Passion flows through the veins of Ian Kennedy when speaking about his latest book, “Ice in their Veins; Women’s Relentless Pursuit of the Puck.”
Kennedy, a lifelong Chatham-Kent resident, writer, teacher and former high school girls’ hockey coach, said women have been playing hockey for many decades, but until the last 25 or so years, it went all but unnoticed.
“Growing up, I loved laying on my living room floor and reading the backs of hockey cards and trying to kind of download every bit of information I could,” he said. “There was never women involved in that.”
He said it was all but hidden and was for decades just an afterthought.
However, women have been taking to the ice, be it in arenas or on frozen ponds, for more than a century, long before the game rose to prominence after being included in the 1998 Winter Olympics.
“Women have been playing the game for 130 years,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy said he became very interested in women’s hockey through coaching.
“I really got into the sport when I started coaching girls’ hockey in Chatham,” he said, “seeing all the differences in terms of how those young women were treated compared to the boys at the same level.”
But the book evolved out of information he came across while researching his first book, “On Account of Darkness,” a story that detailed the racial inequities in sport. That information, it turned out, was very close to home.
“I found a story about Marian Coveny from Wallaceburg. I learned she was the first ever captain of a Canadian national team in 1987,” he said. “I had never heard her name before and I’m from Wallaceburg!”
Coveny grew up south of Wallaceburg, learned to play hockey outdoors and ultimately led the women’s national team in 1987, trailblazing along the way. She passed away in 2022.
Kennedy thinks her efforts, had she been male, would have garnered more attention.
“If she were a man in hockey, we’d probably have the Wallaceburg arena named after her,” he said.
Coveny’s story was his first dig down into what Kennedy called his latest “rabbit hole,” as he sought more stories; more information about women in hockey.
“I thought, ‘There has to be so many other people I know nothing about.’ As a person who has written about sports forever and has loved hockey since the first time I saw it, I felt kind of embarrassed that I didn’t know, not just the local history, but the bigger picture of women’s hockey history,” he said.
Coveny is not the only local connection to the development of women’s hockey. Kennedy said she and many other women laced up the skates at the annual Lipstick Tournament held in Wallaceburg. It began in 1967 and morphed into the provincial championship tournament.
“Original builders of the game used to meet and organize and plan the future,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy, who played AAA and Jr. C hockey, said a great deal has changed over the years, and women’s sports are well positioned for success, including on the ice.
“It’s a really important time in hockey history. It took a lot of these women making incremental steps, fighting court cases, disguising themselves as boys and men so they could get on the ice, finding out they could leverage companies so they could make equipment that fit women’s bodies compared to just fitting into their brother’s equipment,” he said. “Today, we have this incredible sport, with sold-out crowds (at Professional Women’s Hockey League games). It’s standing on the shoulders of all these unknown women. I hope people read the book and see the foundation of how we got to these incredible moments.”
Kennedy has some heavy hockey hitters on his side for his book. The forward is written by Geraldine Heaney, while Sami Jo Small penned the afterward. Both earned Olympic gold while playing for Canada.
“Ice in Their Veins” is available in numerous bookstores across southwestern Ontario. Kennedy is holding a book-signing event Nov. 30 at Turns & Tales in Chatham from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
