Edge of History: Building Women's Hockey in Buffalo

Buffalo's HarborCenter development is, for all intents and purposes, a cathedral to the game of hockey. Completed in 2014 at a cost somewhere north of $200 million, it is among the most expensive construction projects in the city's history, home to two rinks, a Marriott-operated hotel, the (716) sports bar and restaurant, IMPACT Sports Performance, the Academy of Hockey, a smattering of retail spaces, and a special Sabres-themed Tim Horton's, replete with blue and gold signage, Buffalo Aud timeline, and Horton hagiography. Located in puck-crazed Western New York, which is proximate to Canada and a day's drive from major hockey hotbeds in New England and the Upper Midwest (OK, a long day, but still doable), Buffalo is perfectly positioned to become the place in the U.S. for hockey. Iced Mecca.

The HarborCenter has already hosted the IIHF world championships and the NHL Combine; it's also home to the Buffalo Beauts, one of four founding franchises in the new National Women's Hockey League, and as such will host the first-ever NWHL All-Star Game this weekend. Buffalo captain and local legend Emily Pfalzer will also serve as one of the All-Star Game's captains. Struggling in their inaugural season, the Beauts' currently sit in third place in the standings.

There is the general awareness that history is being made here. These are the first professional women's hockey players in North America; they are pioneering a dream they had thought would never come true, establishing a level for all of the little girls who are following them, sticks trailing and skates loosely laced. They recognize, even welcome, the honors and challenges that come with their position, and the word "history" is bandied about almost as much as "hockey" and "Boston," an underlying current as swift and unstoppable as the Niagara River.

Dani Rylan, the NWHL's 28-year-old founder and commissioner, is constantly evoked in conversation about the league. Not only has Rylan materialized an entirely new, albeit small, level of organized women's hockey on this side of the Atlantic, but she managed to do it, remarkably, in roughly a year.

"To be honest with you, it's the only speed I know," Rylan tells me via phone from New York City, where the league is based. "In my mind it's taken forever." Rylan attributes the celerity of her endeavor to a tight and focused league front office and the small size of the women's hockey world, a place where a few well-placed phone calls can create entire coaching staffs. Such was the case in Buffalo, where Rylan personally contacted each of the trio in charge of building the franchise from the ground up.

Linda Mroz got the call last spring while looking for a new helmet at the local Harley-Davidson store. Well, actually, she got the message: she had left her phone in the car and returned to find voicemails from Rylan. Mroz called her back, and Rylan began to fill her in on her dream of a professional women's hockey league.

"She started telling me all about it, being part of the NWHL and being part of the Beauts," Mroz says. "My husband's in the car and she is on speaker phone, and he's hitting me, just mouthing, 'Oh my god!' and I was like, 'Shut. Up.'" At first, Mroz thought she was being asked to coach or play, but Rylan informed the former Niagara University blueliner that she was being tabbed for general manager. After confirming the position was a paid one, Mroz was in.

Mroz's path through the sport has been shaped by her gender, an experience that has left an indelible mark on her life and career. A Buffalo-area native and a born hockey player, she first took to the ice, she says, at 18 months ("I had a very ambitious dad"). By four, she was playing organized hockey.

"When I started playing travel, I was the only girl in the league," Mroz says. "There's girls leagues now, but when I played, it wasn't until I was about 13 or 14 that I made the transition to playing girls."

Mroz attended the Nichols School, a private high school in Buffalo that had one of the few varsity girl's hockey programs in existence in the 1990s. "My dad sold his 1962 'Vette for me to go play," she says. She also kept playing with the boys travel teams until she was 18; on those, she was simply another player.

"Just growing up with all those guys, it wasn't until I was like 16, 17 that they actually realized I was a girl," she says. "I had two jobs: They would dump the puck in the corner, and I would go and destroy whoever was in the corner and I would pass it out to my center and they would score, so they got all the glory. That was my job. I was the bully of the team."

It wasn't all smooth sailing, however. "I think the hardest thing that I had to deal with growing up was being cut from a team because I was a girl," Mroz says. "Parents didn't think it was appropriate to have me in the locker room.

"My one team, I was a captain, and we were at Buff State and the college didn't want me in the locker room with the boys. Liability issues. So they stuck me in a referee room. And I was getting dressed and there was a knock at the door. I opened the door and my teammates were all standing there with their gear. And they were like, 'We are either coming in there, or we are going to smuggle you in our bags. You're our captain, you're our teammate. You are not a girl, you're our teammate. So get your stuff.'" They packed her in a goalie bag and snuck her into the locker room.

"That was awesome for me, to be able to break that type of stereotype," Mroz says. "I'm not that fragile female on the bench, or on the line. I didn't have a gender when I played with them. As soon as I put that jersey on, I was part of the team."

That is why Mroz said yes to the Buffalo Beauts.

Buffalo coach Shelley Looney has a similar story, and faced the same sort of challenges as a female hockey player growing up in Michigan.

"Thank God I had these coaches that were like, 'I don't think there's a rule against it, so OK.' And that's how my career started," she says. "I played boy hockey for seven years, until all the sudden we started to find other girls who played hockey and we put a team together."

Looney wound up at Northeastern for college partially because they were one of the few programs that had scholarships to offer; she got a half-scholarship, which was "huge back then." In 1995, the year she graduated, the IOC named women's hockey as an official sport beginning with the 1998 Games in Nagano. Looney was on the US national team when they won their first and only gold medal at those Olympics, and scored the go-ahead goal in the final.

Looney played one season in the original NWHL, a Canadian league active from 1999 to 2007 and unaffiliated with the current iteration, before beginning her coaching career, which included work with U.S. Hockey's U-17 boys' program. She moved to Buffalo last year to become Director of Hockey for the Buffalo Bisons' youth organization, where she still oversees 24 teams for both the boys and girls while working for the Beauts.

