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.

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Last updated Friday, July 6, 2012
 
 
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