Alternatives

Watched (briefly) the New Year's Day Sabres/Penguins “outdoor” hockey game.

It has always seemed to me that the most Canadian of all games should be played or watched outside on a pond or backyard rink or as an alternative in an unheated small town arena where you watch line changes through the mist of your freezing breath.

Let’s face it, that Saturday night version of the game served up by the CBC and dispensed with adolescent beer commercials and the moronic rantings of Don Cherry isn‘t what we imagined as our youthful frozen fingers fumbled awkwardly with skate laces way back when.

Could we have foreseen player lockouts, multi-million dollar annual salaries or the escalation of violence as just "part of the game" that the NHL game has become?

Alternatives

Over the last years I, and many others, have explored options to the NHL. And while they aren’t played on frozen ponds Senior Men‘s (Allan Cup), American Hockey League (AHL) and now defunct National Women's Hockey League Hockey (NWHL) were more accessible as far as price and geography and may have higher entertainment value as well.

Last month I made it out to a women's ice hockey game between the Burlington Barracudas and the Brampton Canadette-Thunder. They play in the new Canadian Women's Hockey League (CWHL). Top stars playing with enthususiam - it was a good game. I'll go again. Women's hockey is worthy of our support.

Some History

The first account of a women's game was in 1891 although it was likely played earlier. A women‘s pro league preceded the male equivalent by eight years. Into the thirties the game was extremely popular attracting huge crowds, producing successful teams like the Preston Rivulettes and well known stars. The game was booming and then the lights went out according to Joanna Avery and Julie Stevens in their book Too Many Men on the Ice - Womens Hockey in North America).

Why?

Getting the ice for games or practice, an issue still, became a bigger problem with the outset of the war as men’s teams came first. The newspapers claimed that it was important to support the men’s game to keep up morale women’s leagues disbanded . Funds for school athletic programs were cut and women ‘s programs took the biggest hit.

But professional (i.e., NHL) control of Canadian hockey was perhaps the biggest obstacle as the amateur game became little more than a junior partner of the NHL unable to even determine the eligibility of its own members or change its own playing rules without NHL approval according to sociologists Richard Gruneau and David Whitson in their 1993 book Hockey Night in Canada.

Of course, one of the biggest barriers to increasing popularity of women’s hockey is the dearth of media coverage. Pick up any daily paper and you'll be hard pressed to find anything at all. This hasn ‘t always been the case. Elizabeth Etue and Megan K. Williams in On the Edge Women Making Hockey History note the pitiful coverage in various media wasn't always the case. And if you think the appalling state of major league men’s sports would force the media to look for something else to write about, you‘d be wrong. Oh, by the way Brampton beat Burlington 4 - 3 in that December 19th CWHL game. You won't find it in the mainstream media but you can find out more about that league at http://www.cwhl.ca/