THE RAPID RISE OF A HOCKEY TEAM IN CHINA
Augmented by several international stars, Kunlun Red Star reaches Clarkson Cup final
Early one afternoon this week, at a community centre just north of Toronto, one of the teams that will play for the championship of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League finishes up its practice.
Most of the players, and all of the coaches, file off the ice, but about 10 skaters remain. They break into two groups at either end. One works on power-play offence, passing around the zone before setting up one of the skaters in the high slot for a onetimer. They do this over and over, shouting advice and encouragement to each other in between slappers.
For all I know, they could be shouting song lyrics or arguing about dinner plans. They are speaking Mandarin.
These players are members of Kunlun Red Star, one of two China-based teams that began play in the CWHL this season.
The complicated venture has a number of goals: to boost the exposure of the fledgling CWHL, to expand interest in the sport in China, and to help build a women’s program there out of almost nothing. That last part is key: Beijing will host the Olympics in 2022, and China wants to avoid entering a team that will be steamrolled. As much as the unified Korean women’s team was a nice story in Pyeongchang, it still gave up 20 goals and scored one.
The concept was simple: How could Chinese women gain experience playing against better competition? Take the country’s best players and split them into two teams, then fill out the rest of the rosters with some of the best women’s players in the world. Whether that works out for the national team in the long term remains to be seen, but in the short term, Kunlun Red Star was good enough to earn a spot in the Clarkson Cup finals. They will play the Markham Thunder on Sunday afternoon at Ricoh Coliseum for the CWHL title.
The KRS roster is neatly divided between Chinese skaters who had never played this much organized hockey in their lives and Westerners who have been doing it since they were old enough to skate. American Kelli Stack, a two-time Olympic silver medallist, is the team’s leading scorer and Noora Raty of Finland, the Olympic bronze medallist, is the starting goalie.
Two Canadians are on the squad, one being Jessica Wong, 26, who had retired after a brief CWHL career and was working in Hockey Canada’s development program when she received a recruiting call last spring.
“I was still playing a little beer league,” she says with a grin.
Coach Digit Murphy told Wong she would be leading one of the two Chinese teams, which would be based in Shenzhen, a city of 12 million on the country’s southern tip, just north of Hong Kong. They would play home and road games in bunches, to cut down on travel. Because this was a Chinese initiative, the foreigners would be paid, not as hockey players but as sport ambassadors, which skirts the CWHL’s restrictive salary cap.
Wong, of Baddeck, N.S., heard all this and was, well, unconvinced.
“I was like, yeah, yeah, you know, that can’t be real.”
The coach said it was. Wong told her to call back in a couple of weeks, at which point she assumed Murphy would say the whole thing had gone poof.
It did not.
“At first I was ...” — long pause here as Wong considers the word — “hesitant,” she says.
“I’m not gonna lie. I had been retired, and I wasn’t sure if this was something I wanted to do and pursue.”
She said her family convinced her not to pass up the chance to do something this unique.
Asked how it has gone, Wong does not hesitate this time.
“Amazing,” she says. “It’s been something that I’ll remember forever. It’s been a crazy year.”
Kunlun dropped three of their first four games, all played in Canada, then got on a roll once in Shenzhen.
Wong had 10 goals and 24 points, her best totals in the CWHL, and is up for the league’s defenceman of the year award. KRS finished second in the seven-team league, behind Montreal, and beat Calgary 2-1 in the league semifinals.
Wong says the adjustment to life in China was difficult at first. Though she has Chinese ancestry, her family spoke Cantonese, and Kunlun’s players speak Mandarin, which is predominant in Shenzhen. Food, language, culture — all of it was tricky. But it was something the non-Chinese players all had to go through together. Like a wild summer camp.
“So it becomes kind of fun,” Wong says.
The foreigners, as players and ambassadors, are also de facto coaches, explaining skills and tactics to their Chinese teammates, several of whom are 19 and 20 years old.
“It definitely was a slow start for us, just trying to get our feet under us, and the travel was tough,” Wong says.
But that camp vibe has worked out.
“Just being together, and believing in each other, you know, sticking together, we have really come together at the right time.”
Wong says she isn’t thinking about next year, or even next week. There is a Clarkson Cup on which to focus.
It beats, one imagines, the beer league.
Just being together, and believing in each other, you know, sticking together, we have really come together at the right time.