Ference, Wickenheiser spread Hockey Is For Everyone message to India

When Hayley Wickenheiser saw the YouTube video of women playing ice hockey in the Ladakh region of India, her first thought was: Hockey? In India?
It wasn't long before she decided to do something, to bring these women to WickFest, the female hockey festival that Wickenheiser holds annually in Calgary. She had to meet these women, help them in some way.

But before bringing them to Calgary, she decided to go to them. And before she made any travel plans, she called a friend, former NHL player Andrew Ference.
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"Hey," he recalled her saying. "Want to go to India?"
His response came swiftly: "Yes."
That response led the two accomplished former hockey players -- Wickenheiser, 39, is a four-time gold medalist for Canada's Olympic women's team, and Ference, 38, played 16 years in the NHL, winning a Stanley Cup with the Boston Bruins and captaining the Edmonton Oilers -- to plan a trip to a village in the Himalayas in northern India, for two weeks in January.

Starting in 2015, the Ladakh Women's Ice Hockey Foundation began organizing potential players despite every obstacle imaginable. Though hockey had been in Ladakh for about 60 years, it was only in the winter of 2001-02 that SECMOL (the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh) figured out how to make rinks on flat surfaces, opening up ice and time for women from rural backgrounds who had never gotten the chance to play.
Four teams were formed with equipment donated from Sweden, Canada and the United States; by 2002 a women's tournament was played.
That still didn't make it easy to play hockey in Ladakh, a picturesque region that is 11,500 feet above sea level, where the weather allows only two months of ice each year.
There were no places to buy hockey equipment in the entire country. The infrastructure was lacking, and the women had little of their own gear or funding. Much of their equipment was borrowed from the men.
Wickenheiser and Ference wanted to change that. They wanted to improve the hockey community in northern India, to help coach the women and provide support. So weeks before the NHL's Hockey Is For Everyone month celebration in February, the pair headed to India to meet the women in the video and see for themselves.
They did not travel light.
Including 25 bags of gear from the NHL Players' Association, the pair solicited enough donations to bring 73 bags of gear from Canada to India, from Calgary to Delhi to Ladakh. It was precious cargo, precious enough that Wickenheiser and another woman on the trip stayed in the airport in Delhi for an entire night, watching the bags go through security and X-ray machine, and onto the plane.
"We literally didn't sleep for 36 hours until we got to India just to make sure all the bags got there and we got every single piece there," Wickenheiser said.
It was, however, just one step in the process.
Once in India, Wickenheiser, Ference and their traveling party of nine people, including Jordan Deagle, the lead writer for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, set about their mission of playing, coaching and working through a bit of sports diplomacy.
They practiced with the women's team, the Ladakh Women's Ice Hockey Foundation, worked with the men's team, and played with the military team. They held a coaching clinic for kids, engaged with the Canadian ambassador in trying to set up a more sustainable model for the hockey program, and played "totally mind-blowing hockey on these outdoor rinks in the middle of the mountains with a community that loves it, loves skating and loves playing hockey," as Ference put it.

Wickenheiser estimated they impacted 600 to 700 people on the ice, from the 90-plus kids who were just learning to skate for the first time to the military groups to the 100 kids with disabilities that saw time on the 12 sleds they brought for sled hockey.
But for them, it wasn't just about the one-time visit.
It was about the emotional impact that they saw hockey making on the region, especially on the women. It was about the infrastructure improvements they hope to facilitate. It was about the coaching they will give the participants at WickFest, which they hope will encourage the women to eventually coach themselves back in India.
It was about empowering women in a place where that is hardly a given.
"Her initiative has touched our lives," wrote Noor Jahan, the general secretary of the LWIHF, in an email about Wickenheiser.
A woman named Skalzang Putit was especially impacted.
"Here we were in this most primitive village and she puts on her goalie gear, these brand-new pads courtesy of the NHLPA and walks outside and her parents are standing there, and the look on their faces -- it was like a Martian landed on earth," Wickenheiser said.
They had never seen her play hockey.
"My parents are clueless about the fact that I play ice hockey in winters," Putit said in an email. "And for the first time, during Hayley's visit, I dressed in full hockey gear in front of my parents which filled tears in everyone's eyes, even Hayley's."
This was why they had come to India.

"You talk to the women and they felt so strong and powerful," said Ference, who serves on the board of an Alberta organization that encourages healthy lifestyles. "When they talked about playing and how they had to kind of fight for respect at the start, but how they've been playing for a few years now and now it's like a badge of honor, even amongst their brothers and their families.
"We talked to the father of one of the girls on the team and he was so proud -- he's a policeman in this little town in India -- and he was so proud that his daughter was this defenseman and she was strong and she could stand up for herself. She had this confidence, and he really embraced what the sport brought her."
That's the same reason, Ference said, that he's glad his own daughters play in Canada. He saw the universality of the Indian women's passion for the sport.
These were women who worked for every moment of ice time, relying on equipment donations and the weather. They had no indoor ice surfaces. They flattened the ground and flooded it and brushed off the snow with brooms -- "not good brooms, either," according to Ference.
Those were only part of the difficulties.
"The kids don't go to school in the wintertime there, so they have a lot of struggles with suicide and lack of hope and, I think, boredom, so hockey is their way of keeping their community alive, bringing people together and having something to do," Wickenheiser said. "So this just really was empowering to see that, see how the game can be so much bigger than just the game."

So many of them would stop playing, seeing no hope and no growth potential in the sport. There were injuries from improperly fitted gear. And no trained coaches. The few women that remained, as Jahan wrote, "were the ones who really loved being on the ice and enjoyed the thrill of the sport or maybe we got too attached to the sport to just leave it.
"Ice hockey is and has always been a mode of expressing our feelings," Jahan wrote. "We grew up in a patriarchic society where our personal feelings are suppressed and we cannot be really vocal about anything.
"Playing ice hockey has always made us feel that we could do something substantial as well. I think with every glide on our skates, we felt that we could stand out in this society. Ice hockey has given us an identity and this sport has given us the chance to represent our country."
The partnership will not end with this one trip. Wickenheiser is planning on having the women at WickFest in November, with the First Annual WickFest Gala on April 20 in Surrey, British Columbia, designed to raise funds to help bring them to Calgary for the hockey festival, with information available at www.india2yyc.com.
And that's not all.
The plan is to work through political channels to have exchanges, ongoing games, equipment donations, other projects. Yet questions, according to Ference, remain: "How do we engage the Indian government to help support this sport? How do we look at infrastructure in the region so they can play for more than two months a year?"

Because, ultimately, "sports are this beacon of light for these kids," Ference said. "They're really powerful. I think it's easy to forget that side of hockey when you're in the business of it. But [then you remember] just how powerful that can be for some kids.
"I think there's that power in every sport, but I think there is something special about hockey."