“We’re starting to build the team and starting to have a really good foundation,” said Haiek. “We’ve been kind of making a community of women and girls play ice hockey, and we’re starting to get recognized as ice hockey players. I think what we need is more ice, because we don’t really have ice hockey rinks to play in [there are just two indoor rinks Argentina-wide]. So I guess that’s our next step. We’re doing everything that we can with the little ice that we have.”
Similarly, Dosa Alkindi, the captain of the women’s national team of Oman, knows about stepping up to fight for hockey dreams in the face of adversity. The Middle Eastern nation of 5.2 million first participated in the IIHF’s World Girls’ Ice Hockey Weekend in 2021, which was a challenging time for the international hockey community and the world due to the pandemic. Today, with just 39 registered female players in Oman, strong leadership is needed to nurture new talent.
“I started to skate when I was 12 years old, and then we were fighting to get a girls’ hockey team,” recalled Alkindi. “It was so hard. After seven years – we finally started up before [the] Covid [pandemic], and then Covid started and everything shut down. So after Covid, in 2021 we started our club, and we were established [properly] in 2023.”
Looking to the future, it will take a combination of great player leadership, great coaching, and greatly enhanced access to training, facilities, and other resources for these countries to reach the next level. Players always appreciate homegrown talent – 18-year-old New Zealand prospect Sophie Sam, for instance, cites fellow Kiwi defender Rebecca Lilly, 26, as a “real inspiration.”
Down the road, we may discover that a future peer of Knight, Marie-Philip Poulin, or Jenni Hiirikoski was on hand for this year’s Player Leadership Seminar. Fingers crossed!