This 2012 feature from The Hockey News' special women's issue profiled three women in particular who helped pave the way for the women who've followed in their footsteps.

The Hockey News has long been in the business of covering women’s hockey – and in this feature story from our special women’s issue dated Oct. 29, 2012 (Vol. 66, Issue 7), this writer spotlighted three women who helped grow the game.

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The first woman profiled in this story was Central League GM Nicole Kupaks, who ran the Laredo Bucks. Kupaks got into the game after she attended a CHL job fair in Dallas and received seven offers from teams before choosing Laredo. She encountered some difficulty from certain male gatekeepers, but she pushed on and established herself as a management force.

“The pushback I get sometimes is from agents,” Kupaks said. “They’ll say, ‘Really? You’re the GM?’ I’ll say yes. ‘If I go to your team’s website, I’m going to see your picture?’ they’ll say. Like I’m a practical joker, like I’m just the secretary answering the phones.

“I’ll walk into the occasional meeting and someone will say, ‘Oh, you play?’ I don’t look like a hockey player and I’ll say no. ‘Oh, you work in hockey on your son’s team?’ becomes the next question. And I’ll say, ‘No, I run a minor professional men’s team.’ That’s when I get the double and triple-takes.”

Another woman making a difference was linesman and referee Andrea Skinner, the older sister of NHL star winger Jeff Skinner. Andrea played the game at the NCAA level with Cornell, but after leaving school and becoming an attorney, she fed her love of the game by becoming an official. And there were adjustments to be made.

“The biggest adjustment when I first started was learning the positioning, the reasoning for the positioning,” Andrea Skinner said. “Like anything, when you first learn something, you have a tendency to focus solely on that. When I first started out, I was wondering if I was at the place at the right time. Gradually, I got to a point where the positioning comes much more naturally and it’s more a question of how the game is flowing and the right decisions from a game management perspective.”

THEIR ROOTS GROW STRONGER

Vol. 66, No. 7, Oct. 29, 2012

By Adam Proteau

Although the world of professional hockey has been dominated by men, women have been making some solid headway of late. And while there still is a long way to go before we’ll see a more balanced degree of integration, there are women operating in various areas who someday will be regarded as pioneers. What follows are the stories of three of them:

Nicole Kupaks might not have dreamed she’d be a professional hockey GM as a young woman, but that’s exactly what she was for the Central League’s Laredo Bucks last season and that’s what she remains for the St. Charles Chill, a new CHL team that will begin competing in 2013-14.

Growing up in Austin, Texas, the 37-year-old Kupaks didn’t have a natural connection to hockey, but came to love it after attending an Austin Ice Bats game and watching how players interacted with the community. She had toiled in the corporate world – first at Dell Computers, then as a recruiter for a culinary school – but realized that, when she was advising students to follow their dreams, she wasn’t doing so herself. So she attended a CHL job fair in Dallas and got seven offers from teams before deciding on Laredo, where she started out in public relations in 2004 before becoming the franchise’s vice-president of business operations in 2008.

In June of 2011, Bucks ownership finally gave Kupaks the chance she’d been working for when they hired her as the team’s GM. Although the franchise folded this past May, she diligently worked to resuscitate it and found a new home for it in Missouri. And all along, she’s had to let her work ethic and knowledge of the sport speak for her whenever some old-school man questioned her place in it. “The pushback I get sometimes is from agents,” Kupaks says. “They’ll say, ‘Really? You’re the GM?’ I’ll say yes. ‘If I go to your team’s website, I’m going to see your picture?’ they’ll say. Like I’m a practical joker, like I’m just the secretary answering the phones.

“I’ll walk into the occasional meeting and someone will say, ‘Oh, you play?’ I don’t look like a hockey player and I’ll say no. ‘Oh, you work in hockey on your son’s team?’ becomes the next question. And I’ll say, ‘No, I run a minor professional men’s team.’ That’s when I get the double and triple-takes.”

A thick skin has helped out Andrea Skinner, another young hockey-loving woman and attorney. But not in the way you might think: Skinner – older sister of Jeff, the Carolina Hurricanes’ star left winger – works in municipal and Planning law for a Toronto-area firm, But on the ice, she’s an up-and-coming linesman and referee, groomed by Hockey Canada, who worked the Canadian Women’s League championship final last year.

