No Small accomplishment

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/10/2020 (2200 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s nothing that brings more pure joy to a hockey goaltender than a great glove save. Watch the magic when they scoop out of mid-air, with super speed and a delicious flourish, a circle of frozen rubber meant to humiliate them. The shooter is left open-mouthed, incredulous that the puck didn’t go in, as the one who stopped it flashes an unseen smile inside their mask.

Crackerjack world-class goaltender Sami Jo Small doesn’t say so in her memoir, The Role I Played, but hockey goalies per se could well be this country’s romantic, fearless and armoured symbol of civilized combat.

Clearly Small, at her peak, was one of the best to strap on the pads. She was on Canada’s women’s hockey team for 10 years from 1998, when women’s ice hockey first became an Olympic sport, and earned three medals (one silver, two gold) in Olympic competition. She also was a five-time world champion for Canada in International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) women’s competition, and was twice named best goalie of that tournament in 1999 and 2000.

Small believes Canada’s Olympic women’s hockey team in her time (which started in 1997 and spanned the better part of the next decade) was the greatest ever, and continued to be after she left the team. The squad became famous for a record-setting 24-game winning streak and winning four consecutive Olympic golds between 2002 and 2014.

The 44-year-old Small, who was born and grew up in Winnipeg, now lives with her sledge-hockey champion husband and young daughter outside Toronto.

The format chosen to present her writing is sometimes irksome — the book kind of bounces back-and-forth between segments of her life in no chronological order, something like a hockey game that starts after it’s begun and ends before it’s over.

However, if you can put aside the distraction, The Role I Played is worth it to two kinds of people — hockey buffs and those who yearn for inspiration. Small takes the reader on a look inside elite dressing rooms at world championships and Olympics, at managerial conflicts, what Canada’s very best women players are like, the politics of the game and the frustrations of dealing with them, particularly when they make no sense. She also writes about referee mistakes, her disappointments and her recovery from them, the hijinks in off-hours at the Olympics and her insight of where women’s hockey is going and what formidable challenges are ahead.

The personable hockey icon is such a team player — not just in hockey, but also in life. She is now a professional motivational speaker. She also runs hockey schools.

One of the most significant things Small notes in her book is just how far women’s hockey has come, from the days of cultural disapproval (in a tut-tut-nice-girls-don’t-do-that sort of way) to widespread acceptance and booming popularity. There’s such confidence among female players today that Small unabashedly observes in print something that will make men on skates howl at the moon: that after playing hockey with so many men and boys, it’s more difficult for a goalie to face a female shooter than a male one — at least for her.

“I understand how most guys shoot. They use their strength to control their shots, often trying to overpower the goaltender. I know what to look for and when to anticipate the shot,” Small explains. “Women are stealthier. They don’t have the power the men have so they hold onto the puck longer. They use angles to their advantage and find openings with pinpoint accuracy.”

Small began playing hockey in Winnipeg at a time when the only choice was to play with boys. She was the only female in the dressing room on a boy’s team at the Norberry Community Centre at age nine, when she decided to try goaltending (using loaned equipment) and never looked back. She went on to play goal in male peewee and bantam, becoming the first female to play in the Manitoba Major Junior Hockey League.

In 2016 the rink in Winnipeg she grew up on was renamed the Sami Jo Small Hockey Facility.

Sami Jo has a degree in mechanical engineering from the prestigious Stanford University outside San Francisco. She went there on a track and field scholarship (discus and javelin), then after injury played goal for the Stanford men’s hockey team before getting the chance to join Canada’s women’s team for the first-ever female hockey Olympics.

She seems to have superhuman energy. When her team won the world championships in Finland in 1999 she had to rush back to Toronto and then on to San Francisco and Stanford University, because her final exams for that semester were only 11 hours after her arrival.

If Small tackled those exams as she did goaltending and life, she probably aced every one of them.

Barry Craig was a goalie. So is his granddaughter, Ashley. She’ s good. He played as if on Workers’ Compensation… and without a mask.