Women's sports continue to grow in popularity, with record television ratings for the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament as well as the Women's Professional Hockey League. The six-team league began in January and concluded last month at Little Caesars Arena. With that in mind, take a look at one of the seminal moments in women's hockey history, chronicled in the book A Miracle of Their Own, written by former Free Press sportswriter Keith Gabe. Let's. This book examines the U.S. women's hockey team's victory over Canada at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, which became one of the top rivalries in all sports.
For years, ever since Team USA defeated Canada at the first Olympic women's ice hockey tournament in Nagano, some members who didn't like the result tended to downplay the silver medal. Rather, they tended to say they “lost money.” Because their mindset going into the Olympics was that they couldn't imagine winning anything with a gold medal.
And so it happened, and the response on the other side of the border was amazing.
Suddenly, a record number of young American girls were trading their figure skates for hockey skates. The number of female players participating in youth leagues has increased rapidly. According to USA, in 1990, some members of the 1998 team were young female players who were beginning their hockey careers because it was their only opportunity to play, and were registered in the United States. There were fewer than 7,000 female ice hockey players. hockey. By the time the American women won their second Olympic gold medal in 2018, there were nearly 80,000 women registered to play competitive hockey in the United States, including Pyeongchang. This included 23 female athletes who won gold medals.
Kendall Coyne didn't know any other girls who played hockey until she was 7 years old. But in the summer of 1998, when she attended Granato's hockey camp in the Chicago suburbs, she met 100 girls who shared her passion for this sport. I did. Coyne, now Kendall Coyne-Schofield, returned to her school that fall and told all her doubting friends that “girls really play hockey” He recalled his excitement to the interviewer. That moment at camp motivated me to do something that would change my life forever – to play in college, to play for Team USA, and to play in the Olympics. ”
Farther west in North Dakota, the Lamoureux twins, Jocelyn and Monique, were similarly inspired. The American girls were 8 years old when they won in Nagano. That ignited their dreams, which one day materialized in an essay they wrote for school about playing in the Olympics.
“Without that gold medal, without that team, there's no way women's hockey would be where it is today,” Jocelyn (now Lamoureux-Davidson) said.
Twenty years later, Monique (now Lamoureux-Morando) scored the goal that sent the gold medal game against Canada into overtime. Jocelyn then scored the decisive goal in the shootout, giving the Americans their second Olympic gold medal.
That 1998 team ended up on the cover of a Wheaties box — Breakfast of Champions, right? — and various team members appeared on many national television talk shows. … Most of them attended school assemblies and their glittering gold medals impressed both girls and boys.
American universities took notice everywhere except Michigan. In 1998, there were only 14 NCAA Division I teams, and the only one located west of New York state was the University of Minnesota. Most of them were in New England. But it still took two years for the women's game to become an NCAA championship sport.
By the 2019-20 season, there were 41 teams eligible for the NCAA Championship, 36 of which were west of New York. One of them was the University of Minnesota-Duluth, where Canadian Olympic director Shannon Miller was expelled after the Nagano Olympics. She wasn't the only Canadian to build a program from scratch and take advantage of the sport's growth in the United States.
American college athletic programs are renowned for producing elite athletes who graduate into the professional ranks of their sport, whether or not they have earned a degree. The same goes for women's hockey. In 1998, Team She was one of only four women on Canada's roster to have participated in a U.S. college hockey program. In 2018, 21 of Canada's 23 athletes were competing at American universities. She was the only one of Canada's 23 Olympic gold medal hopefuls in 2022 who did not spend their formative years in the United States.
. . .
It might be an exaggeration to describe the rivalry between U.S. and Canadian women's hockey players as the greatest rivalry in team sports. it's not. The competition can and will get hotter, but anyone who suggests it is fueled by hatred is guilty of exaggeration.
To be sure, there have been times when fights broke out between individual combatants, resulting in disproportionate headlines, as happened during the 14 matches leading up to the gold medal match in Nagano. Familiarity breeds a kind of contempt that threatens good sportsmanship. But that's sport. As American coach Ben Smith was fond of saying, on good days the games were lively. On a bad day, it can be downright ugly.
But for the better part of three decades, players on either team have generally been fond of saying that while they may hate competition, they admire, respect, and sometimes even love individual players on the other team. Because they raise the level of the team. Play both sides. With a simple twist of the arm, nearly all of them will say they wish every game they played was against their arch-rival.
For the Canadian women, losing in the gold medal match in Nagano was devastating. “I remember feeling like I was letting people down and letting the country down,” Jayna Hefford told The Athletic's Eric Duha in an interview before her induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2018. told Check. I remember being in the changing room afterward and everyone being so grumpy that one of the trainers was trying to get the girls to take a picture with their medals. she said: “I know you don't want this right now, but trust me, one day you'll look back and want this photo.”
Hefford remembers the story of how he tried to find a silver lining in (pardon the unintended pun) defeat in order to appreciate the value that led the Americans to win their first Olympic gold medal. .
“People were saying, 'Well, this might have been the best thing that could have happened to women's hockey,'” Hefford told The Athletic. “Because it contributed to the growth of the sport in the United States.”
“Well, as a player on a losing team, that's the last thing you worry about. But in retrospect, that was probably true. It contributed to the growth of the game, and certainly for women's hockey in the United States. He made a huge contribution.”
