The fight for ice: How Canada’s female minor hockey programs overcome the old boys’ club

This article was written by Madison Delaval, who is part of the Professional Hockey Writers Association x To Hockey With Love Mentorship Program. This program pairs aspiring writers with established members of the association across North America to create opportunities for marginalized people that do not traditionally get published on larger platforms covering hockey.

To Hockey With Love is a weekly newsletter covering a range of topics in hockey – from the scandals of the week to providing a critical analysis of the sport.

So you want to start a minor hockey association, where kids can play the game from ages five through 18. You have mere months to get from nothing to meeting the standard of established associations, achieved over several decades. When you do achieve what’s required on paper, you then have to navigate a system built without your rights considered, one where you are disadvantaged as a younger association. You struggle to find a regular ice-time slot for your U9 team, and your U11 team practises in a rink that’s practically falling apart.

This is the story of female hockey associations, a relatively novel concept throughout Canada as more and more young girls become interested in playing the sport. Before their advent, young girls who wished to play hockey had no other option but to enroll in local male-dominated associations. Being one of few, or the only, girls on the team often comes with a free ticket to sexist microaggressions and the burden of being a ‘token other.’ Other parents may look at them as taking a spot away from their sons. In some cases, young girls are turned away by these associations altogether because they lack precedent of female participation.

As female registration in minor hockey grew proportionally over the past few decades, a tipping point came where the critical mass of hockey-playing girls could support their own spaces where they weren’t an exception or an afterthought. Couple this with commitments to women’s hockey from the executive echelon of the sport, and from it birthed a new national network of minor hockey.

Yet, the establishment of female hockey associations doesn’t happen in a vacuum. They are considered competitors with established male-majority associations, who have historically hosted a small percentage of female players. These associations, which have been around for generations in most cases, hold the bulk of community ice time and are wary to let go of their hours. This leaves the female associations scrambling to pick up irregular practice times and/or play in less-than-desirable facilities.

These statements may be presented as anecdotal, but they are all the real-life experiences of the Cape Breton Blizzard Female Hockey Association. In 2015, Hockey Nova Scotia announced its commitment to create girls minor hockey associations throughout the province. The Blizzard were formed in 2018, with 10 teams from U11 through U18. In 2020, they added U7 and U9 teams and were formally accepted as the female association in the province’s northerly island.

The Blizzard’s story begins with Christina Lamey, who returned to her hometown after being president of the Nova Scotia Women’s Hockey League in Halifax. Growing up in Cape Breton, Lamey played just one season of minor hockey before being kicked out because the league “didn’t know what to do with her.” When Hockey Nova Scotia made clear its commitment to girls’ hockey provincewide, Lamey knew that it was needed in Cape Breton.

“If you can do it here, you can do it anywhere,” Lamey said.

Problems at the grassroots

Despite all the effort that goes into establishing a minor hockey association, that paperwork is the easiest part.

“The hurdles that you have to jump through to be a girls’ hockey association is that you have to go from pretty much not existing to being as good as or better than the local minor hockey associations,” Lamey said, reflecting on the Blizzard’s establishment of U7 and U9 age groups at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The major sticking point of the quality of a female hockey association is the ice time it is able to procure. Almost all male-majority hockey associations have a set ‘home ice,’ with most in Cape Breton being the primary users of that ice surface. Those associations have decades of precedent and goodwill with the owners of the ice surface to safely assume that their teams will practice regularly—same time, same place. New female hockey associations don’t enjoy that luxury, as they are often picking from ‘leftovers,’ managing uncertainty that sees their girls practice less and with little prior notice.

“There’s a lot of inconsistency in it,” Lamey said of the struggles scheduling practices and games. “I had two teams this year who didn’t actually have a real set practice. I just had to find ice for them all the time.”

