Hockey Girl : Trevi Hibsman Is Savvy Skater, Top Scorer on Boys Team : Youth hockey: Opponents try to intimidate the Rancho Palos Verdes teen-ager, but her teammates return check for check--and so does she.

Were it not for the long brown hair cascading from under a white helmet onto the shoulders of an oversized red jersey, it would have been impossible to tell Trevi Hibsman apart from her male teammates. Like all youth players of the Bay Harbor Minor Hockey Assn., Hibsman wore protective clothing: a cage over her face and assorted hip, elbow and shoulder pads.

But there was no mistaking her skating savvy during a chilly early Sunday morning practice session recently at Olympic Ice Arena in Harbor City. First, she took a teammate to the ice on a puck drill. Later, the Rancho Palos Verdes teen-ager out-sticked another for the puck.

When needed, her coach, John Mepham, said afterwards, Hibsman can also throw a pretty good hip check.

“She is totally dedicated. Hockey is not a (temporary) craze with her,” explained Arena owner John Marshall, who has watched Trevi grow up at the rink. “Those are the best ones. There should be more (like her).”

Hibsman, 13, is one of six girls of various ages playing hockey on boys’ teams at the Harbor City rink. She is, arguably, Bay Harbor’s most accomplished female player, following a path blazed by her older sister, Tina, in the 1980s.

Trevi Hibsman, who plays in the wing position, leads her Pee Wee C Division team in scoring in a league composed of teams from all over Southern California. She has posted six more goals than any of her male teammates, and her consecutive point string has reached nine games. A few weeks ago she recorded her first hat trick.

At Miraleste High School, where she is the eighth-grade student body president, she is known simply as “Hockey Girl.”

“I love everything about hockey,” said Hibsman, whose 5-foot-5 frame and soft features would appear to lend themselves more to modeling than to a rough-and-tumble sport.

Hibsman stepped onto the ice at age 7. “I did gymnastics for a couple of months,” she said. “There wasn’t much to it, just a few little tricks. It didn’t keep me going.”

Besides Tina, now studying pre-med at UC Riverside, older brothers Ted, 26, and Tim, 23, also played at Bay Harbor. Said their father, Ed Hibsman, who has spent 20 seasons with his children at Bay Harbor: “It’s an incredible experience for Trevi to play in this co-ed thing, to be playing in a man’s world.”

There are few ways of comparing Trevi Hibsman’s accomplishments nationwide. Most females who play ice hockey are segregated from the males. Hockey USA, published semi-weekly in Stoughton, Ma., devotes at least a page in each issue to girls’ and women’s standings and results. The National Collegiate Athletic Assn. sponsors women’s ice hockey championships in Division I and III.

But in ice-starved Southern California, there is hardly enough time for youth hockey at the handful of rinks scattered between San Diego and Santa Barbara. For that reason, said Coach Mepham, few girls here attempt to play.

“We have limited ice time here. That’s something Pop Warner football or Little League parents never face,” Mepham said. “Back East it is not the same. In Southern California, (kids like Trevi) endure for the love of the sport.”

So Trevi and the five other girls who play at Bay Harbor play on boys’ teams, which presents some interesting situations.

“There is some degree of harassment (by other teams) because she is a girl,” Mepham said of Hibsman. “And because she is doing so well. Boys don’t mind being beaten by boys, but they take it personal if they get beat by a girl.”

On more than one occasion Hibsman has been checked hard against the boards. She has been jeered. Spectators stare at the hair flowing from under her protective headgear, partially covering the name on the back of her jersey. One boy told her to get off the ice and go back to where girls belong.

Said Ed Hibsman: “Some teams go out and say, ‘Let’s go get the girl.’ ”

In that case, retaliation by her teammates is swift, Mepham said. “If Trevi gets checked on the board, her teammates might go after the guy who did it.”

Because most of the players on the Pee Wee team have skated at Bay Harbor for years, the boys act like big brothers with Trevi. In the locker room, said Ed Hibsman, “they just pile in, and she’s in the corner with them. They are kind of like old buddies.”

Defenseman Matt Kopeikin is the team’s enforcer, according to Mepham, and he often comes to Trevi’s aid.

“She likes me to go after (guys who check her),” Kopeikin said. “I don’t like to see her picked on just because she is a girl.”

Mepham pointed out that Hibsman can handle herself. “She may not agree with this, but she is a pretty good checker too.”

Hibsman said she has rarely been intimidated on the ice.

“Some of the boys on other teams go out to get me, but most of them try to be nice,” she said. “They don’t hit me too hard.”

Hibsman’s main strength, her coach said, is finesse.

“She thinks good hockey, and that is reflected in (the number of) her goals,” Mepham said.

Hibsman agreed: “If somebody checks me, I go after them. But I am more of a thinking player.”

Having a girl on the ice actually complements the boys’ play, Ed Hibsman said.

“With boys, I don’t know whether it is hormones or what, but they want to go chase that puck. Trevi plays position hockey, much better than most boys. She let’s the boys do the work and gets in position to take the shot.”

Trevi Hibsman said she followed her brothers and sister into hockey because “I wanted to do something different. I like the attention I get.”

She has few illusions that she can make a career of the sport after she leaves high school. That might require a move to the East Coast, which she thinks is unlikely, although she will visit New England next week with her team to play in a youth hockey tournament there.

Hibsman has also turned down an offer to play on an all-girl hockey team that is forming in Southern California.

“Playing here with the boys gives me a different opportunity,” she said.

Eventually, she said, she’ll probably end up studying medicine like Tina. Then she changed her mind: “I want to take this (ice hockey) thing as far as I can go with it.”