Breaking the Ice

The Simi Valley Thunder hockey players clambering onto the ice are all raw preteen energy and testosterone.

Except for No. 5.

She’s the smallish one with long, black hair hanging halfway down her jersey.

But don’t judge 12-year-old Jessica Koizumi by her size or sex. Measure Jessica by her speed--by the way she chases pucks, plows through bigger opponents and fires slap shots at the goal.

Then listen to George Wilk, who coaches Jessica’s traveling ice hockey team of 12- and 13-year-old players.

“If she had been a token girl--here as a curiosity--the boys wouldn’t have accepted her,” he said. “But she plays the game, knows the game and plays hard. So they accept her on that basis--as a player.”

A very good player at that, he added.

Indeed, Jessica is the lone girl on the boys Peewee A traveling team--the most skilled batch of ice hockey players her age.

When playing with the Thunder, she might see two other females among the 16 teams she will face during the season. She is one of about 20 girls to make a boys traveling team in the 5,000-member Southern California Amateur Hockey Assn.

In a sport where girls have been sprinkled here and there, this willowy girl with steely determination may represent the shape of things to come. With the advent of women’s hockey as a medal sport in the Winter Olympics in February, Jessica and her female peers could represent the first, best hope for professional women’s hockey.

“This being an Olympic year, with women’s ice hockey featured, I think you’ll see more girls catch the wave,” said Wayne LaVaglio, president of the Thunder Youth Hockey Club. “It’ll probably start a trend like when [Wayne] Gretsky came to L.A.--enrollment across the board went up everywhere. You’ll start to see more and more girls interested in playing the sport.”

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For her part, Jessica thinks nothing could be more natural than playing hockey. When she was not yet 5 and living in Hawaii, Jessica once fibbed to her mother to go ice-skating with friends. She began playing hockey in earnest at 7, when her family moved to Minnesota, the land of 10,000 frozen lakes.

“I wanted to skate, but I didn’t like the girls’ ice skates,” Jessica said. “My dad said the only way I was going to get hockey skates was if I learned to play hockey.”

So she did.

Despite Jessica’s nonchalance, others see her as something special: a skilled player with a real chance for a college hockey scholarship--maybe even an Olympic hopeful in eight years. And a working-class Asian American girl in a sport populated--in Southern California, at least--by affluent white boys.

On the ice, she is a skilled defenseman--fast and agile. Jessica has a mean check and a quick stick. In the stands, she is a source of pride, prompting spontaneous cheers of “Go Jessie! Take him out!”

Among the loudest voices in the seats of the East Street Ice Arena in Simi Valley--the Thunder’s home turf--are Lori Dyer and Kelly Stover, whose sons play on Jessica’s team.

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“She’s better than most of them,” Stover said.

“She’s skilled, very smart and a good leader, just by her hockey smarts,” added Dyer, who wore a rhinestone “Goalie Mom” pin on her Thunder jacket. “When we go places as a team, the boys absolutely accept her. She’s part of the team, one of the guys.”

Corrected Dyer: “Take out that part about one of the guys. She’s very much a lovely young lady.”

A lovely young lady who likes to slam big boys against the boards, said Jessica, who also plays on a Van Nuys-based girls team.

“I like checking--it’s fun,” she said. “When you play with the girls, it’s kind of boring because you’re not allowed to check. I’ll barely touch a girl, and she’ll fall down and start crying and I get a penalty. It’s a sissy sport right now.”

It’s anyone’s guess how long Jessica’s stature will allow her to keep pace with the bigger boys in this physically punishing sport. Although she is mid-sized for her team now, chances are her teammates will beef up as they get older, prompting Jessica to move onto girls teams in her late teens, her coach predicted.

But, he hastened to add, teams with older girls do get rougher. And they are a plum spot for someone like Jessica--who aspires to play in college or join the national team--to be noticed.

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Right now, it seems the hockey gods are smiling on this 98-pound, 5-foot-1 defenseman. But circumstances have sometimes made playing hockey all but impossible.

At the start of the hockey season this fall, it wasn’t clear if Jessica would be able to play at all. At the time, Jessica’s dad, Carl Welch, was temporarily out of work. Her mother, Karen Welch, could not feed and clothe Jessica and her three sisters on her part-time salary and pay for the expensive sport her daughter loves.

Just joining the Thunder costs $500. Add to that $1,000 worth of equipment--pads, jerseys, sticks and skates--that is quickly outgrown at this age. Being on a team that travels to Phoenix, San Diego, Anaheim and Riverside only compounds the cost.

To play, Jessica and her family had to hit up neighbors in their Simi Valley mobile home park and petition family members for sponsorships. But they scraped the money together.

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And Jessica’s mother wasn’t always thrilled about seeing her daughter involved in such a rough-and-tumble activity, in which bodies are bruised and bones are broken.

“She’s my daughter, and I don’t want anyone to hurt her,” Karen Welch said. “At first I was against it: I gave birth to a daughter, not a son. But her dad said, ‘She can do it.’ Now I’ve changed my mind. . . . I saw how happy she was playing hockey.”

When they first see Jessica, some other players also wonder if girls should be playing hockey. There were a few nervous twitters when Jessica tried out for the Thunder in October, but they disappeared quickly, her teammates say.

“She’s one of the best players we have,” said fellow defenseman Jordan Stover, 12. “She gives 110% every time she goes out there. There are only two or three guys on the team who do that. I’m not one of them.”

By now, her teammates feel relieved when Jessica is on the ice, even if they worry about telling lewd jokes around her.

Players on other teams are sometimes baffled by her, added Wilk, the coach.

“What happens is that the other team doesn’t realize for the first period or so,” he said. “Then you see the same reaction, ‘That’s a girl! That’s a girl!’ Then they think they can take advantage of her. But they can’t. It’s funny.”

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Her teammates aren’t above capitalizing on Jessica’s gender when it suits their purposes.

“Our guys kind of make fun of the other teams, saying ‘You got beat by a girl,’ ” Wilk said. “It’s a source of pride for them.”