Lamey said that the Blizzard currently use the Whitney Pier Rink, just outside of Sydney, as the association’s practice facility. Lamey admits herself that the Whitney Pier Rink is “not in the best condition at this time,” and it is indeed in jeopardy of closing its doors. The association has also found success in acquiring ice time at the two ice surfaces inside the Membertou Sport & Wellness Centre, as well as the Dan K. Stevens Memorial Arena in Eskasoni.

A particular frustration is the lack of transparency in municipality-owned arenas, of which there are four in the Sydney area alone.

“We have about 350 players and the minor hockey associations that use those same arenas have 1,200 players,” Lamey said. “So we are about 20 to 25 percent of the minor hockey players out there, but we were only getting access to about five percent of the ice time.”

This imbalance is likely attributed to the practice of ‘grandfathering’ ice time, where the previous year’s schedule is carried ahead without consideration for changes in the system and dynamics. This explains their presence in the two extremes—newer facilities, where precedent is not yet established; and older facilities otherwise largely abandoned by the community.

Rebuilding a solution

This perception of ice time as a zero-sum game has led to strained relationships as female hockey associations emerge and grow in Nova Scotia. When the Cape Breton Blizzard was approved as an official association under Hockey Nova Scotia in 2020, the concept of addition by addition arose with the closure of a beloved local rink.

“We’ve been asking for years for changes—still wasn’t happening,” Lamey said, referring to the local system of doling out ice rentals. “But we had the luck of having an arena here at Cape Breton University that had fallen out of use and was closed down when COVID happened. It closed while we were growing year over year, and we thought the best path forward would be to try to reopen that arena.”

The Canada Games Complex is located on the campus of Cape Breton University, on a stretch of highway between Sydney and Glace Bay, Cape Breton’s two largest communities. The facility was built for the 1987 Canada Winter Games and was in consistent use by the local community until 2020. That year, atop their typical year-to-year growth, the Cape Breton Blizzard also introduced U7 and U9 girls’ hockey. This saw their registration go from 150 girls pre-pandemic to 370 in present day. Already struggling to navigate the existing network of local arenas, the Blizzard knew something monumental had to be done to continue their program at the quality demanded.

With this idea in their back pocket, the Blizzard began to consider applying for Kraft Hockeyville in late 2021. The annual competition sponsored by the NHL awards a grand prize of $250,000 to upgrade the winning community’s arena, as well as a local NHL preseason game.

“We really only entered Kraft Hockeyville as a way to raise awareness of our issue,” Lamey said. “(We were) kind of thinking and kind of hoping, just locally speaking, that by launching a bid to win Hockeyville, to open a new arena for girls’ hockey, (it) would bring everybody’s attention to how unfairly we were being treated.”

The Cape Breton Blizzard’s story resonated much further than the small island on which they play. In May 2022, Sydney, Nova Scotia was announced as the winner of Kraft Hockeyville, reportedly by a spectacular margin in the public vote. The awareness brought about by their campaign benefitted the Blizzard and the Canada Games Complex much more than the $250,000 upfront, also fundraising locally more than $100,000 in additional funds. The Government of Nova Scotia has also committed $8 million to the facility, set to open in December 2024.

A microcosm for change

The Cape Breton Blizzard’s story is not unique. Newly established female hockey associations across Canada run into a system that is reluctant to consider adding them to the equation of youth hockey development in their communities.

“It’s the same everywhere. There are whole arenas you can find in Nova Scotia (where) there’s no girls’ hockey in them,” Lamey said.

The Canada Games Complex may be the first ‘home for female hockey’ in Canada, but Lamey hopes it won’t be the only for much longer. To her, the Blizzard’s winning Hockeyville case is the solution many communities need as female hockey grows in strength and in numbers.

“Maybe the real answer isn’t that anybody needs to get moved or bumped out of an arena. Maybe the real answer is that that area needs another arena.”

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The fight for ice: How Canada’s female minor hockey programs overcome the old boys’ club

Problems at the grassroots

Rebuilding a solution

A microcosm for change

More from the PHWA x To Hockey With Love Mentorship Program