By Abbi Holt

With its Women’s Leadership Night celebration on the 5th of February before the game against the Metropolitan Riveters, the Boston Pride was clearly making the claim that female athletes can and should lead and that the Pride, as an organization, is committed to raising up those leaders. The Pride are founding members of the Premier Hockey Federation that now has the highest salary cap of any women’s league. Hockey’s own history embodied in the Massport Jets, several of whom dropped the ceremonial puck for the night, suggests even more is possible.

Members of the Massport Jets drop the puck before the Boston Pride’s 2/4 win against the Riveters. Photo by Michelle Jay.

Dr. Allison B. Smith of UMass Boston moderated a panel before the 7pm game that included Colleen Coyne of the Boston Pride, Lindsey Keeler of USTA New England, and Andrew Iglowski of the Sayon Group, a major Pride sponsor. As Colleen Coyne said, “Girls who play sports become women who lead,” and, she added, sports are uniquely effective in helping develop female leadership and the networks that can support it. Advancing women to leadership, as Iglowski pointed out, doesn’t only help women, it can fix the “lack of diversity in thought” in organizations.  

The discussion focused on how to get more women and girls into sports and from sports into leadership. Andrew Iglowski’s real estate company has developed a direct relationship with the Pride to develop and recruit female athletes as leaders in their business. Several speakers also discussed the importance of visible representation of women in sports so girls believe they can be athletes and leaders too.

Shortly afterwards, alumnae of the first women’s hockey team in the country, Boston’s own Massport Jets, dropped the puck. The Jets, a team that originated in East Boston and pulled talent from as far away as Delaware, just celebrated their 50th anniversary last year. 

Sue Campbell, “Sunshine” Lorenz (now Diana Weggler), and Stephanie Cardillo were all watching the game when I found them at the end of the first period of play, several wearing their original Massport jerseys. I asked what inspired these women to step up and be leaders as the first women’s team in the country, especially with the lack of any visible women playing hockey at that time. The women told me they were inspired by the great Bobby Orr, ​​Derek Sanderson, Johnny McKenzie, and the Big Bad Bruins of ‘69-’70, because, of course, there were few women playing.  

The stories they told described entering a world that had no space for women and never expected them. Stephanie Cardillo said, “The only women we could compete against were the Canadian women and they were like…I was the oldest at 16, our youngest was 12, and we were competing against 25, 30 -year old women with no teeth!” In the very beginning, the girls never got good ice times, and played with figure skates and sticks that were curved the wrong way for their dominant hand. The boys’ pads they had to wear were so ill-suited that one mom knit pink covers for the boy’s-style cups to show a little home-made love to kids who generally had to just make due. As the first women’s team in the country the Jets were some of the first to model newly-designed women’s pads, including those with special chest protectors.   

Stephanie Cardillo chuckling as she shares an image of one of the amazing homemade cup-koozies! 

Leaders are hard to find and leaders who have the imagination to see themselves doing something no one else like them is doing are even rarer. How do we not just increase representation of all kinds of girls in sports, but make space for people we haven’t even imagined yet? How we answer that question matters even more during a Black History Month  when books on Black history are being taken off the shelves and controversy boils around transgender athletes, especially if we also acknowledge sport is a road to power.  Representation matters, but you don’t get representation without the first few daring people who enter without it.