Girls Hockey, Wildlife Cameras, and Community Rinks: Sue McDowell reflects on a life and career spent growing the game

Sue McDowell was the Girls and Women’s director at the MAHA. She helped found the club team at U of M. Gulo Gulo caught up with her to discuss a life in women’s hockey & grassroots girls hockey in MI

When I reach out to Sue McDowell about the possibility of discussing girl’s and women’s hockey in Michigan, she tells me she has an open window on Monday morning, but that she will be monitoring wildlife camera footage and if something exciting happens, we might need to take a break.

Once a week, McDowell volunteers as a monitor for the Annenberg Foundation’s Explorer.org, keeping an eye on three different cameras overlooking a Kenyan nature preserve in the event something noteworthy breaks out.  When the season is right, she puts in an extra two days a week to observe polar bear cameras in Churchill, Manitoba—a town with a population less than a thousand on the shores of the Hudson Bay.  She posts pictures on Facebook leading to questions from friends about where she’s traveled to, only to reveal that she never left her desk in Ypsilanti to get the photos.

For McDowell, taking the time to relax and observe wildlife is a respite from the rigors of a career split between IT and developing girl’s hockey in a state that is not her home but where she’s been “long enough that it feels as close to home as anyplace else.”

McDowell grew up on Cape Cod and found her way into hockey thanks to a family that came together by following the exploits of the Boston Bruins in the glory days of Orr, Esposito, and Bucyk.

Her hockey playing career began on an area boy’s team with a friend, “which was okay, but not really great.”  Her father and that of her friend determined they could do better, and the Cape Cod Aces were born.

The Aces played at the newly built Cape Cod Coliseum in South Yarmouth, Massachusetts down the road.  The team practiced on Saturdays before traversing up to the Boston suburbs, first in an RV and then in a repurposed school bus, on Sundays for games.

After a few seasons in net for the Aces, McDowell ventured off to Waterville, Maine to attend Colby College, where she graduated with a degree in comparative religions and Russian language while an on-again, off-again goaltender for the Mules’ hockey team.

As she tells it, McDowell wasn’t the sort of goaltender who stumbled into the position due to the necessity of a youth team dying for someone to assume the role.  Instead, playing in net was the product of an unlikely childhood “remote mentor,” Montreal Canadiens’ netminder Ken Dryden.

Even if family orthodoxy dictated a predilection for the Big Bad Bruins, a young, precocious Sue McDowell was drawn to the “fluid skating” and erudite goaltender of the B’s bitter rivals.  Her decision to embrace the Habs caused “a bit of a family crisis” in the short-term but eventually made for lively dinner table banter.

McDowell recalls turning to Dryden in particular as a role model for his unusual commitment to the life of the mind in a sport that didn’t exactly specialize in intellect.  “For a young student who wanted to play goal but also was really good at their academics and had another life,” Dryden—“who is this NHL playing hockey player, but was also trying to go back to law school to complete his law degree”—made for a natural role model.

Like her childhood hero, McDowell has spent her life pursuing interests that have nothing to do with hockey, while never drifting too far from the game.  She came to Michigan to pursue a graduate degree in library sciences, which then sprung a short-lived experiment with living on the West Coast only to find herself back in Ann Arbor.

After Colby, McDowell assumed her involvement in hockey was over, only to find the game luring her back in.  It started in the late 80s and early 90s.  Having returned to the Ann Arbor area, McDowell began filling in when men’s beer league teams needed someone in net and grew into “brokering ice” from those same beer leaguers on days like Super Bowl Sunday or New Years, when they didn’t want it.

McDowell would then assemble a group of “women friends, their sympathetic partners, and girls in the area” to get a game going.  It was mostly something to do for fun in down time, but it soon spawned much more than that.

As a next step, McDowell helped to found the women’s club team at her graduate alma mater but wasn’t done there.  She began the Ann Arbor Girls Ice Hockey Association, helped it develop a relationship with the Ann Arbor Hockey Association, got involved with the Metro Stars (a local senior women’s outfit), and before she knew it, McDowell served as the Michigan Amateur Hockey Association’s Girls and Women’s Director.

