All Girls Youth Hockey Team Hits the Ice
“I told them, ‘Girls, look around. Do you remember the first time you ever took the ice when you were kids? Remember the smell of the rink? Remember walking on the bench and it was kind of scary? Look around you. Own this moment. This is the first time you’ve ever skated with no boys. This is your team, your organization,” Rech recalled recently. “This is your team. This is your opportunity to be girls.
“And they absolutely thrived on it. From there, the girls exploded.”
The explosion reverberating through local rinks this winter is the Berkshire Blizzard, a 14-and-under all girls hockey team that is the first such opportunity for local girls in recent memory.
On Sunday, the Blizzard played its first home game, a 4-1 win over Manchester, Vt.’s, Northshire Bulldogs at Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Memorial Rink.
It was an important milestone in a surprisingly rapid journey that began with an offhand remark.
“Last year, one of the moms -- I was a squirt coach with the Northern Berkshire program -- and one of the moms said, ‘Hey, you should try a girls team,’ “ Rech said. “We had some girls on my team. Shelli [Paligo] and I shot an e-mail to a bunch of the different youth organizations and ended up with a roster of 15 girls. We said, ‘OK, let’s try this.’ “
Rech said there was a girls team in the Pittsfield-based Berkshire Bruins organization at least 10 years ago, but it did not last. That is not to say girls could not and have not been playing hockey; it is common to see them at every level of Berkshire County hockey, from the mites to the high schools, skating with and against the boys.
But Rech and his fellow coaches found that there was an unmet demand for an all-girls team to complement the co-ed opportunities.
“Never in a million years when a mom said something to me last year about doing this did I think we’d get this off the ground, but it was one e-mail after another saying, ‘We’re interested,’ “ he said. “We hit the ice for the first time, and it was so different, so cool.
“Don’t let the pony tails fool you. They’re beasts. They’re ferocious hockey players.”
And most of them -- all but two, in fact -- continue to skate with their co-ed teams, whether the Northern Berkshire Black Bears, Berkshire Bruins or Berkshire Rattlers in South County.
In fact, one of the Blizzard’s biggest challenges has been arranging game and practice dates that do not conflict with the players’ “home” team schedules. It is a priority of the nascent program that its players are able to play both brands of hockey, Rech said.
It did not take Rech long to figure out that coaching girls was different than coaching a boys or co-ed team.
“They’re very much more social, more interactive,” he said. “When you get to a practice environment or a locker room environment, they’re very much more chatty, and I don’t mean, ‘girls will be girls.’ They’re very focused on the game and they talk more about the game, which is really neat. When you have a team like ours with a 13- or 14-year-old and an 11-year-old, there’s that range of skill, and the older girls tend to coach and mentor the younger girls.
“Every time they hit the ice, it’s 110 percent. They thrive. They feed off each other. The locker room is so much louder, so much chattier. It’s very ‘hockeyish.’ “
And the feedback from the girls and their parents bears that out.
Talk to the girls about the experience, and it is clear that they relish the opportunity to play together. As much fun as they have with their co-ed teams, there is something different about the Blizzard -- from the experience of being in the locker room with your entire team to the play on the ice.
“They’re intense,” Lena Ungewitter said of the Blizzard’s games. “Sometimes with boys, it’s different, but I feel like with girls, it’s more fun because you’re friends with them. Sometimes, with boys, it’s rough. At least with the girls, we all get along.”
The local hockey community has rallied to support the Blizzard. Rech is grateful to the Peter W. Foote Rink and Pittsfield’s Boys & Girls Club for their help with ice time, and five of the team’s six coaches got certified to coach youth hockey just so they could serve the Blizzard. Three of those coaches don’t even have daughters on the team. One of the girls on the Wahconah High hockey team even has offered to pitch in and help at practices, Rech said.
The team played its first game in late October in Manchester, Vt., against Northshire, and the Blizzard opened its inaugural season with a hard-fought, 4-2 win. It went on to place third in its age group at one of the Northeast’s biggest girls youth hockey tournaments, the Cranberry Classic on Cape Cod over Thanksgiving weekend.
Rech said the Blizzard is part of a growing community of girls teams in the region. Both the Northshire team and the team in Amherst are relatively new. He expects it to get easier in years to come to find playing opportunities.
“There’s kind of like this underworld of girls teams that are networking with each other behind the scenes,” he said. “Growth wise, next year, I’d love to do something 10-and-under and see if we can have two teams. It’s all about giving the girls an opportunity play as girls. You see the sport growing at the college level, and there are two pro leagues now -- one in Canada and one in the U.S.”
In New England, there are two pro women’s teams: the Boston Pride and the Connecticut Whale, a nod to the old Hartford Whalers of the NHL.
The Blizzard, incidentally, got their name from the players themselves.
“They picked the name on their own,” Rech said. “They picked the colors of their jerseys.”
It’s just one way the players have taken ownership of the team -- even going so far as to give Rech a message of their own.
“They came to me one day and said, ‘Coach, we don’t like the slogan, ‘Own this moment,’ “ he said. “The came back with, ‘One Team, One Dream.’ It’s the girls’ dream. It’s one dream.
“I said, ‘OK, you guys rock.’ “
The Blizzard roster includes: 87. Abby Fuls; 36. Mia Paligo; 22. Lizzy Hunt; 21. Christy Rech; 4. Mia Alfonso; 16. Meg Loring; 25. Kellie Harrington; 19. Tessa Baldwin; 8. Lena Ungewitter; 12. Maddy Rawling; 10. Abby Farrington; 14. Evelyn Fuls; 33; Juliana Johansen; 13. Kaylie Bryan; 11. Cailey Brousseau.
