Women's hockey team gains momentum
The Orlando Sirens completed their first
league season and are holding summer scrimmages.
By
Emily Badger | Sentinel
Staff Writer
Posted May 9, 2004
Walking
in from the blacktop parking lot in April, through
the concession area and onto
the ice, the temperature drops about 30 degrees.
Sure,
it's an ice rink -- the place is aptly named the "Ice Factory" --
but this is Florida, and the two don't go together
in any kind of meaningful
way that would make you remember to bring your jacket.
It
all seems highly unlikely, a group of women -- more
Canadians among them than native Floridians
-- converged
on an ice rink in Kissimmee from places like Illinois,
New York and Maryland for a game of hockey on an
80-degree Sunday afternoon.
"
We had some resistance to begin with. Even the rink
wasn't sure we were going to last because they had
had a bad experience with women's hockey beforehand," said
Leigh Hird Varecka, sitting at one of the picnic tables
inside the Ice Factory.
" It was a lot of skepticism, let's say. A lot of people
said, 'Yeah, lady, try it, but we know you're not going
to be around a year from now.'"
That
was more than a year ago. Hird Varecka and 12 other
women launched the Orlando Sirens
in
November 2002 and are through their first
full season of
a
Florida women's rec league and into a summer
scrimmage session
that boasts 38 players.
"
Even some of the women showed up not really knowing
if it was going to last or not," said Hird Varecka,
the team's captain. "And I think most of them
are surprised -- and happy -- that we're still here."
When
Hird Varecka, who's originally from Connecticut,
moved to the Orlando area in
1999, she wandered
into the RDV Sportsplex and was disappointed
to find mostly
men's teams, and only coed teams at best.
She
began to case RDV for other women on coed teams,
then called around to all the
rinks
outside of
Orlando. What she eventually came up
with was a long e-mail
and eventually a group of 13 who agreed
to attend a women's-only practice and
put up
the money
for the
rink time and equipment.
The
team grew out of those first meetings at the Space
Coast Iceplex in Rockledge.
Meanwhile,
similar
teams
were forming in Fort Lauderdale and
Brandon.
The
movement spawned competition overnight where there
had been no women's ice
hockey at all.
"
Right now girls youth hockey is probably growing faster
than boys, with the Olympics, the success the U.S.
has had, and with women like Cammy Granato," said
David Varecka, the coach of the
team and Hird Varecka's ex-husband.
The
Sirens represent a cross-section of team members
who've been drawn
to the sport:
Most
are from the
North, although their ages range
from 18 to 50; there's a
Ph.D. student, a Web designer
and a correctional officer; and their
introduction
to hockey
spans from a first
skating lesson last year to years
of experience with the distant
cousin roller hockey.
"
Every time somebody says to me, oh you play hockey
-- but you have all your teeth?" said Kris Kruth
of Orlando, a 26-year-old goalie. "How many times
have you guys heard that?" She turned to several
of her teammates, who offered a chorus of yeahs. "Oh,
you get your nails done, and you play hockey?"
Hird
Varecka, a 29-year-old sales rep for a Simmons Mattress
Company,
honed
her skills
with a coed
team in Rochester, N.Y.,
before
moving to Orlando.
Lorraine
Snyder, one of the assistant captains who also
lives in Orlando,
took up the
sport at 30 after
watching the Solar Bears.
She's now 37.
Jenny
Sumner, the other assistant captain -- and
one of the
few Florida natives
-- began
playing only 21/2
years ago. She was on
one of those first e-mails
from Hird
Varecka
in November
2002.
Candy
McCrary, the recreation director for the city
of Apopka, sits at
the higher end
of the
age range
-- at 50, she's both
an honorary mother
to the
group and a
literal grandmother
(her
first granddaughter
was born about three
months ago).
"
They think I'm crazy," McCrary, 50, said of her
children.
But
it's at least a comfort to everyone
that she
plays in a
women's league
and not again
men twice
her size.
"
You're playing against people of your own size and
weight and caliber," she said, echoing the reasons
why many of the women felt it was important to have
their own team. "When you collide, you're both
going to feel it, but you're not going to be the one
who is just annihilated, unlike with a guy twice your
size and twice your speed."
All
of the original members are still
around, at
the core of
the team that
seems to keep
growing, largely
thanks to the
Web site one of the
members designed.
This summer,
for the first
time, there were
enough players
to hold
a
draft and break
into two teams
for off-season
scrimmages, which
are held every
other Sunday
at RDV.
Hird
Varecka said she doesn't
want
the group
to grow
too fast. On
the Sunday
afternoon in
Kissimmee,
the team seemed just
the right size
-- large
enough to
play full
intrasquad
games with two healthy
benches,
but small enough
that several
of
the women
could cram
around a picnic
table
in the
concession
area to laugh
about what
makes women's hockey
so much better
than
coed.
"
Girls are better, yeah!" McCrary offered, and
everyone cheered. "We're a quiet bunch."
Emily
Badger can be reached
at
ebadger@orlandosentinel.com.
Click
here for a scan of the actual article with additional
photos.