Women’s nomads of the ice
KENDALL Coyne gathered the puck and was in the open ice almost instantly, darting towards the University of Minnesota goalie Sidney Peters. Faced with an unforgiving predicament, Peters sprawled out to no avail. Coyne went to her backhand and easily scored, a trademark goal from one of the world’s fastest players.
Last year, such skills earned Coyne the Patty Kazmaier Award as the nation’s top women’s college hockey player while she was playing for Northeastern.
On this night in January, she was competing for the Minnesota Whitecaps, a collection of unpaid Midwestern hockey nomads who barnstorm against college teams. Coyne occasionally shares shifts with players like Hannah Brandt, Stephanie Anderson, Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson and Monique Lamoureux-Morando, all recent members of the US national team.
The Whitecaps are considered a professional team, but they do not play in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League or the National Women’s Hockey League, the sport’s two prominent leagues. Created in 2004, the Whitecaps have remained independent through much of their history. At times, that arrangement has nearly led to the team’s dissolution, but as the Whitecaps persevered, their members were able to cultivate a nuanced view of the women’s hockey world shaping around them.
After the game against Minnesota, the Lamoureuxs, twin sisters who are two-time Olympic silver medalists, spent the night at the house of Brandt’s parents just outside Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Min- nesota. The next morning, the three Whitecaps carpooled to another exhibition.
The two-hour drive to the University of Minnesota-Duluth is a straightforward path up Interstate 35. Many Whitecaps see the best future for women’s hockey as a similarly clear route: a merger between the CWHL and NWHL.
In 2015, entering her senior year at Minnesota, Brandt was taken second overall in the inaugural draft of the NWHL, the first professional women’s hockey league to offer salaries. The longer Brandt examined her options, though, the Whitecaps became a better choice than the four-team, Northeastbased NWHL, she said.
While financial support from the NHL would be important for women’s professional hockey, Lamoureux-Davidson said the NHL, like the Whitecaps, seemed to be in a wait-and-see mode, because “it doesn’t make sense on their end to support one league over the other”.
The Whitecaps started with a fairly modest mission. Jack Brodt and Dwayne Schmidgall founded the team so their daughters, Winny Brodt Brown and Jenny Schmidgall Potter, would have a place to play after college. Brown and Potter, both 38, still play for the Whitecaps. In 2014, after a stellar career coaching women’s hockey at Minnesota, Laura Halldorson was asked by Brodt and Brown to help gain entry into the CWHL.
When the CWHL ultimately decided not to expand beyond its five teams, the Whitecaps took advantage of the abundance of top-level Midwest college programs to create a schedule. Following the CWHL model, Halldorson also strengthened a relationship with the Minnesota Wild.
The Wild’s chief operating officer, Matt Majka, said it was the NHL’s responsibility to use its promotional power “to support and grow the game at all levels”.
“I do think it makes a difference when the NHL ordains something; the rest of the hockey world is going to listen,” he said. “I think it’s coming to a critical mass with women’s hockey very quickly now.”