2025 saw many hockey legends pass, including two women's hockey legends, Bev Beaver, and Lisa Brown-Miller. 

We look back at both of these trailblazing women in memoriam.

Beverly Beaver passed away on April 19, 2025 at the age of 77. 

From Six Nations, Bev Beaver was a pioneer of the game during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, not only for women, but for Indigenous athletes. Wearing her brother's old clothes, Beaver first had to disguise herself to first find space to play on the outdoor ponds among the boys. If they knew she was a girl, Beaver would not have been allowed to play. After showing her skills, her uncle invited her to play on a boys' team with her cousin, with her first official game coming against a team of boys from Canada's first residential school, the Mohawk Institute located near Brantford, Ontario. Soon she was invited to join the Six Nations U-13 team. While she had the skill, Beaver was denied access to playing for the team in league or tournament play because she was a girl.

“They took me to a big tournament, I was all dressed and on the bench and ready to play, but at the last minute, the coach decided not to use me because he was afraid that if they found out I was a girl he might get disqualified from the tournament, which they eventually won," Beaver told The Hockey News in 2023. "That was the closest I got to actually playing in an organized boys game, other than exhibition.”

In 1963 however, Beaver would be part of an all-Indigenous women's team based in Six Nations. It was the coach of the boys' team, Oliver Smith, that Beaver had not been able to play for who eventually helped launch a women's team.

"He had a daughter named Sarah Smith, and she organized a women’s hockey team for Six Nations, and that’s how I got started playing organized hockey with women.”

Soon, Beaver became a scoring phenom in the women's hockey world including helping her team win a tournament in Wallaceburg, Ontario, that would soon become the Lipstick Tournament. The following year in 1967, Beaver joined the Central Ontario Women's Hockey League (COWHL) with Burlington. Beaver would win the COWHL scoring title that season, and again in 1972 while finishing second in league scoring three times in between. During her many seasons in the COWHL, Beaver was league MVP five times. It's a league that would produce many legends of the game including Hockey Hall of Famers such as Angela James and Geraldine Heaney.

Beaver temporarily retired at age 34 before returning midseason to bolster Burlington's lineup in 1983  at age 36 as they headed toward a provincial title. On that run, Beaver scored more than a point per game and was named MVP of the provincial final, helping Burlington capture that title. 

Beaver would play until she was 43 in 1990, then skating alongside her daughter with the Brantford Lady Blues Sr. B team. While she never got to represent Team Canada herself, some of Beaver's memorabilia resides alongside other famous women in hockey inside the Hockey Hall of Fame. Nonetheless, she was thrilled to see the growth of women's hockey to the World Championship and Olympic levels.

“It would have been fantastic if I’d been able to play for Team Canada or in the Olympics,” Beaver said. “It would have been great to be recognized on a bigger scale, at the Olympics, or play against teams from other countries. That would have been nice. I was happy when they finally did include women in the Olympics.”

Lisa Brown-Miller passed away on May 2, 2025 at the age of 58. Brown-Miller, a Michigan product, was a member of USA's inaugural World Championship team in 1990, and also won gold as a member of USA's first ever Olympic women's hockey team in 1998. Brown-Miller, and Hockey Hall of Fame member Cammi Granato were the only members of Team USA to play at both events.

She was first introduced to hockey as a Detroit Red Wings fan, and first tried the game in the living room of a neighbors house in West Bloomfield, Michigan, shooting tennis balls back and forth with hockey sticks. Soon, she found herself on the ice at Lakeland Arena in 1972 for her first time playing the sport for real. At the time however, girls hockey in Michigan was not popular.

“It was definitely not the norm,” Brown-Miller said in Ice In Their Veins: Women's Relentless Pursuit of the Puck. “I knew of no other girls who played hockey.”

Brown-Miller made her first step into girls hockey at age 13 in Royal Oak, Michigan. Soon, she was being called on to join the NCAA with Providence College.

“It was as if we were kind of, just a step or two away, as if doors were opening,” she recalled of the time. “Doors would open, and then we took another step or two and we’re through that door. And then you’re walking along your path, skating along the path, and then there’s another door in front of you, and you’re just one or two steps there, and you’re going to skate through that door. So fortunately for me, when I came into the game, we found this girls’ hockey program. Then I heard somewhere along the line that there was collegiate hockey for women, which became my full focus.”

As a rookie at Providence College in 1984, Brown-Miller made an immediate impact scoring the conference championship winning goal for Providence over New Hampshire to capture the ECAC title that year. As a senior in 1988, she was named the ECAC Player of the Year.

Internationally, Brown-Miller won four silver medals with Team USA in the 1990s, and added gold at the historic Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan in 1998. Brown-Miller had a goal and three points in her six Olympic games, and totalled 16 points in 15 games at the World Championships.

In the 1990s, Brown-Miller also served as head coach for Princeton's women's hockey team, and was named ECAC Coach of the Year in 1992. When she learned of the 1998 Olympics, Brown-Miller stepped away from coaching in 1996 to attempt to make USA's national team yet again. She would later return to coaching, serving as head coach for Aquinas College from 2019 to 2022.

Brown-Miller was also a strong advocate for more opportunities for women and girls in sport, including the push for NCAA Division 1 hockey in Michigan.