In describing her run as Girls and Women’s Director with the MAHA in the 90s, McDowell explains “I was young, I didn’t really know how to delegate.  I burned out in that position pretty, pretty aggressively.”

The role, a volunteer position, led McDowell to the need for a step back and a return to more local concerns.  She resumed working with U of M’s club team, before re-engaging with state-wide work in growing the game, having adopted a new perspective.  Where frustration set in at the top end of the girls game in the state, McDowell found joy closer to home, working with collegiate club teams and learn-to-play programs.

“I realized when I was state director that 90% of my time was being taken up with Tier One hockey, because those people are very competitive and they’re interested in the golden ticket, the college scholarships, which may or may not exist,” McDowell explains.  “That wasn’t really what I wanted to be spending my time on.  I wanted to give more girls the opportunity to play.”

When she looks at the push to add varsity hockey at the University of Michigan, McDowell sees a long road that must begin with grassroots growth across the state.  Twice, McDowell led a formal application to add the sport at Michigan, and twice she was denied.  In both cases, the feedback she received suggested that greater youth participation in girls hockey would be necessary, before the University would deem it economically viable to green light a program carrying hockey’s budgetary demands.

(Here it is worth pointing out that this calculation from the school ignores the possibility that adding varsity women’s hockey would instill a greater incentive for youth participation.  As McDowell points out, specialization is a major pressure in youth sports, and if soccer, field hockey, or basketball offer a clearer path to that elusive scholarship, those sports have an obvious advantage over hockey, where collegiate opportunities are rarer and non-existent within the state.  As ever, investment begets growth in girls and women’s sports, but so often power brokers are reluctant to front the initial costs despite the glaring possibility of long-term growth.)

In the late aughts, McDowell was ready to re-engage with growing the sport across the state, but the circumstances around her were grim.  The onset of the Great Recession saw many families step away from hockey, among the most expensive sports a child could play.  When McDowell looked at the figures, she saw that participation in the girl’s game was actually worse than it had been in the 90s.

For McDowell, solving that problem wasn’t about trying to increase the level of the state’s top end but making the game more available through community, high school programs.

The three traditional American hotbeds of hockey on the men’s/boys’ side are Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Michigan.  The former two are similarly productive on the girls and women’s side, the latter not so much.

McDowell attributes this discrepancy to the abundance of public ice in Minnesota and Massachusetts and the dependence on private rinks in Michigan.

“Minnesota in the 80s passed the ‘Mighty Ducks’ legislation, which gave a $250,000 grant to communities to build ice rinks, but a codicil on that was that they had to have gender equal programs,” McDowell explains.  “And so there’s lots of public rinks in Minnesota, and it comes as no surprise to me that by the time you’re in the 2000s, there’s an urge to have lots of high school girls in Minnesota [playing hockey] because they’ve been skating with their brothers all along, and they’ve been skating with their brothers at rinks that are fifteen minutes away from their house.”

She juxtaposes this reality with the ice rink landscape in Michigan: “Michigan has a predominantly private arena model, and private arenas can decide who gets the ice, and private arenas can change the price.  And thank God for private arenas because of the recession, they were the ones who allowed girls to skate, but it also means it’s not cheap, and it’s not nearby.”

McDowell adds that her own home state of Massachusetts has an abundance of community rinks as well, and thus high school girls hockey exists even in its far reaches like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

The prevalence of girls high school hockey in Massachusetts “blows [McDowell’s] mind because in the same period of time, we have high school teams, but they’re not necessarily as organized or as recognized by the public school system in Michigan.”

As a point of comparison, McDowell notes that field hockey, which has a longer history in the state than girls ice hockey, is still struggling for recognition by the Michigan High School Athletic Association.

She points out that the issue is not necessarily with the MHSAA itself, who she says “are offering to do a lot of things to try to help promote the fact that the girls have got a high school league” but without more widespread support from athletic directors, it’s difficult to receive formal recognition.

