Hayley Wickenheiser

• Born: August 12, 1978
• Place of Birth: Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, Canada

Sport: Ice hockey

Early Life

Hayley Wickenheiser was born on August 12, 1978, in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, Canada. By the time she was able to walk, she had revealed a profound passion for ice hockey. At the age of three, she was playing shinny, a type of ice hockey, on her dad’s homemade rink—a small backyard clearing closed in by two-by-fours and flooded with water from the hose. By the age of seven, Wickenheiser was practicing her shots at nighttime. By eight, she was spending three to four hours a day practicing at the local rink. With her early heroes Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier in mind, Wickenheiser also practiced signing autographs: She believed she would play in the National Hockey League (NHL).

The Road to Excellence

As the only girl on the local hockey team, the Shaunavon Badgers, Wickenheiser had to work twice as hard as the boys to be accepted. Without a designated locker room, she suited up in the boiler room or the skate-sharpening cubicle. At hockey camps, she was under the scrutiny of skeptical audiences. Furthermore, Wickenheiser’s parents had to fight to enroll her at a boys-only hockey school in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. Nonetheless, Wickenheiser consistently proved her worth, earning the Most Valuable Player (MVP) award several years in a row.

The Champion Player

In 1990, Wickenheiser’s family moved to Calgary, Alberta, where Wickenheiser, an eleven-year-old prodigy, could play on the girls’ team coached by Shannon Miller, who became the first female head coach of the Canadian women’s Olympic team and who had created Calgary’s first girls’ ice-hockey team. In 1991, twelve-year-old Wickenheiser was playing in the under-seventeen (U-17) girls division at the Canada Summer Games, where she scored the winning goal in the gold-medal game and was named the tournament MVP. Three years later, at fifteen, she joined the 1993 women’s national team, the Calgary Oval X-Treme, where a team composed of women as old as thirty-five nicknamed its youngest player “High-Chair Hayley.”

By 1998, Wickenheiser was playing on Canada’s U-22 Women’s team, which won the gold medal at the U-22 world championships in Germany. At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, women’s ice hockey was a medal sport for the first time. Wickenheiser was the MVP on the team that had dominated international competition. However, at Nagano, the Canadian women’s hockey team lost to the US team and took the silver medal. Nonetheless, Bobby Clarke, the general manager of both the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers and the Canadian men’s team, extended an invitation to Wickenheiser to attend the Flyers’ rookie camp. Wickenheiser broke the gender barrier again, training with the Flyers for two years.

From 1999 through 2001, Wickenheiser played at the Esso Women’s National Hockey Championships and, despite a knee injury, helped her teams win two silver medals and a gold medal. In 2002, preparing to play against the United States in the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah, Wickenheiser announced that she would refuse to accept the silver medal, helping to motivate her team. On the pre-Olympic tour, she compiled thirty-six points in twenty-six games; at the Olympics, she kept her promise to her team by scoring one of the three goals in Team Canada’s 3-2 gold-medal victory. Wickenheiser was named tournament MVP again. The next year, 2003, she became the first woman to play on a men’s professional hockey team, joining HC Salamat in Kirkkonummi, Finland.

Continuing the Story

Wickenheiser made time for intellectual pursuits, studying science at the University of Calgary, and advancing to premed in 2006. In the springtime, she started playing softball to satisfy her athletic desires. In 1995, Wickenheiser made Canada’s junior national softball team. In 2000, she played on the Summer Olympic softball team in Sydney, Australia, becoming one of the few athletes to compete at both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.

Wickenheiser went on to gold-medal victory in three more Olympic Games with the Canadian women's national hockey team: Turin, Italy, in 2006; Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2010; and Sochi, Russia, in 2014. She was named MVP once more in Turin and was later selected to be the national flagbearer for the Sochi Opening Ceremony, where she ended up playing the final with a broken foot. Wickenheiser retired from hockey in 2017, having scored 168 career goals and 211 assists for the national team.

Wickenheiser also competed with an elite men's professional team in Sweden for the 2008–9 season before enrolling in the University of Calgary to study kinesiology in 2010. She played collegiate hockey for the institution and obtained her undergraduate degree in 2013. She went on to earn a master's degree and then pursue medicine there, beginning in mid-2018. That summer, she took the concurrent role of assistant director of player development for the Toronto Maple Leafs.

In 2019, Wickenheiser was inducted into the International Ice Hockey Hall of Fame. In 2022, she was inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame. A documentary released the same year, WICK, explored her contributions to hockey. Wickenheiser enjoyed business opportunities as well. In 2021, she designed a special women's hockey stick, the Wick Stick, in collaboration with Verbero Hockey. Wickenheiser also remained an elected member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Athletes’ Commission. In that capacity, and as a trainee emergency-room doctor, she criticized the IOC for asserting that the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games could continue as planned despite the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic then raging. Her action contributed to the Games' postponement until 2021.

Summary

The most recognized woman hockey star in Canada, Hayley Wickenheiser, was first in many categories. At twelve, she became the youngest Alberta women’s hockey team player at the 1991 Canada Winter Games. By age twenty, she had become the only woman to represent Canada at the Summer and Winter Olympics. In 2003, she became the first woman to score a goal in a men’s professional hockey league. In August 2005, she scored her hundredth career goal in international play. In December 2007, she was named the Bobbie Rosenfeld Award winner and was selected by the Canadian press as Canada’s Female Athlete of the Year. During her tenure with the national team, Wickenheiser led Canada to seven world championships and four Olympic gold medals, and she ranked first in Olympic scoring. Her career accomplishments include being named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2011 and being selected for the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame and the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2019.

Continuing to promote ice hockey for women, Wickenheiser started a hockey clinic for girls called “Wick One-on-One Tour,” which traveled to different cities. The purpose of the clinic was to enhance skill development and to encourage excellence in young girls hoping to enter a predominantly male sport. She has also been active in volunteer and charity work and helped develop a hockey stick designed for women. In 2022, Wick: The Hayley Wickenheiser Story, a documentary of Wickenheiser's life, was released, and she was promoted to assistant general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Bibliography

Etue, Elizabeth. Hayley Wickenheiser: Born to Play. Kids Can Press, 2005.

“Hayley Wickenheiser.” International Olympic Committee, 14 Dec. 2018, www.olympic.org/hayley-wickenheiser. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.‌

Prewitt, Alex. “Hayley Wickenheiser Using Unique Platform in Global Fight vs. COVID-19.” Sports Illustrated, 11 Apr. 2020, www.si.com/olympics/2020/04/11/hayley-wickenheiser-ice-hockey-medical-school-doctor-coronavirus. Accessed 18 Apr. 2023.‌ ‌

Rutherford, Kristina. “'The Most Intense Ever': How Wickenheiser Worked her Way to the Hall.” Sportsnet, www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/hayley-wickenheiser-hall-fame-big-read. Accessed 10 June 2024.

Shilton, Kristen. “Hayley Wickenheiser Pushing for Equality for Women in Hockey - One Stick at a Time.” ESPN, 7 Jan. 2022, www.espn.com/nhl/story/‗/id/33001049/hayley-wickenheiser-pushing-equality-women-hockey-one-stick. Accessed 10 June 2024.