St-Pierre and Swirsky, 2000
About paying women’s hockey players better
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I’m a day late, but that’s because I decided to save this one for Canada Day.
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“When I played, we used to spank McGill like it was a joke,” Concordia Stingers alumna Corinne Swirsky said, recently, about the cross-town rivalry.
She’s right. They did. Swirsky led the charge. And, when Canadian Interuniversity Athletics Union, now known as U Sports, added women’s hockey—finally!—in the 1997-1998 season, it was no surprise to see the dominant Stingers roll through and end up in the CIAU championship game.
Hosted at Ed Meagher Arena, Concordia’s home ice, the Stingers took on the Toronto Lady Blues. They were heavily favoured, and Toronto was tired.
Swirsky was the player of the year that season, and, also, the two seasons that followed. Her teammates Anne Rodrigue and Delaney Collins joined her on the 1998 All-Canadian Team of university all-stars.
Her Stingers were undefeated in Canadian competition, heading in. And, well, nothing changed.
Catherine Bertrand put her team on the board, just over eight minutes into the game, and Marie-Claude Pelletier made it 2-0 by the end of the first. In the third, the score became 3-0 before Toronto ended Concordia goalie Jessika Audet’s 142-minute goalless streak. An empty-netter made it 4-1, the final score. I summarized a game in a pretty boring paragraph. But, in a way, the game was mechanical that way. Concordia came in. They played aggressive hockey and they beat down the Toronto Lady Blues. They were the better team, and it’s as easy as that sentence to understand that.
“Concordia women’s hockey has made a statement and the country will now pay attention,” Head Coach Les Lawton said post-game.
“When I played, we used to spank McGill like it was a joke,” Concordia Stingers alumna Corinne Swirsky said, recently, about the cross-town rivalry. “Then, they got Kim St-Pierre. Then we saw Concordia get beat!"
It wasn’t only Concordia. Kim St-Pierre bested everyone. She is an absolutely legendary goalie, just last week earning the call to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
And, when Concordia fell to Alberta in the 1999-2000 CIAU playoffs, there was still a Montreal school in the championship game. (They would also lose to Alberta, but St-Pierre would steal away that Championship MVP trophy from the two-time-reigning-winner Swirsky. St-Pierre allowed only the 2 championship goals on 106 shots for the whole tournament.)
Kim St-Pierre, while earning her degree in kinesiology, “single-handedly turned the women’s hockey program around,” which is something Earl Zukerman, McGill Sports Information Officer, wrote in his article about St-Pierre’s Hall of Fame induction. I’d say, she did a heck of a lot more than that.
It didn’t make the Toronto Star on Sunday, November 16, 2003. They seemed focused on that night’s Grey Cup championship instead. But, the night before, St-Pierre won a game of men’s hockey.
In her fifth year with McGill, she spent most of her time with the men’s team. She was used to playing with boys, having it done almost exclusively until her first season with the Martlets in 1999.
“For me, I transitioned to the women’s game only at McGill University, and that changed my life,” she said. “That day, everything opened up in front of me.”
There wasn’t much opportunity for women’s hockey—the first Olympics for it coming in the same year as that first CIAU Championship in 1998—until then, anyway.
And, so, called to action on November 15, 2003, St-Pierre kept Ryerson at bay. The McGill team defeated the Rams by a score of 5-2. St-Pierre became the first women’s goalie to win a game of men’s hockey in Canadian Interuniversity Sport history (the league had been renamed from CIAU to avoid confusion with track and field as well as labour movements).
Nothing says Montreal-Toronto rivalry like McGill-Ryerson, am I right? I am not.
When Swirsky graduated and left the Stingers ahead of the 2000-01 season, she bounced around. She went to Calgary, and joined the Oval X-Treme before hopping over to a new team called the Strathmore Rockies. She never cracked the national team, saying that she was “always a bubble player.”
Swirsky was just a little early for professional success.
“I look back at where we were starting with the X-Treme, and when Samantha started the Rockies, where we are now is what we were dreaming of,” Swirsky said. “Players are now getting paid a little bit and being treated more as athletes instead of having to choose between your job and the game.”
St-Pierre is well-known for her national team successes, and her professional career included stints with a very successful Canadiennes de Montreal team in the now-defunct Canadian Women’s Hockey League.
So, yeah, while they’re getting paid “a little bit,” they’re fighting for the men’s hockey league to recognize them, maybe partner with them. Women hockey players now are hoping for the potential to make this a career.
“What we want, what we’ve always wanted, is to have a sustainable league, something to be proud of,” Liz Knox, former goalie and co-chair of the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association told Lindsay Gibbs at ThinkProgress in May 2019. “Billions goes into global hockey. We don’t have pennies.”
Swirsky and St-Pierre made history, set records, skated circles around competition, stopped pucks like nobody had before. There’s a long history of incredible hockey players in Canada, both men and women. And, while we’ve seen some progress in the professional sphere, we haven’t seen as much as we should. I think of Les Lawson’s words here: Women’s hockey has made statement after statement, and the country should pay more attention.
Relevant Links and Sources
Here’s a link to the Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association website. Here’s one to the National Women’s Hockey League, which recently expanded to Toronto. None of the current PWHPA members see the NWHL as viable for the future.
You can read about some of that in Lindsay Gibbs’s archived ThinkProgress article here. Gibbs also runs an excellent women’s sports newsletter called PowerPlays that I highly recommend.
Here’s some biographical and statistical info about Kim St-Pierre. And here’s a U Sports article about what Corinne Swirsky is up to, which is where I got Swirsky’s quotes found in my article.
A March 2, 1998 Toronto Star article by writer David Grossman, which, accordingly, frames the championship game as a Toronto defeat served as the basis for the play-by-play info in the first story.
Correction: The original email said that St-Pierre allowed 2 goals on 107 shots. This has been corrected to the actual number: 106. I regret the original error.
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