You don’t have to look very hard to see signs of the impact Hayley Wickenheiser has had on girls in the hockey world.
“What Hayley has done for the game … is really heighten the awareness of the game,” says Bruce Woolner, team manager of the Cambridge Rivulettes.
“Girls are getting involved in hockey at a younger and younger age all the time.”
In his time working with the Rivulettes program, Woolner says he’s also see significant growth in the skill level of the young girls taking up the sport.
Like many people involved with the game, he credits at least part of that to Wickenheiser’s influence.
Wickenheiser, widely considered to be the greatest female hockey player Canada has ever produced, announced her retirement Friday.
She spent 23 years on the Canadian national team, in the process winning many Olympic and world championship medals and becoming the country’s all-time leading scorer.
Over the course of those 23 years, the number of registered female hockey players in Canada rose from 16,000 to about 87,000.
She also set a new standard for women in hockey by playing 65 games in professional men’s leagues in Finland and Sweden.
In some ways, it was a lot like when she started playing minor hockey in the mid-1980s and there were no girls’ teams available.
Instead, Wickenheiser ended up on the local boys’ team, where she wasn’t always welcomed by her teammates or their parents.
Hundreds of players of about the same age descended on Cambridge over the weekend for the 59th annual Preston International Hockey Tournament.
Most of them were boys, but teams carrying one or two girls on their roster aren’t exactly an aberration these days.
The North London Nationals have two, including eight-year-old defencewoman Lauren Gustafson.
“It’s cool that girls can play hockey just like boys,” she said Saturday.
Gustafson’s mother says that her daughter plays baseball with many of the same boys in the summer – but when it’s cold out, it’s hard to tear her away from shooting pucks in the backyard.
“I just think she likes the intensity, at this age, of playing with the boys,” Tracy Gustafson said.
Gustafson draws inspiration for her career from Wickenheiser and other members of the Canadian national women’s team, and hopes to make it to that level herself one day.
With reporting by Nadia Matos and files from The Canadian Press