Jane Burns
Longtime teammates (left to right, rear) Barb Pearson, Tanya Falbel, Jen Voichick, Pat Blair, Meg Galloway, Gina Laliberte; Nancy Olson (front): They saw it all.
They’ve seen each other through health issues, the loss of loved ones, and the birth of children and grandchildren, all the while fighting for a modicum of respect.
Over the decades the Madison Edge women’s hockey team has forged an unshakeable bond, not unlike what holds together a longtime book club. Except the Edge are more like a bad-ass book club that would rather skate naked on a dare than chat about the latest bestseller.
After 40-plus years of playing hockey together, the Edge are hanging up their skates after this season. They’ll glide off the ice next month knowing they carry a bit of history with them, having been on the front line of the evolution of not just women’s hockey but women’s sports.
“Women’s hockey has gotten so good and it’s grown,” says Maria Barlow, 65, who joined the team in 1978 and is back this season after sitting out last season with a broken arm. “It used to be that if you said, ‘I know this woman who plays hockey,’ I would know who it was. Not anymore. And that’s cool.”
Those longtime teammates are hanging on this season for one last go-round. They’re true veterans and include 75-year-old Sue Pope, who has played since the first season in 1974, and the one-time “kid” of the team, Jen Voichick, 57, who joined when she was 16.
In the early 1990s, the women's hockey club at UW-Madison had grown in popularity and helped set the foundation for varsity women's hockey, which began in 1999. Many of the current Madison Edge players were on the club team.
It’s all light years from the team’s humble beginnings, when three hockey-loving women at UW-Madison, Marianne (Anderson) Larson, Karen Schwarz and Jill Steinberg, organized the UW Women’s Ice Hockey Club. Sounds simple enough, but in 1974 a group of women who wanted to play hockey was as alien to some as a group of women who wanted to walk on Mars.
“In the early days of the club someone asked me why I played hockey,” says Pat Blair, 62, who has been playing with the Edge since 1980. “They sincerely could not understand why a woman would play hockey. It was so weird because it was so new and unheard of.”
The team was given a less-than-ideal time at the rink to practice — one hour, late on a Sunday night when most people were in bed resting up for the work week. Some of the women had learned hockey with their brothers, some just loved to skate, some wanted to play a team sport.
They were the only women’s hockey team in Wisconsin, hustling up games wherever they could get one in the state by playing men’s and boys’ teams.
“We played a men’s team in Stevens Point and they just killed us,” Blair says. “But we went to the bar with them after and got them to buy us drinks.”
To play against women, they had to travel on the weekends to Minnesota, where women’s hockey had already taken hold. They were busy weekends, with three games, sometimes as early as 6:30 a.m.
“We’d just get creamed,” Voichick says. “Like, we’d lose by double digits.”
They made the most of their trips, finding their highlights off the ice with pranks and adventures. They poured chocolate nonpareils into a teammate’s helmet so when she headed out onto the ice, she left a trail of candy in her wake. Someone spiked the water bottles with schnapps. They piled into hotel rooms and trashed at least one of them. Late one Saturday night after playing a tournament on the home ice of Minnesota’s former NHL team, the North Stars, Voichick accepted a dare to skate there naked and got away with it.
Ironically, Voichick had joined the team because her mom heard about it and hunted down the players to see if her daughter could join. Voichick had been getting in some trouble and her mom thought the team might be a good influence.
“If my mom only knew what was going on,” says Voichick, who had played youth hockey with her brothers.
Rowdiness aside, it really was all about the hockey, and over the years the players’ sacrifices began to pay off. The players became a cohesive unit and started to tie teams that once scored 20 goals on them. There was enough interest in women’s hockey that the club roster grew to split into two teams. Eventually the original players shed their university affiliation and became the Madison Edge. Two players, Voichick and Mary Jones, made national team rosters before women’s hockey became an Olympic medal sport in 1998.
When hockey became a varsity women’s sport at UW-Madison in 1999, the first coach, Julie Sasner, invited the Edge to skate with would-be players during tryouts, club founders were honored with a “passing of the puck” ceremony at the Badgers’ first game and the team was invited to a reception afterward. “We were recognized at a hockey game,” Blair says. “They thanked us and that was the first time we got any recognition for what we’d done.”
In 2013, at long last, they found success on the ice: They won a national championship. At the USA Hockey Women’s 50+ Recreational Tier II Tournament in Florida, the Edge defeated one of their former rival Minnesota teams, The Final Period, for the title.
“I just remember being exhausted and then showered with gifts,” Voichick says. “The music was blaring, and we were just crying.”
Time has caught up with the Edge. Players find they don’t recover from injuries like they once did, and some are now snowbirds; family commitments have only grown and finding substitutes to fill out the roster has just gotten to be too much.
They know that hockey will do just fine without them. There’s now a league, the Women’s Central Hockey League, that includes nearly 60 teams of all skill levels in seven divisions in Illinois and Wisconsin. The Badgers women’s hockey team has won five national titles and regularly sells out its games, and many of those players go on to become Olympians.
“It was beyond our dreams to think of it going to the university level, then to see it in the Olympics is a miracle,” Voichick says. “And we saw it all.”
