University of New Hampshire Athletics
Trailblazers Fostered A Tradition of Hockey Excellence
1/19/2017 3:44:00 PM | Women's Ice Hockey, UNH Insider
The very first University of New Hampshire women's hockey team – the trailblazers who are being honored Saturday at the Whittemore Center as part of Alumni Day and a weekend series against Maine – drew a tough assignment in their inaugural contest.
UNH played as a club team for a few seasons, but now, in early December of 1977, this was the real deal.
Gail Bigglestone, the forward-thinking leader of the UNH women's athletic department – the department was divided into two parts in those days – had shepherded the program through the process to become a varsity sport and had brought in Russ McCurdy as coach and the opening game was at hand.
The Wildcats squared off against Colby College, a power in college hockey at the time, in a challenging first game in Snively Arena.
Let the winning begin.
The new team on the block knocked off the well-established program, 8-4.
It was the start of a remarkable debut season – more accurately a remarkable first decade - for the Wildcats.
Those early years are being celebrated as a focus of Alumni Day on Saturday. The weekend begins with a game against Maine on Friday at 7 p.m. at the Whittemore Center.
Alumni Day festivities will be held Saturday before the weekend series wraps up with a 4 p.m. game against the Black Bears.
Tickets for all UNH home games are available by CLICKING HERE, by calling 603-862-4000 and at the Whittemore Center box office.
The first UNH team in the 1977-78 season featured a strong goalie in Donna Nystrom Martineau out of Nashua and a prolific first line of Gail Griffith, Melissa White and Kathy Bryant that quickly earned the nickname the GAS Line – for "goal-a-shift" because it seemed they were scoring at about that pace.
The Wildcats moved on from the opening win to beat Boston University and then edged Providence, another of the powerful teams in the early days, by a score of 5-4.
Soon came another huge test in a trip to Ithaca, N.Y., to take on Cornell. The Ivies and Cornell were also among the leaders in pushing women's hockey.
The Wildcats were undermanned and had only six forwards and three defensemen on the trip because several players stayed behind with the flu.
But by now they were a confident bunch.
"Someone had taken a bedsheet from the hotel we stayed in and written, 'UNH - Best in the East, No. 1 in the East,' or something like that on it and tucked it in their bag in case we won," Martineau said. "They were the only other team we needed to beat to be able to say that."
Cornell, though, jumped on the Wildcats early and led 2-0 after one period.
UNH rallied for a 5-3 triumph.
"The sheet got pulled out and opened up after the game and we took pictures and then put it away," Martineau said. "Russ always said that when the game was done it was on to the next one. But there's a picture of that out there somewhere."
The Wildcats kept winning the next one. They won every next one that opening season and finished with a 15-0 record.
They were just getting warmed up.
Those trailblazers never lost a game.
In year two, the Wildcats had a 16-0-1 record that included a 6-6 tie against Providence. The next two seasons the team finished with records of 20-0 and 21-0 and won a pair of Eastern Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women championships, the women's national championship of the time.
"The women at the beginning had to work really hard just to convince people that they should have a team," said UNH coach Hilary Witt. "At first it was club and just to fight for the club team was a lot for them. When I look back over the decades and how the game has changed, if it wasn't for these women, there's no way we would be where we are here today. Women playing sports in general in the '70s wasn't as popular, especially hockey. It's pretty incredible that they did what they did. They used old equipment and scrounged for any kind of equipment and did everything they could to get a little bit of money to do some things."
Some things they were unable to do.
Lesley Visser – then a sportswriter and a pioneer in journalism herself – wrote about that first team under a headline in The Boston Globe that read, "15 and 0, Nowhere to Go."
There was no national tournament, but McCurdy's team had been invited to the season-ending Cornell Invitational.
There was no money left in the budget and the team stayed home.
Eleven schools had varsity programs at the time, UNH professor emeritus and hockey historian Stephen Hardy wrote in "Coolest Game."
The Wildcats set a tone and were the best right off the bat. The program went 73 games – rolling to a 72-0-1 record – before losing its first game. The Wildcats won six titles from 1980 to 1988 when the ECAC took over running the championships.
Robin Balducci was among the second wave of hockey pioneers at UNH with teammates such as Kathy Kazmaier and Lauren Apollo. McCurdy recruited Balducci to play hockey for the Wildcats and she came to Durham in 1981 and ended up starring not only on the ice but in field hockey and lacrosse as well.
She's been UNH's field hockey coach for more than a quarter of a century now and earlier this month was inducted into the National Field Hockey Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
"When I think of hockey here at UNH, it was well ahead of its time and that was thanks to Gail Bigglestone," Balducci said. "She was woman who was a real forward thinker. What I remember most was that if Russ McCurdy was watching you as a recruit and if you had a chance to play at UNH, it was a no brainer. If you could play here, you wanted to come."