That progress requires a slow build up is nothing new for McDowell.  In discussing the long trudge toward recognition, she points to the newly formed Washtenaw United team, now playing at the high school level.  Students from Saline, Dexter, Milan, Manchester, and Father Gabriel Richard High Schools comprise the United.  The team has just begun its third season of play, but four years of leg work preceded its debut.  

As McDowell points out, it’s not easy to commit to that level of preparation and organization, especially when many parents are just looking for an activity in which their child can engage.  “Like we said when we started, my dad wasn’t in it for anything other than his daughter, so you’re not necessarily thinking about ‘what am I going to be doing with my ten-year-old to ensure that she’s got a place to play all the way through her senior year in high school.’”

Once again, McDowell points out that the central obstacle facing her effort is not so much reluctance from those in power as the fundamental import of access to ice.  The Cape Cod Aces program her father helped found could never have gotten off the ground without the construction of the Cape Cod Coliseum at the perfect moment.  

She has sympathy for athletic directors who would love to get involved in girls hockey, “but they don’t have a rink on their campus.  I have friends who are coaching in Minnesota that basically walk from the classroom they’re teaching in across the street to the community rink.  They’re not getting in their car and driving forty-five minutes to get to Farmington Hills in traffic to do a high school team at Suburban.”

The absence of a robust network of readily accessible community ice “breeds a culture where people pay to participate, assuming that they’re going to be playing at the top level, which is travel.  That’s not high school.”

Of course, rink access is a crucial part of the fight to bring varsity hockey to the University of Michigan.  The athletic department insists that having two teams share Yost is not a viable option.  Despite the rink’s charm and tradition, it isn’t constructed to support two varsity teams in the long term; it already wants for a true visiting locker room.  As such, taking on varsity women’s hockey would likely begin with an expensive effort to construct a rink for the new program.

Based on her experience dealing with the powers that be across the state, McDowell believes that without a major increase in youth participation, the University of Michigan will not feel compelled to cut the requisite check.  In the 2021-22 season, there were thirty-five Michigan-born women playing Division I hockey.  That figure is dwarfed by the seventy-two Massachusetsans and fifty-two New Yorkers playing.  It is more comparable to the fifteen women from California participating in the DI game.

“If we had a Stephen Ross that came out of nowhere, if Elon Musk decided to take his profits from his sale of Twitter tomorrow, decided to say that hockey was his thing, and he wanted to put it on the map at Michigan, Michigan State and Northern, I don’t think any of those schools would sneeze at the financial investment, but I don’t think they’re motivated intrinsically internally, just to do it because it’s a good idea.”

For her, at least in the short-term, the goal for women’s hockey at Michigan should be improving the conditions they work in as a club team, while the state continues to build out access to the game at the lower levels.

She points out that emerging hockey markets like Arizona and Florida are gaining traction on the girls side thanks to NHL teams assuming the responsibility of development.  The presence of the facilities necessary to support an NHL franchise then creates an imperative to give the girls who engage in learn to play programs a space in which to continue their careers.  That same dynamic is nowhere to be found in Michigan.

Despite the challenges of a long career in and around the game, or perhaps because of them, McDowell still finds joy and excitement in her work.

She’s excited to see the sport “back up and running” after COVID inflicted another setback.  She’s excited by the new coaches involved in the game and the way that they are “focusing their student athletes on being successful in the game that they’re in.”  She’s excited about the continued growth of high school girls hockey.

More than anything else though, what makes the work worthwhile for McDowell is getting out to the rink to watch the game in action. 

“Anytime I'm in a rink and I'm watching anybody play, you just get pumped up because it's a game you love. The high school team I'm affiliated with here just had two international students sign up for our team. And they've skated with their friends in rinks back home, but they've never played the sport.  To see their eyes light up as they're passing and skating and doing drills in the middle of the ice so they can try to be part of this larger group is a real thrill. It's really heartwarming to see people embracing something that you yourself have enjoyed a lifetime of right? It's always seeing beginners get that gleam in their eye when they're like ‘oh my god, I could really work on this and I could actually do this this is really fun.’ That is really cool to me. I mean that's where I don't want to be a negative Nelly because I do want it to last forever. You know, I want hockey in some form or other to be available to people for eons to come.”

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