Looney is joined on the coaching staff by Ric Seiling, a former Buffalo Sabre and Detroit Red Wing with an anthracite sweep of hair and a strong jaw. "They asked me if I had any interest," Seiling told me, "and I said, 'Well the best group of students I've ever taught happened to be women,' and that piqued my interest to go back and work with women some more."

Women's ice hockey is nominally different from the men's game—namely in the lack of open ice hitting allowed and similar body checking limitations—but the strategies and skills remain predominately the same. While the coaching strategies may not be too different, the player pool obviously is, and Seiling, who had never officially coached a women's team before, counted on the rest of the front office while helping to assemble the team.

"With Shelley's experience, I relied a lot on her knowledge of players because she is active in the women's hockey world much more than I am," Seiling says. "To come into this in the summertime, it's not like I could just walk in the door and watch a bunch of players play the game."

The players invited to Buffalo's initial training camp that summer were vetted and selected, via a flurry of emails, by Mroz. The coaches ran the on-ice camp, which included skating and shooting drills and a scrimmage. The trio plus Rylan evaluated players and tried to reach a consensus on who to sign. By September, the first-ever Buffalo Beauts roster was in place.

"It was like, who is willing to come to Buffalo?" Mroz says. "Because you have Boston, and New York, and Connecticut, and … Buffalo."

While New York City is a bigger cultural capital and sexier market and Boston the hub of the women's hockey scene stateside, the Buffalo front office considers its city a great asset for recruitment. Canada is still the undisputed leader in the game, and with the Great White North just a short bridge away, the Beauts lead the league in imports. They play in what is almost certainly the best facility in the league, as well: the HarborCenter is sparkling new and state of the art. An in-building performance training institute, access to dedicated trainers and conditioning coaches, and a location at the nexus of a quickly coalescing hockey capital all makes for a tantalizing carrot with which to entice talent.

"What we have to offer the players here will be second to none," Seiling says. "With our off-ice facilities, our on-ice facilities, our expertise—Shelley's a two-time Olympian, my professional background—I think we've got a lot to offer. Any hockey player, I think that … players are going to want to come to Buffalo, more so than they thought before."

Add to that the city's extremely low cost of living—and the almost total dedication to sport that allows—and Buffalo could make a strong claim as the best place for a professional hockey player to call home. The NWHL's salaries are all public; all contracts go through the league's office in New York. The Beauts' salary breakdown can be found on Instagram, and they range from $10,000 to $22,500—nothing lavish, but in Buffalo a few of those could certainly keep you in a $500-a-month house without much need for more than a part time job.

Five of the Beauts, for example, share a home in Hockey Haven, a beautiful manse built in 1920 near the southern edge of Delaware Park. It has hardwood floors, three floors of living space, and beautiful chandeliers. It also has a prominently marked security camera at its intersection, and the occasional sharp rapport of gun shots at night.

The players I met during my visit to Hockey Haven demonstrated the relatively wide reach of the Beauts roster: Tatiana Rafter (Manitoba), Paige Harrington (Massachusetts), Hannah McGowan (Michigan), and Hayley Williams (Illinois). I had met Rafter days after media day, when she was freshly arrived in Buffalo and not yet allowed to skate. A native of Winnipeg, Rafter is tall and powerful, and as exuberant as a bottle of champagne; she speaks with the slightest hint of that bottom-heavy, classically Canadian accent ("Manitobah"). She began skating at 5 and worked her way through the usual midget circuits, right up to the Junior Women's Hockey League before receiving a scholarship to the University of British Columbia. She graduated UBC as the most decorated Thunderbird in history, and she found herself invited to the NWHL's Toronto showcase in July and an International Camp in Boston before being offered a contract with Buffalo.

Rafter's gear had not yet even arrived when I talked to her; she was over a thousand miles from home in a foreign, albeit familiar, country—a life transplanted for a modest salary and a league which had not existed a year prior. She was completely unafraid.

"I'm used to picking up and moving around," she said. "I have an entire team of girls that are going to be my family out here. I've got people I'm going to be going through it with."

On days when the players hit the ice, they will get up, make breakfast, and head to their various jobs—Williams, for example, is hosting at a restaurant. They do their off-ice workout at around 7:30 in the evening, and then hit the rink somewhere around 9 or 10. For non-ice days, they wake up early and eat breakfast again, then head to IMPACT in the morning for their training sessions. Workouts and on-ice practices last about two hours.

Visa issues with their Canadian players led to an exsanguinated Buffalo roster for the season opener against Boston, and the Beauts found themselves down 4-0 at HarborCenter. There was a strong turnout for a game against the city's great rival, and when Kelley Steadman, a practice player called in to shore up the depleted roster, scored the first goal in team history, the HarborCenter roaring like Niagara Falls.

Steadman's call up proved fortuitous: although the Beauts have only four wins through the All-Star break—three, including a shoot out, against the New York Riveters and one in OT against Boston—Steadman is second in the league in goals, and fourth in points. She will be playing in this weekend's All-Star game on the squad captained by Buffalo teammate Emily Pfalzer. Their opponents are captained by Hilary Knight, whose Boston Pride scored an exposure coup for the young league in a 1-1 tie against the CWHL's Montreal Canadiennes at Gillette Stadium during the inaugural edition of the Women's Winter Classic earlier this month.

There are other, smaller victories for Mroz and the Beauts as they march toward the playoffs and the Isobel cup in two months. Mroz is already being recognized in public—the GM! While the difficulties and whirlwind of a first, historical season leave her little time for reflection, she did allow me a moment.

"Just seeing some of those young girls, in their jersey, wanting autographs, it's an unbelievable feeling" Mroz said. "It just brings tears to my eyes."