A half-dozen girls teams from Keene qualify for provincial championships
Ontario Women’s Hockey Association tourney runs from April 11 to 14 in Toronto
The Keene Wolverines girls hockey program has achieved unprecedented success this season.
While the organization has been around since the early 1980s and won provincial championships in its early years, it has grown dramatically since hockey resumed following the COVID-19 pandemic. This season, it iced seven teams from U11 to U18, the most in its history, and all six of the rep teams have qualified for the Ontario Women’s Hockey Association provincial championships April 11-14 in Toronto. Their lone U13 house league team, coached by Robin Graham, won the Central Ontario GHL A championship, going unbeaten all season, including three tourneys.
A high of 113 girls registered with the Wolverines this season, almost double their pre-COVID numbers, and the six rep teams is the most they’ve qualified for provincials through regional playdowns.
Those teams include U11B (coach Ryan Girard), U13B (coach Jesse McInroy), U15BB (coach Graham Lawrence), U15B (coach Keith Beecroft), U18BB (coach Ryan Sedgwick) and U18B (coach Brian Wesenberg).
The U13B and U18BB Wolverines are still in the running for the Southern League championship while the U18B team is still alive in the consolation playoffs. The Southern League championship weekend is April 6-7.
“Before COVID, we only had three rep teams,” said Wolverines president Jen Stewart. “Seven teams is the highest we’ve been. We’ve had seven the past two seasons. Our U11 team was only introduced last season so this is their second season.”
When travel hockey was shut down due to COVID-19 for the 2020-21 season, the Wolverines ran an in-house program and Stewart believes it may have helped spark their growth. “Once we started back up again, we saw an influx of registration and we had to branch out and add more teams to accommodate the registration that was coming in,” she said. “I think a lot of it is word of mouth. If you talk to any of the players or families, we’re there to have fun. Our teams have great coaches and volunteers in place and our first goal ahead of everything else is just to have fun and enjoy the sport of hockey.”
The Wolverines have won two provincial silver medals in the past two years.
The U15BB team won silver in 2023 and the U15B squad took silver in 2022.
Their success has been noticed outside of the Peterborough area.
“We go places and people are like, ‘Where the heck is Keene.’ We’re playing against big centres and they’re surprised to hear we’re based in this tiny community,” said Stewart.
The Wolverines also have a senior-C women’s team. It didn’t participate in provincial qualifiers.