USA Hockey Magazine

I graduated, I found out a few things that I didn't know at the time—like there were some meetings and discussions about me trying out. My parents may have just kept that from me, which was probably nice, because I was just going out and playing." A few years behind Dyer Hayes, Whitten Hamlen also grew up hockey mad, and her hometown certainly helped. There were ponds and backyard rinks reliably freezing every winter, street hockey games in the summer, and the Adirondack Red Wings winning three Calder Cups in the 1980s. "That was really when I was totally into hockey, fully engulfed," says Whitten Hamlen, who was born in 1971. "For me, I grew up with hockey kind of in my blood. It was just the environment I was in. I spent a lot of time collecting hockey cards and playing and going to backyard rinks, and spending hours upon hours until it was too dark and you couldn't feel your toes anymore. It was hockey all year round." Whitten Hamlen didn't spend much time thinking about trailblazing, either. " I d e f i n i t e l y j u st p l a y e d ," s h e sa y s. "That's all I did." By high school, red carpets weren't exactly being rolled out to invite Whitten Hamlen to become the first girl to play boys' hockey at Glens Falls High School. As with Dyer Hayes, Whitten Hamlen would need the forces of will and talent to take that next step herself. But, first, a physical fitness test for a player who since the age of 8 had been lugging around old-school goalie equip- ment for the better part of a decade and playing with boys at not-quite five-and- a-half feet tall. "I had to go to a fitness test that none of the boys had to go through," Whitten Hamlen recalls. "But I get done with that, and I killed it, of course. They were, like, 'Yeah, she can play. It's OK, she's not frag- ile.' And I remember thinking at the time that it was odd. But, at this point, it was just the end goal that mattered." Pushing in those days was just as much a part of playing, it seems. "My mom, at one point, tried to talk me out of hockey," says Whitten Hamlen. "And I'm, like, 'Not in my makeup, mom. It's not going to happen.'" In the early '80s and into the '90s, the best female college hockey players had essentially one league, the ECAC, and the very best were playing for one of three schools—Providence College, the University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University. From 1984 to 1998, no other team appeared in the wom- en's hockey ECAC final. When it came time to look at colleges, however, no one was beating down Whitten Hamlen's door. Certainly not the way things are today in her current job as a Division I head coach at Merrimack College. I've been extremely fortunate and I have tremendous gratitude for the opportunities that unfolded in front of me and in front of my life." JUNE 2022 USAHOCKEYMAGAZINE.COM // 27 P I O N E E R I N G P U C K S T O P P E R S – KELLY DYER HAYES

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