Girls Can Play

By Alanah Downie
Exclusive to Femmefan.com

April 2, 2004

For me, one of the fantasies of being a sports fan is imagining that I could be out on the playing field. It doesn’t matter that I have no talent, no skills, no discernible level of fitness (really, it’s frightening how unqualified I am); I just feel an empathy with the athlete. When my favorite hockey team finishes that impossible, beautiful play, I feel like I’m right there on the ice. In short, I own every win and loss like it’s my own.

Part of this passion for NHL hockey comes from the rise of women who do actually play the sport in other arenas. This past week, for instance, has been the Women’s World Championships in ice hockey, here in Canada. Aside from the United States and Canada, the level of competition is often quite poor, but still, the very existence of this event is like a miracle to me.

Prior to the 1990s, the dominant opinion was that “women don’t play hockey” – and largely, they didn’t. Even here in Canada, a hockey-obsessed nation if ever there was one, women simply didn’t have much chance to play. Our role was to be the unofficial cheerleaders in a sport that didn’t want to pay for the genuine pom-pom types.

The cheerleading thing was fine, and still is. After all, isn’t that what all fans are for their teams? We yell and cheer for the players, root for the home-crowd, pray for the big championship. If we aren’t in the game, we’re all cheerleaders. Our boyfriends and husbands are the same; if they’re sitting next to us on the couch and swilling a beer during the game, screaming their approval once in a while, they’re cheerleaders, baby. (Try telling them that though, and they get kind of upset. Go figure.)

But when I was growing up, there was a significant difference between the men and women ‘cheerleaders’ at the hockey games we attended each weekend. That is, as women, we never even had the chance to play, whereas our male friends could at least have gone to the try-outs if they really wanted.

That disparity allowed our fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands to easily imagine themselves out there on the ice. But for us girls, that dream was only fantasy, not even a remote possibility. We still loved hockey, but we resented being excluded by the sport.

For many women, this exclusion was enough to instill an emotional distance from team sports that lasted a lifetime.

So my generation (I’m 34 years old) just missed out on this new era where women athletes are now allowed to imagine being “professionals” at their game from a young age. But these younger women have earned it – they demanded to be able play, whereas my friends and I were willing to just watch, and then go back to organizing the prom committee.

Because of this new era, I think all women sports fans have joined the men at another plateau. Like them, we can’t all rise to fame playing our favorite game, but we can all have that same emotional connection to a sport that welcomes us, at least a little bit. Even arenas like the NHL, the NBA, the NFL each now belongs to us as much as them. We, too, can imagine “it could have been me” out on the ice, the gridiron, the court. We can all dream of scoring the big goal.

As I watch the Women’s World Championships ice hockey tournament this week, I am reminded of my own childhood days playing shinny and street hockey. My brother and I would spend hours on our backyard rink – both pretending to be Vancouver Canucks players – and it was usually me setting him up for the game-winning goals.

I had a lot of fun in those days, but have one regret: I wish I’d known then that girls really can play.

And I should have shot the puck more.

Check out Alanaha’s passion at: http://www.vancouvercanucksoped.blogspot.com/

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