When Nancy Schieffelin skated across the ice to join the men’s hockey team in the fall of 1964, she wasn’t necessarily thinking about the path she was paving for future generations of young girls.
“I don’t remember my first thoughts, but I just know if anybody had asked me to do that, I’d be totally excited,” Schieffelin said. “It would give me an opportunity to play.”
It was that decision to play, however, that ultimately fueled her mission to start a women’s hockey team at Pembroke College — the former women’s college in Brown University, now merged with Brown — which would become the first in the country.
“I didn’t have any idea,” she said. “So, I’m credited even though it was totally because I wanted to play on this beautiful sheet of ice. That’s the only thing I wanted.”
Schieffelin, a longtime resident of Belmont, first picked up a hockey stick at the age of 6. In her home state of New Jersey, she played pickup games with the boys in her neighborhood on ponds that froze over each winter. At 8 years old, she joined a family friend’s team, where she was still the only girl in the mix.
“My mother would have to drive me at 6 in the morning on Saturdays,” she said. “She’d be the mother of the only girl. It was, I think, embarrassing for her, but she did it and I’m grateful.”
A few years later, at around 14 or 15 years old, she joined a club, but soon after, things got “complicated.”
“I wanted to have normal relationships with boys, and it was not easy playing hockey, so I stopped,” Schieffelin said.
Then, as a freshman at Pembroke College in 1964, Schieffelin — who played varsity field hockey for the school — saw an opportunity to lace up her skates for the first time in years. Skating around the school’s “exquisite new rink,” she quickly got bored and asked for permission to bring a puck and a stick to the rink.
“The coach of the men’s team saw me fooling around by myself with a stick and a puck … and he asked if I would come to a practice for the men’s team,” Schieffelin said. “The men’s team was doing really poorly, and he wanted to get something fired up in them.”
They suited her up, with only the coach, the captain, and a reporter from the Providence Journal knowing she was on the ice with the men.
“After that I said to the gym teacher … I said we have to start a hockey team,” Schieffelin said. “She said sure.”
With the athletic director’s OK, Schieffelin began recruiting women from her field hockey team as well as some figure skaters, none of whom had ever played ice hockey. And so began the life of the Pembroke Pandas.
“We were just a ragtag group of women who were having a lot of fun,” she said.
In 1998, 34 years after a group of women formed what would become the first collegiate women’s hockey team in the United States, the U.S. Olympic Women’s Ice Hockey team participated in its first Olympics. The team took home the gold.
Life After the Pandas
After her sophomore year of college, Schieffelin attended Freedom Summer, a campaign launched by civil rights activists to register Black voters.
“That changed my life totally,” she said.
Schieffelin dropped out of college, letting hockey fall by the wayside, and moved to Boston, where she worked in Roxbury for a year before going back to school at Boston University.
“Eventually, I can’t remember when, I picked up a stick and started playing again,” she said. “I played through my 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and early 70s with various teams — teams like Motherpuckers, the Ice Sharks, and the Zambeauties.”
It was the competitive nature and team aspect of the sport, the speed and the plays, that kept her coming back, even as a kid when she had no other girls her age to play with.
In 1981, she moved to Belmont, where her kids went through the public school system. She became an avid fan of the girls team at Belmont High School.
“To go to these Belmont games and see these girls — it’s just very exciting to see that,” she said. “Just sports, for girls, period. When I was a kid, that was just not encouraged.”
Though she is dubbed the “founding mother” of U.S. women’s collegiate ice hockey — which opened the doors for all levels of play for women and girls — Schieffelin is quick to acknowledge the people who followed in her footsteps.
“Though I get the credit for the idea, the mobilisation and getting permissions, most of the credit, I think, should go to the people who followed me, because they were the ones that did the fundraising to get the money to pay for recruitment, or to lobby for more space for the women,” she said.
A few of the women to follow in Schieffelin’s footsteps happen to also be Belmont natives and members of the Class of 1996.
“[Schieffelin] is a great person,” said Allison Haley, who grew up playing recreational hockey in Belmont. “She didn’t make it readily known all the work she did. Mostly she was supporting us in the moment, versus talking about her history. … Like many things in the world, when you have the opportunities, you sometimes forget the history behind them and that there was sometimes a fight to get access.”
After aging out of the recreational program, Haley played with a then-newly formed club team for teen girls — they had ice time, but didn’t play other schools. Eventually, Haley, Kaitlin McGaw, and Meredith Stella petitioned Belmont High School to create a girls hockey team, citing Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination. By her sophomore year, the girls received the approval and funding they needed to get the program off the ground.
“The team was a cornerstone of my high school experience,” Haley said. “The fact we had people like me who grew up playing … and people who’d never played before, it was super fun to have this collection of girls … learning a sport and enjoying the sport.”
According to her father, Mark Haley, chair of the Municipal Skating Rink Building Committee, Belmont High was the first public school to have a program for girls hockey. Allison Haley said many of the teammates she had in high school continue to play to this day, herself included.
“You see girls lugging around their bags and their sticks, and it’s just a common sight, but that didn’t become common really until the 2000s,” Schieffelin said. “I would think once the Olympics featured women in ‘98, that kind of put it on the map.”
According to Eloise McGaw, Kaitlin’s mother, the success her daughter and friends had in starting a high school team inspired the start of a Sunday night club at the former Viglirolo Skating Rink on Sunday nights, where she and other women, including Schieffelin, played.
‘It’s a Commitment’
Though she no longer plays, Schieffelin now coaches — though she uses that term lightly — the next generation of young boys and girls in the game of hockey.
At the nonprofit SCORE Boston Hockey, a diversity program started by the Boston Police Department, Schieffelin teaches children who may otherwise not have the opportunity to play the sport. Hockey is expensive, she said, and historically a mostly white sport.
“The program recruited kids from Roxbury, Dorchester, and other parts of the city,” she said. “I’ve been coaching them for about 25 years.”
Many of the kids in her program are girls, Schieffelin said. Right now, in fact, there are more girls than boys.
“It’s so cool,” she said. “It’s so cool to see these kids really improve and really seem to love it.”
Schieffelin is particularly inspired by the families who come from cultures where girls aren’t necessarily thought of as athletes.
“It’s not in the cultures they are coming from, for girls to be [playing sports],” she said. “Many of the families that bring their kids to the SCORE Boston program are coming from the Caribbean or from Africa or the Middle East, and none of the parents have even skated much less played a sport. I have to hand it to them, they’re bringing their little kid. It’s a commitment.”
