and mentor today. Relentless work ethic even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

LIVING THE DREAM IN COLLEGE HOCKEY:
I was converted from a defenseman to a forward after my first ever skate for the Dartmouth College women’s hockey team. We had a captain’s practice that day which amounted to a few warm-up drills followed by a scrimmage. The coaches watched from the press box at the top of the rink as they weren’t allowed on the ice yet due to Ivy League rules. After the skate, the coaches asked to see me in their office, which was more than a little daunting for a freshman. I went in, sat down and was told that they wanted me to play forward instead of D. My first thought was, “I’ve never played a shift of forward in my whole life.” I frankly don’t remember any other words that came out of their mouths after that. I just remember leaving and thinking, “I guess I have to figure out how to play forward.” For every practice, shift and game of minor hockey, I was a D. A rushing D mind you who played a bit like the Tasmanian devil, touching every corner of the ice on every shift. My effectiveness wasn’t based on my adherence to structure clearly, it was based on my ability to read the play, make a decision and recover quickly. So it is completely understandable that my college coaches would watch me fly around the ice unbridled during that first scrimmage and think ‘winger’ instead of ‘D’. I had the mindset, game set and aggressiveness needed to be a great power forward. And that’s exactly what I became – eventually. But first I had to start out on the 4th line.

I found out very quickly that I was going to find my success as a forward in the same way I started making an impact on the outdoor rink 6 years earlier – I was going to have to go get the puck myself. I LOVED hunting players down and stealing pucks on the forecheck. It became my special gift and is still one of my favorite things to coach almost 30 years later. Angling, steering, getting stick on puck & body on body and taking that puck like a thief in the night – it may not make all the highlight reels but it sure makes a huge impact on the game. So how did I become so good on the forecheck? I used what I knew from playing D. The things that I hated having done to me when I played defense – having no time, having no space, feeling the forechecker breathing down my neck no matter where I turned – I perfected as a forward. I turned forechecking into a bit of an art and it was the catalyst that took me from the 4th line to the 2nd line before Christmas of my freshman year. I started off creating turnovers all over the ice. That earned me penalty kill time. Then I started making great passes to my teammates off recovering those turnovers which earned me my fair share of assists. That started to move me up the ladder on the lineup and got me more ice time. That ability to relentlessly pressure the other team’s Ds, and an eagerness (quite frankly excitement) to go into the dirty areas and come out with the puck, also led to me scoring a lot of goals. They weren’t always pretty – actually let’s be honest, they were mostly gritty. Of the 50 or so goals I scored in my 4 seasons in college hockey, I’d bet 40 were of the ugly variety and 10 might be considered “nice”. I sure wasn’t making any highlight reels with the majority of them, but the last time I checked all goals count equally on the scoreboard, whether you scored them off a backhand toe drag or off a greasy rebound. I always tell my players, there isn’t a video of your goal on the scoresheet, it just says “goal”. I made a whole career off scoring goals from in-tight, with opponents draped all over me, on the edge of getting a goalie interference penalty (I had my fair share no doubt). And I loved every second of it. I wasn’t a ‘slow it down type of player’, I was a ‘speed it up kind of player’ who loved creating chaos out on the ice. And I had just enough skill and smarts to make good things happen as a result of that chaos. That mentality, physicality and relentlessness is still rare in our game as it was back then. And it’s still as effective if you harness it properly.

I finished my 1st season at Dartmouth with 27 points, not bad for a converted D who started the season on the 4th line. And that performance earned me my first ever invite to a Team Canada tryout. I still find my ascension up the ranks a little hard to believe to this day. I’ll never forget when my college coach told me I was going to the camp in Montreal and I called my parents to let them know. I’d earned it no doubt, but it was still a little out there given that I’d only started playing organized hockey 7 years earlier. While I scored quite a few goals at the camp, I really had no shot at making the team. I was surrounded by past, current and future Olympians, and was lucky enough to be on a line with two of them for the tryouts. When you’re playing the wing with Jennifer Botterill and Tammy Shewchuk, two of the greatest scorers and playmakers of all time who scored hundreds of goals for our arch rivals at Harvard University, potting a few goals at camp isn’t hard. I just went to the net with my stick on the ice and good things happened. Gritty, not pretty, but still a goal in any game.

