Color of Hockey: Egypt goalie Ramadan revives women’s club team at Rutgers

William Douglas has been writing The Color of Hockey blog since 2012. Douglas joined NHL.com in 2019 and writes about people of color in the sport. Today, he profiles Danna Ramadan, a goalie with Egypt’s women’s hockey team. She successfully led the effort to revive the women’s club hockey team at Rutgers University in New Jersey this season.

Danna Ramadan couldn’t imagine going to a college without being able to play hockey.

“I’ve been around hockey my entire life,” said Ramadan, a 19-year-old goalie from Somerset, New Jersey. “There really was no world where I wouldn't be playing hockey in college. It was just about which route I would take.”

Ramadan created her own route by reviving Rutgers University women’s club hockey team, which had been defunct since 2019.

The revamped Scarlet Knights team made its American Collegiate Hockey Association Division II debut in a 10-1 loss to the University of Delaware at ProSkate Arena in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey on Sept. 19.

Rutgers is 2-7-0 so far this season but Ramadan and her teammates feel like winners for bringing women’s hockey back to the 71,000-student state university which has campuses in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden.

“It feels great,” said Ramadan, the team’s president. “I mean, we're talking about a school that's been in my family's life for so long, my parents are alums. The fact that I'm able to represent the school itself and an organization that I revamped, I feel nothing but pride and accomplishment.”

In resuscitating the team, Ramadan said she applied some of the lessons learned from watching her father, Sameh Ramadan, help establish Egypt’s men’s and women’s hockey programs.

Those teams have competed in tournaments in the Middle East and North Africa over the years and in North American events like the Amerigol LATAM Cup and Dream Nations Cup.

“The things he’s done with Egypt, I’ve seen firsthand,” said Ramadan, a dual U.S.-Egypt citizen who plays on Egypt’s women’s team.

“When it came to Rutgers, I wanted to do something, obviously not just for myself. I used information and advice that I’ve gotten from him, and I see him as a mentor and inspiration.”

Ramadan inherited her father’s passion for hockey and gravitated toward goal. She rose through New Jersey’s youth hockey ranks and played with the Princeton Tiger Lilies’ 19U AA team that competed at the 2024 Chipotle-USA Hockey National Championships in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

She occasionally visits Egypt with other members of Egypt Ice Hockey to help promote the sport in their ancestral homeland in hopes that it will someday join the International Ice Hockey Federation and compete in hockey at the Winter Olympics.

Ramadan began laying the groundwork for Rutgers’ women’s hockey’s return while she was still in high school and before she was accepted to the university.

She said she engaged in “a little bit of stalking” when she reached out to former Rutgers women’s players, the university’s men’s ACHA Division I club hockey coach, the student affairs office and just about anyone else she could think of and posed a hypothetical question.

"’Hey, in the event that I were to get into Rutgers, because it’s my No. 1 school at this time, and I were to start a program, how would I go about it?’” Ramadan recalled asking.

After she enrolled at the university, Ramadan assembled an executive board with Vivian Isabella as vice president and Sara Genena, a Team Egypt teammate, as treasurer.

They got busy crunching financial numbers, preparing an application with Rutgers’ club sports office and gauging student interest in a women’s team and pondering a coaching staff.

Adam Shanley, a Rutgers club sports coordinator, said he was impressed by what Ramadan and her board had accomplished by the time he responded to her inquiry in October 2025.

“She'd already looked into the local rinks, how much it would cost,” said Shanley, whose office oversees 57 student-led club sports. “She connected with other students who were interested, so they had a core group who were interested in leading, which is probably the most important thing. They weren't naive to the fact that (hockey) costs a lot of money and that we needed a lot of questions answered before we could fully say yes to a women's ice hockey program because it is a lot of financial risk for the university and obviously just risk management for the university to take on as well.”

Ramadan tracked down ACHA women’s Division II commissioner Taylor Hadley to inquire about the league’s rules, regulations and willingness to add another team.

“Danna, she's a boss,” said Hadley, who is also commissioner of the women’s Delaware Valley Hockey Conference. “We've got 100 ACHA teams nationwide in women's D2 this year, so you can imagine my email inbox has a lot of volume. She would call me on my cell phone if I hadn't answered her emails within a couple days. She wouldn't let stuff go. She was really on top of it. She wanted to make sure her admin side was in tip-top shape, that they were doing everything they needed to do to try to have a successful season starting for this fall.”

That included fundraising. The Rutgers women received a $1,500 donation from the Atlantic Amateur Hockey Association, the USA Hockey affiliate for New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware. The association later added a $1,500 grant to help a player cover the cost of her team fees and tuition. 

Ramadan and her team also connected with the New Jersey Devils and Brooklyn Nets of the NBA. The Nets helped the team with a ticket-sale fundraiser for their preseason game against LeBron James and the Philadelphia 76ers at Barclays Center on Oct. 8.

The Devils Youth Foundation chipped in by matching the AAHA $1,500 grant. The foundation grant was used to help the women’s team cover the cost of their jerseys.

“For us, it's just so much more than jerseys. It's about helping to launch a pathway,” Devils Youth Foundation executive director Kate Whitman Annis said. “We think that when young girls see new women's college teams, especially in our state, they see the possibility of playing there, and that is so important for us.”

The Rutgers women paid the gift forward when they joined the Devils’ Jersey Girls Hockey Club program in a skate at Prudential Center on Oct. 18 as part of World Girls Hockey Day.

“Around 10 players from our team showed up and helped out, which they were really appreciative of,” Ramadan said. “It was really cool to be a part of. We kind of see it as a partnership because they helped us out by matching a donation. In exchange, we obviously offered our services to help them out whenever they need.”

Ramadan said the Rutgers women’s team is building for the long haul. The university’s original women’s club team, whose records date back to 2011, stopped in 2019 due to lack of student interest and leadership, Shanley said.

That’s not going to happen again on Ramadan’s watch.

“We're not putting in all this work just to see it fall through the minute we graduate,” the sophomore exercise science major said. “We're doing it for girls who didn't have the opportunity to play at Rutgers, and now they have that chance. So it's very important to us that that we maintain that strong leadership when we pass down our roles to the next generation in a sense.”