“When I officially signed the contract to become a professional hockey player, it was a surreal feeling.” Here’s a first-person perspective on playing women’s professional hockey during the pandemic.
Neve Van Pelt, Whitney Dove and Cassidy MacPhersonNeve Van Pelt played for the NCAA Providence Friars women’s hockey team from 2016-17 to 2019-20 and for the NWHL's (now PHF’s) Buffalo Beauts in 2020-21. She’s currently a student at the College of Sports Media in Toronto and an intern at The Hockey News. She’s writing a blog series about her hockey journey.
When I was growing up, becoming a professional hockey player wasn’t a reality for me.
At the time, that would have meant trying to make the NHL. I looked up to a lot of players in the league and loved the Toronto Maple Leafs, but as a young girl, my true role models were legends such as Cassie Campbell and Hayley Wickenheiser. I still remember meeting Wickenheiser when I was younger and telling my parents, “When I grow up, I want to be just like her.”
Watching the Canadian women’s hockey team gave me a reason to dream big at that age and allowed me to fall in love with the sport all over again. The women’s national team was my “NHL” in terms of where I hoped to get to one day, but unfortunately for me, one team with the best players in the country is a lot harder to crack than a league with 32 teams full of top talent.
It may sound like I gave up on my childhood dream, but it honestly never felt like that to me. I knew I wasn’t a national-team caliber player, and this was completely fine with me. There were so many other things in my life that brought me happiness that I was beyond content having NCAA Div. I hockey be the highest level I would ever play.
Little did I know that playing professional hockey would become an option.
The NWHL was established in 2015 when I was in my last year of high school. As a female hockey player, it was very exciting to see a professional women’s hockey league announced, but even throughout my four years at NCAA Providence College, I never expected to end up playing for the NWHL’s Buffalo Beauts.
My original plan was to play overseas and travel Europe, but with COVID-19 taking over the world in 2020, my plans changed. During COVID-19 times, my friends and I took full advantage of Zoom and chatted on there all the time. Cassidy MacPherson, who played with the Beauts the year before, and Whitney Dove, who graduated in my class at Providence, and I were chatting on there one night about life and hockey, and before we knew it, we were thinking, “Why not get the three amigos back together for another year?”
After multiple phone calls with the Buffalo Beauts GM, Nate Oliver, this late-night Zoom dream became a reality.
When I officially signed the contract to become a professional hockey player, it was a surreal feeling. If you had told me I’d be doing that a year or even a few months earlier, I would have laughed in your face, but I’m forever grateful for getting the opportunity.
From the moment I signed the contract to the moment I was driving back over the border after the season was over, those months of being a professional hockey player were ones to remember. It was far from what a regular year of hockey looked like, as the season started with the Canadian players on the team wondering if we were even going to be able to cross the border to attend practices.
A couple of the other Canadians who were living in Buffalo for the season and I were able to come over with no issues. The problem was for the Canadians who lived in Canada that had to go back and forth. For most of the season, practices consisted of half the team in Buffalo with our assistant coaches while the other half practised in Canada with our head coach.
This meant rather than being extremely nervous for what would be my first pro practice, I was simply just excited to get out there. Our options were very limited, considering we only had half the team, so the practices were very unique, consisting mainly of flow drills, mini-games and skating.
The toughest part of the practices was getting used to playing hockey with a mask on. Bag skating is already hard enough with nothing obstructing your breathing. But bag skating with a mask on? Well, that should be illegal.
At this point in time, making the step from the NCAA to professional hockey was an interesting one because rather than it being an even bigger commitment, it was quite the opposite.
Instead of having one day off a week like we’d have in college, we’d only have two mandatory practices with a third optional skills session. My teammate, Whitney, and I would spend a lot of time at the local gym to do our best to stay in game shape, but it was a tough adjustment not being on the ice every day like we were used to.
COVID-19 didn’t help, but because we weren’t able to earn a living wage, a lot of players had to work full-time or part-time jobs. I knew this heading into the season, but it definitely still came as a shock that professional hockey felt like more of a step down than up.
I became more of a fan of the city of Buffalo than I thought I would, discovering different trails and paths to walk and rollerblade on during our spare time. Living with four of my teammates, we’d always find ways to pass the time, whether it was trying a new restaurant for dinner, binge-watching reality TV shows, doing 1,000-piece puzzles, playing card games or having a paint night.
The season had a lot of ups and downs, especially considering that for a good chunk of time, we didn’t know if we’d even get to play a game.
Many rumors circulated through the players and teams about what would happen, but when the final decision was made, we were ecstatic.
The day they announced we would be playing in a bubble in Lake Placid, N.Y., was a day I’ll always remember. Going from the thought of possibly not even having the chance to play my first professional game to having the chance to play it at one of the most historic hockey arenas ever was an indescribable feeling.