Women’s hockey has come a long way

I attended my first Valley High School Hockey League girls’ division closing banquet last week.

In a room with close to 100 high school-aged female hockey players, I couldn’t help but think how far women’s hockey has come.

Girls’ hockey in the Valley hasn’t been around all that long, but the high school league currently has seven teams, from Windsor to Middleton and as far away as Bridgewater. It’s an active and growing league, in need of all the support and encouragement it can get.

After all, while hockey has been “co-ed” for some time – often on the same team, especially at the lower age levels – it’s still a “guy’s game” in the minds of many.

It was so appropriate to have Amy Ferguson as guest speaker for the banquet. If you recognize the name, it’s proof of how far hockey for women has come in Nova Scotia. If you don’t, it’s proof it still has a way to go to achieve true equality.

Ferguson is arguably Nova Scotia’s most successful female hockey player. After growing up in Pictou County playing on boys’ teams, including West Pictou District High School, where she was the first-ever girl on the team; she represented Nova Scotia in women’s hockey at the 1999 Canada Winter Games in Newfoundland.

From there, she was recruited to play NCAA Division 1 women’s hockey for Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where she spent four seasons helping the Big Green to two Ivy League championships and a national bronze medal in her senior year, 2003. She was voted her team’s MVP and won the top goalie award.

Following graduation, Ferguson spent a season with Edmonton in the Canadian Women’s Professional Hockey League, where she played with - and against - many current and former members of the Canadian national and Olympic women’s hockey teams.

Ferguson is currently a Valley resident, living in Falmouth with her husband of 10 months, Jason; and working as Human Resources Manager at Fundy Gypsum in Hantsport. She still plays recreational hockey. “Our team is called the Coldbrook Old Boys,” she points out, “but we’re not all old - and we’re not all boys.”

To my mind, Ferguson is a real trailblazer, a wonderful ambassador for women’s hockey. She has seen it all and done it all, from the thrill of victory to once being cut from a boys’ team - just because she was a girl. Disappointed but undaunted, she simply moved up a division, tried out and made the team.

Ferguson probably doesn’t see what she has done as anything special, but if you view her accomplishments from the perspective of a 16-year-old girl playing high school hockey, they take on a whole new importance. I watched with interest the faces of some of the young women listening to Ferguson, and I thought to myself, to them, she might as well be Wayne Gretzky or Sidney Crosby.

People like Ferguson – and Hayley Wickenheiser and Cassie Campbell, who broke the “gender barrier” as a commentator on Hockey Night in Canada, and so many others – are the present - and immediate past - of women’s hockey in Canada. Some of the girls in attendance at the VHSHL banquet just might end up being the future.