Let me start with this: I am a hockey mom. It’s a title I’m so thankful for, and a badge I wear with honor. What I’m not is “the” hockey mom, and neither is any other mom in your rink.
Last week, a piece called “Please Stop Asking Men What Women Think About Hockey” made its way around our corner of the internet. If you haven’t read it, go read it. The writer covers a lot of ground, but one idea stuck with me more than any other: stop treating women as a monolith.
She was writing about fans and media. I read it as someone who has spent most of my adult life in and around youth hockey, and I recognized the same pattern right away.
I’ve seen this game from just about every seat in the rink over the last couple (at least) decades. I started on the facilities side, so I know what it takes – in dollars, people, resources, commitment, and scheduling – to keep a rink open. Then I moved into youth hockey administration (including time with an association that was an early adopter of USA Hockey’s ADM model club concept). My husband coached. Our kids played (our daughter played college hockey and is now in her first year as a graduate assistant coach, and our son is in his first year of junior hockey).
Through all of it, I’ve watched our sport talk about “the hockey mom” and “the female player” as if each one is a single person with a single set of traits. They aren’t. And when we build our organizations around those stereotypes, we leave talent, players, and families on the table.
The Hockey Mom Stereotype
We all know the picture. She runs the snack schedule. She sells the raffle tickets. She plans the end-of-season party, orders the team apparel, and, depending on who’s telling the story, she’s either the volunteer who holds everything together or the one yelling from the glass.
So let me introduce you to the actual moms in your rink. One played college hockey. One is a project manager who runs multi-million dollar budgets. One is a teacher who has spent fifteen years getting eight-year-olds to listen. One has scheduled ice and managed rink staff. One knows nothing about hockey yet and is quietly trying to learn so she can help her kid. One would make a phenomenal board member, and nobody has ever asked her.
The only thing they all have in common is that their kid plays hockey.
When the only jobs we offer women in our organizations are merch sales, fundraisers, and event planning, we might not be utilizing people’s strengths. We’re typecasting them.
The Female Player Stereotype
The girls in our programs get the same treatment, just from a different angle.
When people do try to describe a female player with some nuance, it almost always bends back to gender. “She’s basically one of the boys.” “She’s a really girly girl, but she can play.” As the mom of a daughter who played college hockey and now coaches it, I’d happily retire both. Neither one describes a hockey player. One erases who she is, and the other treats who she is as the surprising part.
A girl on your roster might be a gritty net-front presence, a quiet leader, a creative passer who sees plays nobody else sees, or a kid who is still figuring out whether she loves this game. Those are hockey traits. Coach the player in front of you.
The same goes for what girls want out of the game. Until she was 12, my daughter wanted to play with the boys and had no interest in playing exclusively on an all-girls team (and our USA Hockey affiliate did not allow for dual rostering, so doing both, even in a limited capacity, was not an option). And, at times her choice was interpreted as betraying the effort to grow the girls’ game locally. I understand where that comes from – people have fought hard to build girls’ programs, and every player matters to them. But that’s another broad stroke. A ten-year-old who wants to play with the boys isn’t against girls’ hockey, and neither is her family. My daughter went on to play college hockey and is now a graduate assistant coach.
Some girls will want the all-girls experience from day one. Some will want to play alongside the boys for a while. Plenty will move between the two as they grow. Every one of those paths can grow the girls’ game, as long as our organizations (and affiliates) make space for all of them and support the player in front of us, whichever path she chooses.
Why Many Clubs Never Get Past the Stereotype
Here’s the honest part, and I say it with real sympathy: a lot of this isn’t malicious.
Because I came up on the facilities side too, I know how stretched the people running our rinks and clubs are. Ice is scarce. Ice is expensive. Staffs are thin. The schedule is a puzzle that sometimes gets rebuilt every week. Coaches, managers, and administrators are juggling all of that, while parents show up, drop off, pick up, and pay registration. There’s rarely a moment where anyone asks, “What’s your background? What are you good at? What would you want to help with?” So people get sorted by the easiest shorthand available, and gender is about as easy as shorthand gets.
That’s a systems problem, which means it has a systems solution.
