This Isn’t Ice Follies : Women Hockey Players Trade Checks and Fists With the Guys

It feels good--check that, it feels great--to take the puck away from a guy, plant an elbow in his midsection and skate away like Wayne Gretzky, rare as the occurrence may be for Danielle LaRocca.

For LaRocca, one of a handful of women players in the Easy Street Arena Adult Ice Hockey League, suiting up and skating in a male-dominated sport fulfilled a lifelong dream. Starting her own team was, well, call it icing on the puck.

But the biggest reason LaRocca formed the Black Widows, a predominantly female team in the league’s entry level division, was that she simply wanted to play hockey.

A lot.

“I don’t do this to prove anything,” said LaRocca, 24, who began playing hockey three years ago. “I do it because it’s fun for me. I’m not interested in any other sport. There’s just a rush that you get playing ice hockey.”

Yet ice time was in short supply when LaRocca and Black Widows teammate Piper Byrnes were the only female members of the Acme Warriors. In fact, you might say they got the short end of the stick.

Simply stated, “We were bench-warmers,” LaRocca said.

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For Byrnes, 32, a mother of two who began playing as one of only three women among 120 players at the rink, teammates weren’t exactly encouraging.

“They yelled at me and booed me,” Byrnes said. “ Booed me . My own team .”

Suffice to say, neither was voted the team’s most valuable player. And neither wanted to stay.

“We were told we weren’t good enough to keep up with the boys,” LaRocca said. “We just had it pounded into our heads.”

These days, things still are pounded into their heads: sticks, elbows, even fists.

That’s hockey.

The only difference is, the Black Widows, whose roster includes nine of 15 women among 22 teams at the arena, hit back.

And they manage to hold their own in the standings.

During summer league, the Black Widows placed fourth among six teams with a 4-4-2 record. Last week, the Black Widows were defeated, 5-2, in their winter season opener, but LaRocca insists the team will improve during the 24-game season. The team faces off tonight at 9 against the Acme Warriors.

“We’ve got a lot of talent,” said defenseman Marty Lopez, one of three women who joined the Black Widows this season.

“There was talent before I even came to this team. [We’re] all like a bunch of sisters who get along.”

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Goalie Chris Rivera, one of six men on the Black Widows, added: “They’re not all that bad. They’re a lot of fun to play with and they don’t have any attitudes.”

Skating with the boys, to paraphrase LaRocca, might be a kick in the butt.

But it also means taking a few boots in the behind--literally and figuratively.

Since the Black Widows first suited up this summer, LaRocca, the team’s captain and starting center, has been both bad-mouthed and beaten.

Patty Alpert, a member of the Penguins, refused to join the Black Widows, labeling them “a bunch of losers,” according to LaRocca.

“I told them, ‘If you’re going to be all females, you’re going to get your butts kicked. Call me when you get some ringers,’ ” Alpert said. “To me, it’s almost like they resent being female. I don’t know what chip Danielle has on her shoulder but I don’t want to deal with that.”

Critics charge that the Black Widows’ moderate success this summer was because of the team’s male players.

Bobby Minn, no longer a member of the Black Widows, tied for the league lead in scoring with 21 points (18 goals and three assists).

His output likely will be missed.

“But one player doesn’t make a team,” Byrnes said.

Still, LaRocca concedes that the Black Widows need a few good men to succeed--at least, for now.

“I’d like it to be all girls,” she said. “It would be harder, but I think we’d do all right, eventually. Some of the guys are bigger and stronger and have more finesse. But they’re not as determined as we are. I finished second in scoring, but I played on an all-girls line. Piper gave me the passes and I put them in the net. The goals went in somehow.”

LaRocca doesn’t expect to win any popularity contests. And she hasn’t.

She has been involved in more than a few fistfights, exchanging blows with male players who tower over her 5-foot-6 frame.

“I’ve been hit, I’ve been hurt,” she said. “But what goes around, comes around. It hasn’t stopped me from playing.”

Off the ice, LaRocca’s car has been vandalized and opposing players have left intimidating messages on her answering machine. Even her social life has taken a beating.

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“I went out three times with a guy on one of the other teams and then we played them and beat them and he never talked to me again,” she said.

Said Byrnes: “The guy literally was mean to her in the parking lot.”

Byrnes, admittedly the team’s most-physical player, has been involved in more fights than she can recall--with men and women. Her injuries have included broken ribs.

“My temper is easier to flare if it’s a guy,” Byrnes said. “A lot of guys will hit me first. I grew up with that, so I won’t put up with any of it.”

Perhaps surprising to some, women have been playing hockey almost as long as men have.

The first organized and recorded all-female ice hockey game was played in 1892 in Ontario, Canada, and interest in the sport among women has increased steadily.

In 1998, women’s ice hockey will be a medal sport for the first time at the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

“That will be huge for what it does at the grass-roots level,” said Darryl Seibel, spokesperson for USA Hockey in Colorado Springs, Colo., the national governing body for amateur ice hockey. “We’ll have a whole team of Olympic heroes for young girls to look up to. We expect participation to explode.”

Seibel said no statistics are recorded regarding women playing among men. However, he called the Black Widows “a fairly unique” situation.

Ben Cohen, Easy Street’s league commissioner and a part-time player for several teams, said the popularity of roller hockey in recent years has led to more women lacing up ice skates.

If the trend continues, the arena one day may offer an all-female league.

Until then, women will keep trying to break the ice with men.

“Obviously, some of the guys have their own issues with it but that’s too bad,” Cohen said.

“The other teams, generally, don’t want to be losing to the girls’ team. It’s the old boys’ club. It starts in the youth programs, where we have girls who come to the rink already dressed with their hair in their helmets so the boys will pass the puck to them.”

Rivera said he can relate.

“One thing I will say: If a girl puts the puck in [the net] against a guy, you better believe I’m going to razz him,” he said.

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And what if that happens to him?

“I haven’t been beaten by a woman yet,” he said. “So, I don’t know how I would feel.”

Byrnes said the league would be more harmonious if a few of the men would just chill.

“They just don’t get it,” she said. “Some of them just don’t want to lose to us. But that doesn’t make them any less of a man.”

Fights aside, Byrnes said problems with male players are more exception than rule.

“Sometimes, when I take the puck away from a guy, he’ll say, ‘Nice play, Piper.’ Those are the type of guys who have kept me coming back.”