Balducci loved being on the team.
"It was one of the greatest experiences I had here at UNH," she said. "There was just such pride in the culture, such pride in the history of it and the longevity of success, that was just so meaningful as an undergrad. It was an athlete being proud of something you were part of, that history. And Russ McCurdy is still to this day one of the best coaches I've had."
Witt knows the history and looks forward to the chance to meet more of the history makers this weekend.
"One of the major reasons I wanted this job, quite frankly, was because I know that UNH has always been one of the leaders and supporters of women's hockey and for me that's important," Witt said. "People forget, or never even knew, that it was UNH, the Ivies, Northeastern, Providence, Colby. Those were the schools that from the beginning really supported women's hockey. It wasn't Minnesota. It wasn't Wisconsin. It wasn't Ohio State. It wasn't all those other schools. I wish people could really understand that and have that history because if it wasn't for a place like UNH, Wisconsin probably doesn't have hockey right now."
This weekend, the UNH trailblazers get their due.
"I'm excited," Witt said. "I think it's going to be cool for not only me but for our players to see this. It's not all that often that the people that start something get recognized. I hope these women know that we're incredibly grateful for what they did. We're lucky to be here and UNH has always supported women's hockey and I know it will continue to. It's just a special place and those women, you've got to credit them for it."
Martineau - who is 57 and teaches in Sanbornville and has UNH season tickets plays goalie for the Great Bay Riptides in Rochester - and several of her teammates will be the guests of honor.
They'll talk about the golden days and no doubt share stories of Lady Olivia Puck, McCurdy's black and white cat that in truth was not a big fan of coming to the rink, but made an appearance in the team photos of the early days.
They'll likely talk about the Cornell win that helped solidify their "Best in the East" claims and they may even take note of how today's players have a more structured approach to what they do, including preseason workouts.
"They do a lot more off ice stuff than we ever did," Martineau said. "They're pretty much year-round. We'd run over to New Hampshire Hall and shoot pucks against the brick wall and get yelled at by the dancers inside. They'd be trying to listen to their music and they'd be hearing pucks hitting the wall."
They heard the sounds of hockey's trailblazers.
Allen Lessels
@UNHInsider
Allen.Lessels@unh.edu
UNH played as a club team for a few seasons, but now, in early December of 1977, this was the real deal.
Gail Bigglestone, the forward-thinking leader of the UNH women's athletic department – the department was divided into two parts in those days – had shepherded the program through the process to become a varsity sport and had brought in Russ McCurdy as coach and the opening game was at hand.
The Wildcats squared off against Colby College, a power in college hockey at the time, in a challenging first game in Snively Arena.
Let the winning begin.
The new team on the block knocked off the well-established program, 8-4.
It was the start of a remarkable debut season – more accurately a remarkable first decade - for the Wildcats.
Those early years are being celebrated as a focus of Alumni Day on Saturday. The weekend begins with a game against Maine on Friday at 7 p.m. at the Whittemore Center.
Alumni Day festivities will be held Saturday before the weekend series wraps up with a 4 p.m. game against the Black Bears.
Tickets for all UNH home games are available by CLICKING HERE, by calling 603-862-4000 and at the Whittemore Center box office.
| Prior to varsity status
The struggle to establish a women's ice hockey program at UNH began in the 1970s when a group of women petitioned to the campus recreation office to accomplish its goal of forming a recognized women's ice hockey team. The petition made its way to the Vice President for Student Affairs at which point the team was granted club sport status with the ability to utilize ice time, equipment and a modest budget. A year later, the Director of Club Sports worked with the Director of Women's Athletics to promote the program to a fulltime varsity status, allowing the program to have a larger budget, and play an official 15-game schedule. The team was among the first 11 varsity athletic women's ice hockey programs in the nation and performed at a high level, winning six championship titles during the next decade.
|
The first UNH team in the 1977-78 season featured a strong goalie in Donna Nystrom Martineau out of Nashua and a prolific first line of Gail Griffith, Melissa White and Kathy Bryant that quickly earned the nickname the GAS Line – for "goal-a-shift" because it seemed they were scoring at about that pace.
The Wildcats moved on from the opening win to beat Boston University and then edged Providence, another of the powerful teams in the early days, by a score of 5-4.
Soon came another huge test in a trip to Ithaca, N.Y., to take on Cornell. The Ivies and Cornell were also among the leaders in pushing women's hockey.
The Wildcats were undermanned and had only six forwards and three defensemen on the trip because several players stayed behind with the flu.
But by now they were a confident bunch.
"Someone had taken a bedsheet from the hotel we stayed in and written, 'UNH - Best in the East, No. 1 in the East,' or something like that on it and tucked it in their bag in case we won," Martineau said. "They were the only other team we needed to beat to be able to say that."
