This afternoon Victor and I went to see the Delaware Valley Collegiate Hockey Conference Women's All-Star game.
Sometimes people ask me if I played hockey. I laugh. I didn't, for a variety of reasons...one being I was slow and uncoordinated.
Also, hockey gear is not cheap, and my parents had three kids and dad worked for the city. The way my feet grew, I was lucky they let me have shoes. Skates would have been a bit much, not to mention pads and pants and gloves.
Hockey also wasn't very popular, and there was only one boy's league. And back then, if a girl played on a boys' sports team, there was usually a lawsuit involved.
I did play sports, soccer and softball. Had I really had passion, I'm sure I'd have found a way to play hockey, too, even in those days.
Watching the kids play today, I was thinking...it's great to see passion. Even though girls playing hockey isn't as far-out an idea as it was thirty years ago, it still can't be easy...all the hassles of hockey in general, with the limited ice team meaning 5 am practices and games three hours from home, are probably magnified for girls. But apparently this area has the fourth-largest girls' program in the country. I applaud them and their passion.
And actually, I'm impressed by the passion that drives anybody...boy, girl, woman, man...to get out and play the game instead of watching it on tv or in the stands. Any game: hockey, basketball, rugby.
I haven't played a team sport since a company picnic softball game in 1991. One of the women in the department coached her daughter's softball team and thought it would be fun for us to enter the tournament. I agreed to play; I was only a year or two from my last rec league season. But what was cool were the women who wanted to play for the first time...there was a middle-aged lady who went out and bought a pair of sneakers (footwear she did not own) for the occasion. The young glamor-girl cut her manicured nails short so she could wear her borrowed glove. We spent a month doing batting practice on our lunch hour.
We weren't great, but we were credible. And now that I think about it, we had passion, too.
Hmm.
Posted by Nic at February 20, 2005 08:23 PM