Not Your Mother’s Hockey Puck

On the ice, the Roadrunner women face off with Oklahoma City. One tense second. The ref drops the puck, and the starters’ sticks strike for it like axes for a chicken’s neck. It shoots to the side, an OKC girl scoops it in. The play breaks across the ice toward Austin’s net.

The Roadrunners seem skinny and tense. Oklahoma City players loom among them. They look bigger than our team (a third-generation Oklahoman, I use the term “corn-fed” with pride) and they play meaner.

Within minutes, the ref calls their first personal foul. Unfazed by the penalty, they recoup and descend on our goal. The Roadrunner defense wavers, and they make their first goal. The first period goes like that — foul, goal, foul, goal — but the Roadrunners rally by the final period and hold their own. The game ends in a tie, 4-4.

The next game of the tournament, against Dallas, is supposed to be tough. Dallas was good last year — an older team from a bigger city. This time around something isn’t working for them, though. The Roadrunners skate around their offense, walk over their defense, gain an early two-point lead and hold it. The Dallas fans in the tiny crowd start to get ugly. Two men in baseball caps heckle the Roadrunner players between bites of nacho chips and Day-Glo yellow cheese. Let them. We win 5-2.

Not bad for a nonprofessional team only three years old.

Thirty women, give or take, play in the league — enough to put an A team and a B team on the ice in the five or six tournaments they play year-round. Another 40 or so women around the city make it to the other practices and pickup games held each month. Most of the tournaments are local, pitting the Roadrunners against Dallas, Houston, and other in-state teams. They’ve played tournaments as far afield as Las Vegas, and this year even made it all the way up to Toronto. (Albeit in the relatively less intense Class C division, where they won one game out of three — respectable for a team from a city where mass panic breaks out when the temperature dips below 40 degrees.)

A week later, in Thursday night practice, the women are in the locker room, strapping and buckling and lacing into their uniforms. It’s nine o’clock on a Thursday night after a long workday. Outside the air is muggy and stale. A good night to go home, take your shoes off, feed the cats and settle in front of the tube. What are they doing here?

“I need it. I get all my frustrations from workout,” says Angie-from-Canada, a fifth-grade substitute teacher by day who’s played hockey since childhood. While she talks, she slowly disappears under layer after layer of padding — shin pads, shoulder pads, elbow pads, striped athletic socks, and jersey. “If you don’t play, you start to miss it. You miss everything about it — you miss the smell. It’s addictive.”

Other women on the team agree: The game gets in your blood.

“As soon as I knew I was moving to Austin, I started looking for a team,” says the Roadrunners’ newest team member, a twentysomething young-professional type who’s been in town just a few weeks. “I got on the Internet and looked up ‘Austin’ and ‘hockey’ — as soon as I knew there was a team, I came.”

Some of the Roadrunners have been playing hockey since they were knee-high, like Angie, who played on co-ed teams back in Canada until she was 13. “Then all of a sudden you’re a woman and you can’t play with the boys anymore. Oh my God,” she says in mock horror. “One of them might see you in your undershirt! So you have to start playing Ringette …” (a toned-down but still fierce all-girls’ version of the game).

Others played on college teams at schools farther north, where the sight of frozen water doesn’t make for panic in the streets. Others still are late converts from figure skating or Rollerblading, or the suburban blood sport of street hockey. A few are brand-new, having never even clung to the wall and stumbled around the rink a few times at somebody’s elementary school birthday party eight years ago.

Out on the ice, you can tell the difference, of course, but it’s not as dramatic as you’d think. New players pick up speed fast. The rules aren’t hard to learn, players tell me; anyone who’s ever played a pickup game of soccer can figure out the positions and the basic theory about passing and intercepting. But soccer players don’t move with that running glide. You could never run as fast as you can skate. This is sport in the world of no friction. Sports in outer space.

The Roadrunners are scrimmaging, dark jerseys against light jerseys. Skidding skates and a spray of ice. When they went out, the ice was flat and shiny; now it’s carved with long, curly lines.

Two forwards in dark jerseys take the puck up the ice in a long, perfect passing zigzag. They skate between light-jersey players and around them, all the way up to the net. One of them makes the goal shot, clean and fast. The goalie drops onto her kneepads. (One of the Roadrunners’ two goalies tonight has gray hair. The other has a 17-year-old daughter, also on the team. You would never guess the goalies’ ages from watching them play.)

The light-jersey goalie gingerly lifts her kneepad up. The puck is under there, safe. A dark jersey darts forward, slashes at the puck, and it is in the net. A second of shocked silence. The ref blows the whistle. Goal.

The dark jersey pounds happily on the goalie’s helmet. Better luck next time. Inside their helmets, quick grins on both sides.

“One thing that’s really different about a woman’s team is the sportsmanship,” says Jackie, a defender. She’s relatively new to the game herself — only picked it up a year or two ago, after she started working at the ice skating rink where the practices are held. “I’d say that really is the big difference. Now and then somebody might get a little rough …” she grins. “I get a little rough. But it’s not the NHL. There’s no blood on the ice out here. Nobody’s yelling at the ref. Everybody’s loving it.”

In the center, dark jerseys and light jerseys square off again. Outside the Plexiglas that shelters fans from wild-flying pucks, a man balances a small child in each arm. The three press their noses up against the glass. They watch some particular woman out there play sports in outer space. Football on Venus. Golf on Jupiter. They point her out to one another, this woman.

“That’s Mommy,” they tell each other. “See Mommy?”

This article appears in June 29 • 2001.