Sue Vitt accompanies one of her sons to a hockey clinic Sunday nights, rushes to another rink to carpool for another child, gets everybody home by 9:15 p.m., then hurries out the door to make her 10:10 ice time at the Skatium in Skokie.
Practice is until 11:40, then it’s home, have a bowl of cereal and go to bed. Up at 6 a.m. to get the kids off to school, and then her week officially begins.
This 42-year-old Wilmette mother of four is only doing what the men have for years-indulging their passion for hockey by squeezing late ice times alotted for adults into their busy schedules.
But when Vitt and a couple of other hockey mothers founded the Lady Hawks ice hockey team three years ago, they were unknowingly grabbing onto the tails of a trend: women in hockey.
It’s the same game of course, but with a few differences in style.
“The women’s game is a much faster up-and-down-the-ice game,” says Vitt, who plays on both an all-women’s and a men’s team. “The men’s game is very physical and if I can outskate one, they don’t feel bad tripping me. There’s some checking but I don’t check. You know why? I don’t want them to come back after me.”
This isn’t a problem when women play women. As the game finally begins to creep into the recreational level, the only problem is numbers.
Women were playing club hockey in isolated pockets of the U.S., mostly the Northeast, as far back as the late 1970s. Lady Hawk Margie McLean was introduced to hockey at Dartmouth College 15 years ago.
But the game took off in the ’80s and by 1992 it was announced that women’s ice hockey would be a full medal sport for the 1998 Olympics.
On the North Shore, little girls who want to play hockey no longer have to join the boys’ teams. There is an all-girls league and two high schools, Barrington and Lake Forest Academy, have girls teams.
None of that came in time for 30-plusers like Vitt and McLean.
While McLean picked up the game in college, she abandoned it after moving to Chicago 10 years ago. That was until she heard about the Lady Hawks.
She occasionally played some pick-up games with men, but, said the 5-foot-5-inch McLean: “I’m not that tough. When men get into the heat of it, people are getting dislocated shoulders and stuff. If the puck is in the corner and two people are going for it and the man weighs 80 pounds more than you and he gives you a shove, you’re going to get knocked on your butt.”
And how much fun is that? McLean loves the game because it takes her away from the tedium of the health club while still being a great workout.
“It’s easier on your joints, easier on your knees, and the thing you get in hockey is a thrilling sense of speed. If you watch us we probably look like 8-year-olds, but it feels exciting.”
So why shouldn’t women play? Apparently, think the Lady Hawks, hockey was just considered unladylike years ago and since ice was limited, not many girls ever got the chance to experience the sport.
So Vitt, who enjoyed golf and tennis but grew up before girls were encouraged to play team sports, had never even skated when she decided to take up hockey. Neither had many of the other moms who joined the team.
“The first time I basically walked on the skates and hung onto the boards,” says Vitt. They had John Holter, who coached youth teams at the Skatium, help them learn to play as a team.
“I was a little leery at first as to whether they’d keep doing it,” says Holter. “I thought if they stuck with it, they could do it, and some have become very good skaters. The women have all the skills, the skating and stickhandling and the knowledge. The only difference I’ve seen is the actual physical strength in the shooting and checking.”
Instead, the women’s games tend to be much faster. That can be a problem for the moms when they play high school and college teams because the younger legs tend to move quicker.
But they keep playing them. They have to because the Lady Hawks have the only adult recreational team in the area. They’ll begin playing a fledgling team from Rockford later this month.
After watching men play hockey all those years, the women began playing themselves and realized hockey wasn’t really about toughness. It was skating skills and strategy.
“The fear of falling and getting hurt is the hardest thing in the beginning,” Vitt says. “As you get confidence and learn the proper way to skate, the fear goes away.”
Adds Vitt, “We’re not a bunch of pushovers.”