Cornell, though, jumped on the Wildcats early and led 2-0 after one period.
UNH rallied for a 5-3 triumph.
"The sheet got pulled out and opened up after the game and we took pictures and then put it away," Martineau said. "Russ always said that when the game was done it was on to the next one. But there's a picture of that out there somewhere."
The Wildcats kept winning the next one. They won every next one that opening season and finished with a 15-0 record.
They were just getting warmed up.
Those trailblazers never lost a game.
In year two, the Wildcats had a 16-0-1 record that included a 6-6 tie against Providence. The next two seasons the team finished with records of 20-0 and 21-0 and won a pair of Eastern Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women championships, the women's national championship of the time.
"The women at the beginning had to work really hard just to convince people that they should have a team," said UNH coach Hilary Witt. "At first it was club and just to fight for the club team was a lot for them. When I look back over the decades and how the game has changed, if it wasn't for these women, there's no way we would be where we are here today. Women playing sports in general in the '70s wasn't as popular, especially hockey. It's pretty incredible that they did what they did. They used old equipment and scrounged for any kind of equipment and did everything they could to get a little bit of money to do some things."
Some things they were unable to do.
Lesley Visser – then a sportswriter and a pioneer in journalism herself – wrote about that first team under a headline in The Boston Globe that read, "15 and 0, Nowhere to Go."
There was no national tournament, but McCurdy's team had been invited to the season-ending Cornell Invitational.
There was no money left in the budget and the team stayed home.
Eleven schools had varsity programs at the time, UNH professor emeritus and hockey historian Stephen Hardy wrote in "Coolest Game."
The Wildcats set a tone and were the best right off the bat. The program went 73 games – rolling to a 72-0-1 record – before losing its first game. The Wildcats won six titles from 1980 to 1988 when the ECAC took over running the championships.
Robin Balducci was among the second wave of hockey pioneers at UNH with teammates such as Kathy Kazmaier and Lauren Apollo. McCurdy recruited Balducci to play hockey for the Wildcats and she came to Durham in 1981 and ended up starring not only on the ice but in field hockey and lacrosse as well.
She's been UNH's field hockey coach for more than a quarter of a century now and earlier this month was inducted into the National Field Hockey Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
"When I think of hockey here at UNH, it was well ahead of its time and that was thanks to Gail Bigglestone," Balducci said. "She was woman who was a real forward thinker. What I remember most was that if Russ McCurdy was watching you as a recruit and if you had a chance to play at UNH, it was a no brainer. If you could play here, you wanted to come."
Balducci loved being on the team.
"It was one of the greatest experiences I had here at UNH," she said. "There was just such pride in the culture, such pride in the history of it and the longevity of success, that was just so meaningful as an undergrad. It was an athlete being proud of something you were part of, that history. And Russ McCurdy is still to this day one of the best coaches I've had."
Witt knows the history and looks forward to the chance to meet more of the history makers this weekend.
"One of the major reasons I wanted this job, quite frankly, was because I know that UNH has always been one of the leaders and supporters of women's hockey and for me that's important," Witt said. "People forget, or never even knew, that it was UNH, the Ivies, Northeastern, Providence, Colby. Those were the schools that from the beginning really supported women's hockey. It wasn't Minnesota. It wasn't Wisconsin. It wasn't Ohio State. It wasn't all those other schools. I wish people could really understand that and have that history because if it wasn't for a place like UNH, Wisconsin probably doesn't have hockey right now."
This weekend, the UNH trailblazers get their due.
"I'm excited," Witt said. "I think it's going to be cool for not only me but for our players to see this. It's not all that often that the people that start something get recognized. I hope these women know that we're incredibly grateful for what they did. We're lucky to be here and UNH has always supported women's hockey and I know it will continue to. It's just a special place and those women, you've got to credit them for it."
Martineau - who is 57 and teaches in Sanbornville and has UNH season tickets plays goalie for the Great Bay Riptides in Rochester - and several of her teammates will be the guests of honor.
They'll talk about the golden days and no doubt share stories of Lady Olivia Puck, McCurdy's black and white cat that in truth was not a big fan of coming to the rink, but made an appearance in the team photos of the early days.
They'll likely talk about the Cornell win that helped solidify their "Best in the East" claims and they may even take note of how today's players have a more structured approach to what they do, including preseason workouts.
"They do a lot more off ice stuff than we ever did," Martineau said. "They're pretty much year-round. We'd run over to New Hampshire Hall and shoot pucks against the brick wall and get yelled at by the dancers inside. They'd be trying to listen to their music and they'd be hearing pucks hitting the wall."
They heard the sounds of hockey's trailblazers.
Allen Lessels
@UNHInsider
Allen.Lessels@unh.edu
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