Ice Maidens

In Nagano, Michelle and Tara and Nicole spin and twirl on the ice, each dreaming of gold. Back home, little girls lace up their figure skates, dreaming of Salt Lake City in 2002 and their own quest for gold.

Other girls watch the figure skaters in their sparkly little costumes and think--in a word--yuck. Sweating beneath pounds of unisex padding, ponytails peeping out from their helmets, they have Olympic dreams of quite a different sort. You say Michelle Kwan; they say Cammi Granato, captain of the American women’s Olympic ice hockey team.

On Tuesday, they watched, enthralled, as the American women, draped in flags and clutching bouquets, lined up on the ice to claim their gold medals, having bested Canada, 3-1, in the sport’s Olympic debut.

It was, said U.S. coach Ben Smith, “a great showcase” for women’s ice hockey. Long considered a men’s sport, it is enjoying a boom with 23,000 girls and women participating in for programs under the auspices of USA Hockey, the governing body of amateur hockey programs, up from about 5,500 in 1990.

The Olympians “will be the darlings of America,” predicted Jeff Weil, president of Team LA, the only girls’ ice hockey club in California, with teams for girls 15 and younger and 12 and younger.

“This is the beginning. It’s like soccer was out here 10 years ago,” Weil says.

Welcome to the new ice age.

“There’s a big push right now. A lot of it’s driven by the Olympics,” says Rod Gunn, a vice president of the California American Hockey Assn., which oversees the amateur sports regulatory group’s girls’ and women’s hockey programs statewide. Still, he adds, there are so few girls’ teams in California that “most of the girls have to play on boys’ teams.”

Many, like Courtney Betley of Corona, play on both. Double axels, triple lutzes and camel spins aren’t for Courtney, a member of the select regional girls squad Team California.

“Girls nowadays want more of a challenge,” the 15-year-old says. “This seems to be what kids are into now.”

For top players like Courtney, the Olympics are more than a pipe dream. But first, she’s hoping to parlay her talent on the ice into an Ivy League scholarship. Through hockey, she says, “you have a chance to get a really good education. I’ve already got interest from Cornell, Harvard . . . .”

Ladylike and genteel, hockey is not, even though body checking isn’t allowed in the women’s game.

“It can get rough,” says Team California’s Alaina Clark, 16, of Alhambra--who wears No. 9, the number of her hero, the Mighty Ducks’ Paul Kariya. When boys and girls play together, it’s a full-contact game. When it’s all girls, says Courtney, who’s been tossed out of a game or two, “we bump a little. And girls use their sticks a lot.”

Alaina, who hopes to be a surgeon, took up the sport four years ago and now attends a Massachusetts prep school on a hockey scholarship. When she first became interested, her mother, Yolanda, like some other hockey moms, had reservations, thinking, “Oh, no! There goes $3,000 worth of braces.” (To avoid toothlessness, females are required to wear mouthpieces in addition to masks.)

Still, Yolanda Clark wasn’t surprised. Her daughter had always been rough-and-tumble.

“I remember buying her a doll when she was 3 years old. She looked at it and said, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ ”

Many girls are introduced to the ice through figure skating. Others had older brothers who played ice hockey. Blair Kurtz, 16, of Encino used to play roller hockey with her brother. One day he told her, “Get a net. I’m shooting on you.” Today, she’s a Team California goalie, plays for her Eastern prep school and dreams of playing in the Ivy League--”for Brown. They’re No. 1.”

When a girl takes up ice hockey, it is a family commitment. Courtney’s parents, Bill and Bea, say their weekends are “pretty hockey-intense.” But they’re with Courtney all the way.

“We’re both from back East,” he says. “Our first date was a hockey game.” They had no hesitation about their daughter playing, he adds, knowing “she could take the physical abuse.”

But Blair, who’s only 5 feet tall, met some resistance. At first, her father said absolutely not, says mother Beverly, but finally relented, happy that she was to be a goalie rather than “out on the ice, where she could get checked and killed.”

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Ice hockey can get expensive. If a girl plays on a traveling team, such as Team California, one or both parents may go along. Teams must pay for ice time. And the equipment adds up--$250 to $500 for skates, a few hundred more for all that padding, a hundred or so for the helmet and $22 a pop, literally, for the stick. If it breaks, you buy a new one.

When California girls go east to play, they’re still something of a novelty. Courtney recalls, “We actually got asked, had we ever seen snow? Do we surf to each other’s houses?” Today, she says, “we can hold our own, big time.”

Ice hockey “gives you a rush you don’t get anywhere else,” says Lacie Sommer, 14, of Mission Viejo, who also has Olympic dreams. “It’s an awesome sport.”

