Wickenheiser eyes Stanley Cup with Leafs to cap off Hall of Fame career
Long before she joined the Toronto Maple Leafs staff in 2018, Leafs Assistant General Manager Hayley Wickenheiser had already cemented herself as an icon of the game.
Wickenheiser, a four-time Olympic gold medallist and the first woman to play as a skater full-time in professional men’s hockey league, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2019 in her first year of eligibility.
But she’s far from finished making an impact on the sport — at whatever level that may be.
On Sunday, Wickenheiser was on the ice directing a clinic at Scotiabank Arena, joined alongside longtime team Canada teammate Angela James as part of the Kruger’s Big Assist program.
Leading hundreds of five-through-eight-year-olds from across Ontario through on-ice drills, Wickenheiser had the chance to be a part of a program that’s raising $200,000 this year for minor hockey programs across the country through multiple charitable initiatives, including the chance for one organization to be nominated to win a $75,000 grand prize.
“The thing I think about immediately is new Canadians, people that have come from other parts of the world,” Wickenheiser said in an interview with Daily Hive when asked about barriers to hockey that people may not realize. “In Canada, we live and die by hockey but when you step outside of Canada a lot of other countries have never heard of the game… it’s just exposing people to the beauty of the game of hockey.”
For Wickenheiser, the dreams of a career in hockey started watching one of the NHL’s great dynasties in the early 1980s.
“When I was this age, I was practicing signing my autograph over and over because I was going to play for the Edmonton Oilers and win the Stanley Cup,” Wickenheiser added of life growing up in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan. “I never knew another female played hockey until I was about 10 years old.”
And while she’s currently working for the world’s most valuable hockey team, sometimes it’s teaching a few youngsters the game’s fundamentals that she finds more challenging.
“It’s harder to work with these kids than the pros,” Wickenheiser laughed. “But life’s about helping people, and it’s the more we can get more Canadians from different walks of life into the game of hockey, the better the game’s going to be.”
While the heavy fees of playing hockey have been spoken about for years, one of the less-thought-about barriers that Wickenheiser touched on was decreased access to free community ice caused by rising temperatures.
“I think about global warming and climate change. We have outdoor rinks [in Toronto and throughout Canada] but they’re few and far between and for shorter time [than they used to be],” Wickenheiser said.
Whether it’s with the Leafs, young kids on the ice, or her work in the medical field as a resident doctor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Family and Community Medicine, Wickenheiser tries to keep the same approach in whatever environment she’s in.
“It’s about people and it’s about being able to lead,” Wickenheiser said. “I’m taking everything I learned as an athlete as a hockey player and I’m just applying it in a different area.”
Currently, the top women’s hockey league in North America is the newly launched Professional Women’s Hockey League, which began its inaugural season on January 1. With more liberal rules about bodychecking than traditionally allowed in women’s hockey, Wickenheiser is in support of the changes.
“I think it will be more entertaining for fans to watch,” Wickenheiser said of the PWHL. “[Physical play] is just part of the game of hockey, so I’m not surprised. Hopefully, the refs will let as much go as they can and let the players play within reason.”
Wickenheiser herself went to “the end of the world” to make a living playing pro hockey, suiting up for parts of three seasons in Swedish and Finnish men’s leagues. She played 104 games across now-defunct professional women’s teams Edmonton Chimos, and the Calgary-based Inferno and Oval X-Treme, but neither had the financial backing available to the PWHL.
“I don’t have any regrets,” Wickenheiser said. “Maybe I wish [leagues like the PWHL] could’ve happened sooner when I was playing, but everything happens for a reason… 10 years from now, those players will be making hopefully six figures or seven figures.”
And while plenty of things are keeping her busy, for now, though, Wickenheiser’s main hockey goal revolves around making the Leafs a championship team to cap off her career.
“It’d be nice to be a part of a team that could win a Stanley Cup,” she said.
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