Where Women Are Already Leading
If we’re serious about putting people where they’re strongest, start at the very beginning: entry-level programming.
That’s not a narrow lane, and it’s not a consolation prize. Learn-to-skate and learn-to-play are some of the most important, and most difficult, jobs in any organization. That first step is where the first attrition cliff lives. It’s where families decide whether this sport is for them.
Let’s be honest about something: at learn-to-play, a hockey resume means just about nothing. The skills that make someone a great player, or even a great coach of older players, aren’t the skills this level demands. Most elite players can’t remember a time they didn’t know how to skate, which makes it hard to break the game down into the tiny first steps a beginner needs. Knowing how to run a power play doesn’t help when a five-year-old is in tears because their helmet is too tight, three kids need to use the bathroom, and the rest are making snow angels on the ice. This level takes patience, structure, and the ability to make a six-year-old in full gear feel like the rink is the best place on earth.
Then there’s voice and tone. At five and six, most kids – boys included – spend their days being taught and encouraged by women: at home, at daycare, and in the classroom. A warm, steady, encouraging voice isn’t foreign to them, it’s familiar. And familiar is exactly what a nervous beginner needs to settle in and have fun.
Representation matters too. Girls are often wildly underrepresented at learn-to-play, sometimes one or two in a group full of boys. When a young girl steps on the ice and sees women running the session, she sees someone like her who belongs there. That makes it more likely she has fun, and fun is what keeps kids coming back.
Maybe the biggest blind spot in learn-to-play programs everywhere is parent education. New hockey families don’t know what they don’t know: the gear, the schedule, the culture, and what development should look like at this age/stage. The expectations parents form in that first year follow them through their child’s entire hockey journey. I learned how much that step depends on communication when our association became an ADM model club. The on-ice changes were the easy part. The real work was helping families understand why cross-ice, station-based practices were better for their kids’ development, and earning their trust while we changed what youth hockey looked like for them. A leader who has been that nervous new hockey parent, very often a mom, is well suited to have those conversations early, before confusion turns into frustration.
Across our sport, women are proving invaluable at exactly this level. They’re running learn-to-skate and learn-to-play programs, bringing in new families, and making the rink feel welcoming to kids and parents who have never set foot in one. That’s culture and development at the same time, at the grassroots level, and it’s the work that keeps kids in the game long enough to find out how much they love it.
To be clear, I’m not saying all women are naturally better at this. That would make me guilty of the same broad strokes I’m arguing against. I’m saying many women in our rinks already have exactly the skills that first step demands, and we rarely hand them the keys.
One of the most common complaints we hear from career coaches about entry-level programming is “This is kindergarten!”
Yes, it is. So staff it accordingly.
What You Can Do This Season
None of this requires a big initiative. It requires a few intentional changes:
- Ask before you assign. Add two questions to registration or a quick parent survey: “What skills or experience could you bring?” and “How would you like to help?” Make it clear that work, school, volunteering, and life experience all count. Then actually read the answers.
- Open your coaching pathway. Personally invite moms, especially former players, to coach or assist at the entry levels. Cover their certification costs if you can.
- Staff your entry-level programs with intention. Make learn-to-play leadership a sought-after role, not a leftover one.
- Make room for both paths. Offer girls-only options and fully support girls who choose co-ed teams, without treating either choice as a statement.
- Diversify your board and committees. Look at who’s making decisions. If women only show up on the fundraising and events committees, that’s a signal.
- Audit your language. Notice when “she plays like a boy” or “ask one of the team moms” comes up in your rink, and offer something better.
- Build ways to get to know people. A parent coffee before practice, a ten-minute check-in at the start of the season, a director who learns names. Small moments turn archetypes back into people.
The writer of that piece ended with a reminder that women have always been right there. In youth hockey, that’s literally true. We’re in the stands, in the parking lot, at the registration table, behind the bench, and on the ice. I’ve been in most of those places myself, and I’ve been a hockey mom in every one of them. The question for every organization isn’t whether women are in the rink – it’s whether you know who we are, what we’re good at, and what we could do if you asked.
The Hockey Think Tank Youth Organization Blueprint helps clubs build systems for culture, communication, and family engagement. Learn more here.