However, like her more famous younger brother, Skinner began her love affair with hockey as a player, when she and her twin sister Jennifer left the sport of ringette to follow friends into hockey. She had a solid if unspectacular NCAA playing career at Cornell (under former Team Canada women’s coach Melody Davidson), but once she graduated and chose to pursue a law degree at the University of Ottawa, the chance to put on the stripes and still be involved in the game was appealing.

For starters, it was a part-time job to help her stay active outside of her studies, but she also quickly learned to appreciate the role referees and linesmen play and was challenged right away by the technical elements of the job.

“The biggest adjustment when I first started was learning the positioning, the reasoning for the positioning,” says Skinner, who has excelled as a linesman and is starting the next steps to becoming a referee. “Like anything, when you first learn something, you have a tendency to focus solely on that. When I first started out, I was wondering if I was at the place at the right time. Gradually, I got to a point where the positioning comes much more naturally and it’s more a question of how the game is flowing and the right decisions from a game management perspective.”

Skinner is one of Jeff’s five siblings and her evolution into officiating has affected her famous younger brother’s attitude toward the zebras. “It’s pretty impressive with all she has on her plate to take on that, too,” Jeff says. “If anything, that makes me second-guess myself when I get mad at an official or don’t like a call. You’ve got to realize they’re doing the best they can.”

Skinner can continue to rise through the officiating ranks, working more CWHL games, Canadian Interuniversity championships and international tournaments if she’s judged to be worthy. But her star is on the ascent, in part because she’s taken her talents as a lawyer and used them to help her mediate matters on the ice. “Mentally, it can be quite challenging, especially in the early years when you’re dealing with coaches at the minor levels who may not be as refined and maybe think more off the top of their head and it doesn’t come across in the most endearing manner,” she says. “But I’m also lucky because I get to deal with conflict resolution in my career, so I feel there’s a parallel skill set there.”

Whereas Kupaks is blazing a trail for women on one side of hockey’s contract negotiating table, Laura Keegan is doing the same on the other side as one of the game’s first female player agents. As a member of Pat Brisson’s hockey representation team at the Los Angeles-based Creative Artists Agency, Keegan is one of only two female agents currently accredited by the NHL Players’ Association.

Keegan always knew she wanted to work in sports and after earning her law degree from the University of San Diego in 2006, the Boston native interned and networked and eventually was welcomed to Brisson’s team in 2009. Once in a while, she realizes she’s a pioneer of sorts, but she hasn’t encountered any noticeable resistance to her presence in any negotiations or client relationships. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: in addition to working with players on endorsement deals and marketing contracts, she has developed working relationships with players’ mothers, wives and girlfriends and offers a woman’s perspective whenever it’s called for. And, like Kupaks, she couldn’t be happier to see her hard work pay off.

“I’m proud of what I’ve done and to be doing my dream job,” says Keegan, 32. “I don’t know how many people can say that. It’s a perfect job, a perfect fit. From Day 1, I felt comfortable and was really well received.

“I never felt for a second I was treated differently because I was a woman. But a good sense of humor and thick skin have helped.”

All the women profiled above acknowledge hockey has made notable strides in assimilating women into all corners of the sport, yet all understand it will take many more years and much more pioneering before anyone can honestly claim there are equal opportunities for both sexes.

“We’ve got a lot of opportunities to coach now, far more than there ever were when I came through, and the next step would be the management positions, scouting and those types of things,” says Davidson, now Hockey Canada’s head scout for its women’s national team program. “But I still feel like we have a ways to go, because when I came out of (the 2010) Vancouver (Olympics), I didn’t feel like there were a whole lot of options for me to stay in the game if I didn’t want to coach.”

Women have been able to break several barriers to the hockey world over the years, but most know there are still many more to bust through. “I’d like to say it will be significantly different in the next 10 years,” Kupaks says. “But hockey is a very small world. It’s still a good old boys’ club.”

Adds Keegan: “It is a predominantly male-dominated industry and that won’t change overnight. But women in the industry now are going to open the doors for a lot of opportunities for women in the future.”

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