USA Hockey Magazine

When it came to goaltending in women's hockey, Kelly Dyer Hayes and Erin Whitten Hamlen, the first two American- born women to play pro hockey, timing— both good and bad—was everything. Fo r D y e r H ay e s, t h e st o r y b e g i n s i n Acton, Mass. For Whitten Hamlen, sepa- rated by a few years, a few hundred miles and by their playing styles, but fast friends once they met while playing for Team USA in 1992, the story begins in Glens Falls, N.Y. For both, a passion for goaltending and not taking no for an answer was the answer. It was a passion that took each of them up and down and around all sorts of places they couldn't have imagined from Acton or Glens Falls. I n t h o s e d a y s, i t w a s t h e d i f f e r e n c e between an unclear path and no path. By the time their careers were complete, there were a lot of firsts between them, and while those firsts may not have made life easy for female goalies, they undeniably are central in telling the story of how those paths formed. Thanks in large part to Dyer Hayes and Whitten Hamlen, elite female goaltenders in the United States were no rumor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were progress. Progress in different forms, maybe, but through the twists of hockey with boys and men, then the turns of USA Hockey that ended for each before they would have liked, it was all fueled by a very similar and unceasing passion for playing the very best hockey they could. As was often the case for a girl born in 1966, starting out on skates meant figure skates for Dyer Hayes. "My brother David was two years older, so we're at the same arena," she says. "He would go to the right and I would go to the left. And the rink on the right looked like way more fun. But there were no other girls out there, so I just kept sort of asking and asking." It wasn't long before she was playing hockey, which she started at the age of 11 in the Assabet Valley program after figure skating wasn't working out so well for someone almost fully grown to 5-foot-11 by then. Getting in the goal was another story, however, and a story that also begins to reveal the force of will that helped fuel the fire. "I had to beg to play goalie," Dyer Hayes recalls. "One time, our goalie didn't show up, so I just hopped in net in regular player equipment and never came out of the goal after that." From there, she filled in as a goalie for the boys' team in Acton-Boxboro Youth Hockey, which led, eventually and some- what famously, to playing alongside Tom Barrasso, Jeff Norton and Bob Sweeney into high school. Why high school boys' hockey with some of the most competitive teams in the hock- ey hotbed state of Massachusetts? "I never even questioned it," Dyer Hayes says. "People have said, 'Oh, you're blazing a new trail.' Well, no. I just wanted to play hockey. It just seemed like the natural step. I never even thought of not doing it. After 26 // JUNE 2022 T he Goalie Issue USAHOCKEYMAGAZINE.COM Erin Whitten Hamlen, left, and Kelly Dyer Hayes were fueled by their love of the game and the goalie position, which helped them enjoy great careers as players and as pioneers. PHOTOS BY Jim Stankiewicz; USA Hockey Magazine Archives W W

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