THE GLORY & THE GRIND OF PRO HOCKEY:
After a very successful college hockey career where we won multiple Ivy League & ECAC championships and played in 2 national championships, I returned back home to play professional hockey in what was the original version of the NWHL, the National Women’s Hockey League. No million dollar contracts or private jets mind you, just a bunch of super talented and highly motivated women playing at the highest level in the world without the compensation we wanted or the publicity we deserved. That never influenced how hard we worked or competed to be our best though. We had jobs outside the rink so that we could pay our bills. Some like me pursued master’s degrees to continue our education. Some had families to take care of. And we did it all while practicing late at night, training when we could and traveling all over the province and country to play the game we loved at the highest level in the world. The league was full of Olympians from both sides of the border and on my first pro team, the Brampton Thunder, we had quite a few of them. Watching the all Olympian line of Jayna Hefford, Vicky Sunohara and Lori Dupuis dominate in every practice and every game was a sight to behold. I would still out them up as one of the most effective and well-rounded lines in the history of our game. Our line-up that year was chock full of national team players and recently graduated college hockey all-stars. We had depth, youth and experience all wrapped into one which led to us winning the provincial championships and finished 2nd at the national championship.

That first season of pro, I did what became my calling card for all 6 seasons at that level. I started the season as a forward and ended it as a D. My experience playing both positions made me quite versatile and led to more ice time and more opportunities. Young players often question themselves and their coaches when they are asked to switch positions but the truth is that it should be seen as a compliment, a show of trust, and will serve them well as they move up in hockey. I think that first year of pro was the best I ever played. I was in the best shape of my life, I had phenomenal teammates and I was being asked to play in all situations in multiple positions. This led to me being asked to move to Calgary to play with the program out of the Olympic Oval, which was called the Oval X-Treme. While it wasn’t the home of the national team program per se, my teammates the next season were 90% from the 2002 Olympic team. Wickenheiser, Goyette, Campbell, you name it, they were there. There were a handful of players like me who had played college hockey and a bit of pro and some young kids who would eventually go on to the national team level. We trained full-time which was something new for me and I loved every second of it. Some days we had two ice times and a workout all in one day. That meant multiple warm-up and cool-down sessions, meals crammed in in between sessions and often an inability to move/function when you dragged yourself home at night. We did fitness testing more than any human would want to, trained hard constantly and dominated most games we played. As someone who loved training and practicing as much as they loved the games, this was heaven for me. As I look back on it now, I know that this full-time training is the dream of all the players currently fighting for a viable professional women’s hockey league here in North America.

In 2007, my final year of professional hockey, I helped found the now defunct Canadian Women’s Hockey League, alongside other great women/players Sami Jo Small, Jennifer Botterill, Lisa-Marie Breton, Allyson Fox, and Kathleen Kauth. We created a centrally funded league that would be responsible for all travel, ice, uniforms and equipment, but could not pay the players. While that has changed somewhat, being paid a livable wage while playing professional hockey is just starting to become a reality in our sport. I hope that the players I coach and my two young daughters have that opportunity one day. The passion, talent and drive to make it happen is there, just as it has always been. The amazing women who play in the current leagues and in the national team programs deserve to be paid and celebrated for all their awesomeness on and off the ice. They are the ultimate role models – they are elite athletes, they are university graduates, they are small business owners, they are mothers, they are working, going to school, making ends meet and fighting for what they believe is not only possible but well deserved. I would be thrilled to see my kids grow up to be like any of the amazing women I had the privilege of playing with in my 6 seasons of pro hockey. They already look up to all the ‘hockey girls’ I coach today and think it’s ‘cool’ that I played with and coached so many of the players, coaches, announcers and leaders in the female game today. All 3 of my kids have asked me the same question when they were about 3 years old, “Mommy, do boys play hockey too?” It always makes me smile and makes me even more driven to grow our game in any way I can on and off the ice from players to coaches at the grassroots level to pro all over the world.

I’ve ended every email I’ve sent since I started Total Female Hockey back in 2008 with the same phrase, “Work Hard. Dream BIG.” It’s all I’ve ever known and all I’ve ever asked from the players, coaches and families I’ve worked with. I give the same advice to you and wish you the best of luck on your hockey journey.