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The Record

SUCCESS OF WOMEN'S HOCKEY EVENT MAKES SPORTS WORLD TAKE NOTICE
                                    
By Christine Rivet and Steve Cannon Record staff
For more than two years they gathered to draw up plans, all of them
volunteers fueled by coffee and the belief Kitchener was up to hosting
a major, international hockey event.All week, fans have filled the
Auditorium to watch the result of those meetings and to celebrate
women's hockey.

But for those early organizers of the Women's World Hockey
Championship, the back-patting has already begun.

"The City of Kitchener is certainly leaving its mark on the world,"
event chairwoman Fran Rider said of an event that has smashed
attendance records and drawn raves from fans, players and coaches.

"I couldn't even begin to count the number of times people from out of
town have come up and said how kind, warm and friendly" the volunteers
and people of Kitchener have been, Rider said.

By the time gold medals are draped over the winning team's necks late
Sunday night, more than 50,000 fans will have paid to watch women's
hockey in Kitchener. That doesn't include satellite games played in
places like London and Hamilton.

To those who have hung with women's hockey through the lean years, the
crowds seemed like proof their game is no longer seen as a novelty.

To the players, of course, it never was.

At 38, Team Canada veteran France St. Louis has played in all four
world championships. She was in Ottawa seven years ago, when 10,000
fans watched Canada win its first gold medal, and she was in Lake
Placid in 1994 when the entire tournament drew 20,000 fans.

But, St. Louis said, it was something special to see 3,900 people in
the Aud for a Monday night game against a lesser team like
Switzerland, knowing full well the real crowds were yet to come.

"The crowd is our seventh player," St. Louis said, knowing there will
be a full house of more than 6,000 for Sunday's gold medal game,
should Canada beat Finland in today's semifinal.

That's not to say there haven't been hurdles for organizers to jump.

There has been a small army of 700 to 1,000 volunteers working behind
the scenes all week, but several of the front-liners have quietly been
saying they could have used far more help.

Then, there have been the games themselves.

A string of early blow-outs not only weeded out the weaker teams, it
made for some longer hockey games, which Don McKee said organizers
hadn'treally counted on.

"We've had up to 32 faceoffs per period, which is far more than you'll
see in games" between strong teams like Canada and the U.S., said
McKee, a member of the tournament's management committee.

"Those extra faceoffs added 15 to 20 minutes to those games. We can
predict what television coverage will do to extend a game, but
faceoffs are one of those unknowns. Yet all at once you find out that
you can't run a game in 31Z2 hours, that you don't have enough time
for the next team to get out."

Nor do you have enough time to properly repair the ice between games,
which has led to some tough skating in late games. That, however,
should not be a problem as the tournament winds down and the time
between games increases.

McKee, a Kitchener elementary school principal, said he's been pleased
with how well organizers have coped with each problem as it appeared.
Overall, he said, he'd give the tournament a glowing report card.

So would Bob Nicholson, senior vice-president of Canadian Hockey, who
said the world championship has exceeded his group's expectations,
which may augur well for Kitchener's bid for the world junior hockey
championships.

But the greatest beneficiary of the games may well be women's hockey
itself, which is hoping to build interest in the sport as it heads
towards Nagano, Japan, and the 1998 Olympics.

If that was the mission of Kitchener organizers, most fans here this
week said it was accomplished.

"I've been involved in European championships before and I'm
tremendously impressed with what I've seen here this week," said Laura
Urquhart of England. "The volunteers, the organizing committee and the
delegates from the other countries have all been great. It's been
first class."

But is it enough to land the world junior championships?

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