URL:http://www.canoe.ca/HockeyWomen/apr5_move.html

April 5, 1997

WOMEN'S HOCKEY MOVES UP
                                    
 KITCHENER, Ontario (AP) -- Karen Nystrom carries a wallet photo of a
3-year-old girl bundled in a baby-blue hooded jacket and clutching a
hockey stick.
 It's a reminder of how far she has come since she was that little
girl, with no expectation that her passion would take her anywhere
beyond ball hockey in the streets of Scarborough.
 Now, Nystrom and other top players are the newest heroes of women's
hockey, driven by gold-medal dreams.
 The final leg of their journey starts here, at the Women's World
Championship, where five of the eight competing national teams will
make the cut to play in the debut of women's ice hockey at the 1998
Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.
 Also at the tournament is Sari Krooks, who remembers pickup games on
a frozen soccer field in Finland. Stephanie O'Sullivan said her father
registered her as "Steven" so she could play youth hockey in
Dorchester, Mass. And Ekaterina Pashkevitch laughs as she tells how
her parents worried about their "weirdo" daughter.
 "Last summer, when I watched the Olympics in Atlanta and there was
women's softball, women's soccer teams -- I saw how much fun those
girls were having," said Pashkevitch, who plays for Russia but lives
in Boston. "I said, 'Hey, women's ice hockey MUST be in the Olympics.
They MUST be there."'
 Pashkevitch, 25, and her teammates hope to join Canada, the United
States, China and Finland, which earned Olympic berths this week in
first-round play. Russia, Switzerland, Sweden and Norway are
contending for the fifth and final spot; Japan, as host country, has a
bye.
 Pashkevitch, a powerful 5-foot-11 center who has led her team in
goals since 1994 and been named most valuable player in two European
championships, started skating when she was 3. Her nonathletic parents
were horrified when she became interested in hockey a few years later,
eventually joining a boys' school team.
 "It was very weird for girls to play hockey, or play with boys at
all," Pashkevitch said Thursday, her face flushed and sweaty from
practice.
 The reaction wasn't much more forgiving in other countries.
 O'Sullivan, a forward on the U.S. squad since 1994, had the
encouragement of her hockey-loving family. Brother Chris, one of 10
siblings, is a defenseman who has played 27 games with the Calgary
Flames this season. Both wear number 19.
 Yet even with the acceptance of local youth hockey coaches,
O'Sullivan had to register under a boy's name when she was 5 to get
past league rules barring girls.
 "It didn't bother me because all the kids I played with knew who I
was. They just had to document it as 'Steven,"' she said. "That
changed after about a season."
 The game became an escape as well when both parents died, her father
from lymphoma seven years ago and her mother, suddenly, from a brain
tumor three years later.
 "You could go on the ice and put your mind off it," she said. It
helped to know that their father "saw something special in me and
Chris, that we'd make it to the highest level."
 In hockey's home country, opportunities for girls' teams were
marginally better. Canada's Angela James, who has been on every
national team since the first, unsanctioned women's international
competition in 1987, has played almost exclusively with women.
 Still, on her first girls' team 25 years ago, most of her teammates
wore figure skates -- humiliating for a 7-year-old who took her hockey
seriously.
 "I would have had to play with figure skates, too, because we didn't
have a ton of money then," she said. "One of my neighbors gave me his
skates that had these steel plates sticking out at the toes. I
constantly got killed, but I kept playing anyway cause those were my
hockey skates, you know?"
 Nystrom, another Canadian, met future teammate Vicky Sunohara after
posing with a hockey stick for that wallet photo. Sunohara encouraged
her to join the neighborhood pick-up games.
 "We didn't know of any Olympic chances when we were kids," said
Nystrom, 27. "We were just playing for the love of the game."
 Finland's Krooks was 13 when the first girls' team formed in her
area. The tough part was finding other all-female teams to play. She
eventually ended up in Toronto, playing for the Aeros for the past
five years.
 When the International Olympic Committee announced in 1992 that
women's hockey would be included in the upcoming Winter Games,
interest took off.
 "It just developed so fast," said Krooks, who has shared in Finland's
three WWC bronze medals. "We didn't even dream of the Olympics -- we
just went with the flow."
 That flow has been more like a flood: The International Ice Hockey
Federation says enrollment of women in national ice hockey programs
increased 265 percent between 1988-89 and 1994-95.
 Angela Ruggiero was part of the huge increase in the United States,
joining a youth program in California with her brother and sister when
she was 7. In January, she celebrated her 17th birthday on the Great
Wall of China, traveling with the U.S. team to the Friendship Cup in
Harbin.
 Even with the increased opportunities, Ruggiero had to go to boarding
school, Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Conn., to find enough
competition at her level.
 "I'm growing up in the perfect time," said Ruggiero, the youngest
player on the U.S. team. "I have something to shoot for. And the young
girls growing up now, they have something to aim for, too."

SLAM! 
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