Copyright (c) 1997 The New York Times April 7, 1997 Women's Hockey Comes of Age By JERE LONGMAN KITCHENER, Ontario -- Her family had season tickets to the Chicago Blackhawks. Her brother, Tony, would eventually play in the National Hockey League. The boys in the neighborhood accepted her, and Cammi Granato assumed that the NHL would accept her, too. Then, one day in junior high, her mother took her aside and explained the hockey facts of life. "I wanted to play for the Blackhawks," Granato said. "My mother told me I was a girl and that was a boy thing. I cried. I loved hockey just as much as the boys did." A dozen years later, women's ice hockey has gained international acceptance and authentication on its own terms. For the first time, the sport will be an Olympic medal event, joining two other first-time sports -- snowboarding and curling -- at the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. Granato, 26, is a star forward on a hockey team that, with Canada, will be an Olympic favorite and try to sustain the gold-medal momentum generated by American women in basketball, soccer and softball at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. That momentum was evident this past week at the women's world hockey championships, which served as the qualifying tournament for the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. Sunday night, the United States faced Canada in the championship game with both of those countries having already qualified for Nagano. Of the eight teams here, China, Finland and either Sweden or Russia, who were in contention for the final spot, will also be part of the six-team Olympic field. Japan, as the host country, received an automatic berth. Checking -- the use of bodies to impede the other team -- is not allowed in the women's game, which places a premium on the skills of skating, passing, stick-handling and playmaking. It is the equivalent of below-the-rim basketball, a fluid, finesse game that avoids the fighting and clutching and grabbing of men's hockey. The women's skill level is such that Tara Mounsey, a defenseman from Brown University, was voted the best high school player in New Hampshire, man or woman, in 1996. In a 10-0 rout of Sweden on Thursday that secured the Olympic berth, Karyn Bye of River Falls, Wis., contributed a hat trick, three goals, and Granato scored twice as the United States outshot Sweden by a stunning margin of 73-4. "With the Olympics, people will know women play hockey, and they will be shocked to see that we can play at that level," Granato said. "We're not trying to play a men's game. What we're trying to do is be recognized for our own game and respected for it, too. We don't have to be 6-4, 220 pounds." The U.S. women have traveled similar paths on their pioneering expeditions toward Olympic acceptance. They grew up in the East or in the Midwestern hockey belt of Michigan and Minnesota. They learned the game playing with their brothers and other boys. Some, like Vicki Movsessian, a defenseman from Lexington, Mass., first took to the ice on figure skates. "My personality was too gritty for those outfits they had me wearing," Movsessian said. One day, her father was sharpening her figure skates and he filed right over the toe picks. She told him: "Don't worry about it. I'm not going back." Many of the American women played on boys teams from youth hockey through high school. Some had an easier time than others in gaining acceptance from opposing teams and parents. Stephanie O'Sullivan, a forward from Dorcester, Mass., had to tuck her hair inside her helmet and take the name of Steven on one youth team; Kelly O'Leary, a defenseman from Auburn, Mass., once played a tournament as Kevin O'Leary. The youngest American player, Angela Ruggiero, 17, is a junior at Choate prep school in Wallingford, Conn. Most of her teammates played at Ivy League colleges or at other Eastern schools, such as Providence and Northeastern, which have varsity teams. Erin Whitten, the starting goalie from Glens Falls, N.Y., has played in several men's professional minor leagues. "Playing against men, you're at the bottom rung of the ladder, and you scrape to get playing time and respect," Whitten said. "There's a lot of satisfaction when you gain that respect. But people look at me and some say I shouldn't be there because I'm a girl. Or, 'She's doing the best she can, but she's still third string.' With the women, I'm one of the elite players. It makes a big difference when we all have that respect. Winning an Olympic medal with the women's team would be way more satisfying than simply being part of a men's team." Unlike women's basketball, the Olympic afterglow will not help light the way for a professional women's hockey league. The Olympics will be the summit for these careers. So, many of the Americans, eligible for training grants between $10,000 and $20,000 from the U.S. Olympic Committee, have delayed school, careers and their lives as they try to make the final roster for Nagano. Brown-Miller, of Union Lake, Mich., resigned from her job last June as head coach of Princeton's women's team to follow her Olympic dream. Instead of going on a honeymoon two summers ago, she went to a hockey training camp. Brown-Miller said her husband told her, "I don't want you sitting on the couch and watching the Olympics and saying to yourself, 'If I had stuck with it, I'd be there.' " Women's hockey first appeared in Canada in 1892; Canadian television recently identified the oldest active player in Canada as Mabel Boyd. She is in her 70s. The Canadians defeated the Americans to win the previous three world championships, with the first title coming in 1990. Twice in the early 1990s, goalie Manon Rheaume participated in exhibition games with the Tampa Bay Lightning of the NHL. Canada's current team is so skilled that Rheaume, now 25, was cut from the women's squad a week ago. The Americans are catching up. In this decade, the number of women playing hockey in the United States has jumped from 5,533 to 20,555, according to USA Hockey, the national governing body. Three years ago, Minnesota declared women's hockey a varsity sport on the high school level; this season, 67 teams registered to play. On the college level, women's hockey is an emerging sport on the 25th anniversary of Title IX, which forbids discrimination on the basis of gender. The sport perfectly fit the International Olympic Committee's pressured need to add more women and women's team sports to the Winter Games. Finland, a three-time bronze medalist at the world championships, is considered the other medal favorite at Nagano. But China, which lost, 6-0, to the United States in the semifinals, has made an intriguing emergence since 1992. Coach Zhang Zhi Nan said that only 70 women in the entire country play on an elite level, all of them from the northern industrial city of Harbin. Still, the Chinese have developed an assertive style, based on hard work and from watching videotapes of NHL games. The men in the former Soviet Union once dominated Olympic hockey, but the Russian women's team is struggling with inexperience and financial problems now that the country's sports machine is no longer greased by state support. Russia's top player, Yekaterina Pashkevich, has followed the lead of many Russian figure skaters by coming to live and train in the United States. She coaches the women's club team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When she began playing as a girl, Pashkevich said, people told her parents, "Your daughter is weird." The national team is only 3 years old, and Russian players struggle, she said, "because the economy is bad and people can't buy equipment and pay for ice time." On a tour of the United States several years ago, the Russian women had to rely on the charity of American prep schools to improve their shoddy equipment. Failure to make the Olympics may turn away sponsors and kill the women's program outright, Pashkevich said. "If a team is not going anywhere, no one wants to spend money," she said. It is quite another story for the Americans. Cammi Granato is now one step closer to fulfilling a goal that began when her brother Tony played in the 1988 Winter Games. A onetime New York Ranger, he now plays for the San Jose Sharks. "I was 16; I wanted so bad to be an Olympic athlete," Cammi Granato said. "Should I try basketball? Volleyball? It's great now to have a chance to get there playing hockey. It's a dream come true." Copyright (c) 1997 The New York Times