Girls’ hockey league reveals a sports gap
Sandra Tan’s story on a possible local ice hockey league for girls underscores the painfully slow progress some womens’ sports have made since the passing of Title IX.
In 1971, before Title IX, my daughter Angela, at age five, was used as a backstop by her brother so that his slap shots wouldn’t bang against our garage door. She took an interest in becoming a goalie, but there were no girls’ leagues in Western New York. She persisted, until she became an all-star goalie on several boys house and travel teams, and she was the winning goalie on the 1984 Amherst Central High School championship boys’ club-hockey team.
That athletic experience stood her in good stead, and eventually, she was inducted to the athletic halls of fame at Amherst as well as her college alma mater, Nazareth of Rochester.
How many more young women could have excelled at their chosen sport over the past 40 years, if it hadn’t taken so long to even consider a girls’ ice hockey league?
Angelo F. Coniglio
Amherst
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