Kristen Harn, 16, of San Jose, asked why she didn’t take up figure skating instead, says, “I’m just not into that. I’m not elegant enough.” Though the Olympics gave women’s ice hockey the big push, it had been building. Team California’s Chanda Gunn, 17, of Huntington Beach says that “it didn’t really occur to me that girls played hockey” until she saw Granato play in a benefit game. She remembers the date: Dec. 13, 1993.

Now the first women’s professional hockey league hopes to debut in the fall, with teams to represent four cities in New England and Quebec, as yet not chosen. Women play competitive college hockey, with the powerhouse teams concentrated in the Eastern and Midwestern states.

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In USA Hockey programs from coast to coast, girls 12 and under (Squirts) are mixing it up with the boys. They’ve come a long way since the first recorded all-female ice hockey game was played in Ontario, Canada, in 1892, a game featuring women playing men dressed as women.

Some other milestones: In 1994 Minnesota was the first state to sanction girls’ ice hockey as a high school varsity sport. In 1996, manufacturer Louisville Hockey introduced a line of equipment designed for women, with extra pelvic protection.

There are women’s leagues and women’s teams with names such as the Chilly Peppers (Tucson), the Valkyries (San Francisco), the Steel Magnolias (Ann Arbor, Mich.), the Ice Pack (Melvindale, Minn.) and, in Potsdam, N.Y., the Motherpuckers.

From April 1-5, the 1998 USA Hockey girls’ and women’s national championships will be held at Disney Ice in Anaheim, with players competing in age divisions from seniors to Pee Wees (15 and under). The event will feature an open invitational for girl Squirts, for whom there is no official national championship.

The official home team for the youngest girls will be Jeff Weil’s Team LA, which will be going against teams from the East and Midwest and one from Alaska and one from Northern California. Team LA, a fledgling squad of players from San Diego to Thousand Oaks, came together only last fall.

“Five months ago we had six girls,” says Jodell Haws, assistant coach and team vice president. “We now have 34. There’s an awful lot of girls out there on boys’ teams. Their opportunity to be seen and recognized is on the girls’ team.”

Is there discrimination against girls in this once all-male bastion? Yes and no, says Steve Butler, Team LA head coach.

“Hockey has always been a male sport. Discrimination exists, but it’s not intentional,” he says. And most of the coaches are men.

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Do the girls play as well as the boys?

“Absolutely,” Haws says (although, this day, they would lose, 6-3). In the girls’ game, she adds, “there’s no body checking. There’s a lot more thinking, more finesse.”

She mentions, “The very first tournament our girls were in, we didn’t tell [the organizers] it was a girls’ team. We knew they wouldn’t let them play. Once we got there, we pleaded ignorance.” That was in November, when Team LA was only 6 weeks old. The team placed third of six.

Assistant Coach Konstantin Lodia, a former Russian player, has a boot camp philosophy. Addressing his players in the box, he grumbles, “You not understand what I want. What are you doing. . . ? One more goal. You can, you can, you can. . . .”

The parents are getting into it too.

“Hard and tough! Use your body!” screams Janet Sandoval from Burbank to daughter Jessica.

“Skate back, Jess!” screams Steve Schofield to daughter Jessica. A former player, he is sizing up the girls. “Certain kids skate hard,” he says, “but they don’t see the ice. Wayne Gretzky sees the ice.” “Did you see that breakaway? Awesome, huh?” beams Weil as one of his girls takes control of the puck.

Later, in their locker room, the girls of Team LA talk tough. What do they think of that other ice sport, figure skating? Regina Shvarts, 13, of North Hollywood sticks out her tongue, makes a face and says she’d rather die than do “all those ugly, twirly things.” She adds, “Most of the time the moms want you to figure skate because they’re so feminine.”

To pigtailed Ashley Mazur, 12, of West Hills figure skating is a wimp sport. “I’d rather clean the toilets in the boys’ bathroom.” Jessica Sandoval just says, “They suck.”

Says Allison Silverstein, 10, “I think no one’s going to want to do that” in the future. “Right now, when you think of ice and girls together, you think of ice hockey.”

Debbie Rosen, an angelic looking 12-year-old from Laguna Niguel who’s “always liked to get out there and play rough with the boys,” says, “Girls are invading the sport.”

Debbie’s dad, Carl, who brought her to today’s game, says, “For girls, looking for an athletic scholarship, hockey is probably the sport. She’s blazing the trail. At Anaheim, there are going to be the big powerhouse girls’ teams from back East. If she can play well, somebody’s going to notice.”

Allison is talking about the loneliness of the competitive figure skater, the cutthroat competition. She and her teammates don’t relate to that. They do relate to teamwork and to battling for equality. In short, they relate to the women Olympians with whom they recently had a two-hour clinic in San Jose.

Says Ashley, “Girls kick ass.”