Michele Emerson was a 9-year-old goalie. Traveling from Illinois to Canada for the 1978 International Silver Stick, she was barred solely for being a girl. When it kept happening, Emerson left the sport.
Michele Emerson was a 9-year-old goalie. Traveling from Illinois to Canada for the 1978 International Silver Stick, she was barred solely for being a girl. When it kept happening, Emerson left the sport.
Michele Emerson was only nine. She’d made the more than twelve hour drive through the snow with her team, the Waukegan Shields, from Illinois to Sarnia, Ontario to play in the 1978 International Silver Stick tournament. When she arrived, the only goaltender for her team, Emerson was told she could not play.
Referred to primarily as “the girl” in initial news reports, the Ontario Minor Hockey Association, who sanctions the Silver Stick, barred Emerson from competing. According to OMHA executive John Slobodnik, “the OMHA provides hockey for boys only.” Tournament director Hugh Sutherland stated to the Canadian Press that, “to the OMHA, she is an illegal player…”
Entered into the Atom B division, the team tried to move their opening game across the St. Clair River into Port Huron, Michigan.
“We asked if we could move the game to the United States,” said Waukegan manager Ron Williams. “We figured with all the little league cases, the precedent had been set. But they told us OMHA rules would apply in Port Huron, too.”
The team tried to move cities, they tried to move countries, but they couldn’t move mountains. As Port Huron’s The Times Herald wrote, there was only one reason Michele Emerson was being held off the ice, “because she’s a girl.”
With the referees instructed not to drop the puck if Emerson was on the ice, she took warmups, and then retreated to the dressing room to watch her team play the opening game of the tournament without her. Playing with six skaters and no goalie, the Waukegan Shields, a team of 9-year-olds, lost 6-4 to Coniston, Ontario.
“When I first found out I couldn’t play, I cried a lot, but then when I saw the game, I just got mad. We all worked hard and we wanted to win,” the 9-year-old Emerson told The Times Herald.
“I’m not a crusader or anything, but this whole thing is pretty stupid,” said Williams. “She’s one of our best players. The only difference between her and the rest of the players is that she combs her hair after the game.”
It was Emerson’s third year on the Waukegan team.
“I just can’t believe this is happening,” Michele Emerson’s father David told the media. “Those kids have practiced six days a week. They drove 11 hours to get there. Now their goalie can’t play because she’s a girl. I’m definitely going to sue if my daughter can’t play. She’s a member of the Amateur Hockey Association of the U.S. which sanctions Silver Stick competition in this country. AHAS rules permit her to play. And they knew she was coming up there. I’m just sick about this.”
The story made newspapers across North America, with the Chicago Sun Times writing that Emerson, upon arriving in Canada “found out that all her hockey trophies, hours of practice and youthful skill don’t count, because she’s a girl.”
“I don’t get it,” Emerson told the Sun Times. “Why don’t I get to play because I’m a girl?...I got a lot of trophies playing hockey, you know. I don’t see why a girl doesn’t get a chance.”
City council in Sarnia agreed with Emerson, passing a motion only days later calling the rule “discriminatory and antiquated,” and stating in the Canadian Press that it should be changed.
The Waukegan Shields went home, making the trip to Illinois without a fair chance to show their mettle against the top competition in their age group, but even back in the United States, Canada’s discriminatory rulings followed Michele Emerson.
Playing in another event, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Shields were scheduled to face a team from Kitchener, Ontario. While the rule was being discussed in Ontario, a fight that would take another decade of exclusion and many court battles to resolve, Canadian teams were bringing the issue outside their jurisdiction.
“We’ve told our team just to skate off the ice and wait for the next game,” Kitchener coach Pat Doherty said of their message to the team of 9-year-old players about what to do if Emerson was on the ice. By this time however, Emerson was prepared.
“I planned for this for a long time and I’m gonna suit up against them,” Emerson told the Associated Press. “It they want to walk out, it’s their tough beans.”
Not all boys’ teams acted the way Canadian teams did however, as the Chicago Saints who played the Waukegan Shields brought flowers unto the ice for Emerson and the players all wished her luck to let her know she belonged.
The games were part of a “friendship” series between American and Canadian teams but as the Wisconsin Times-Herald-Reporter stated in their headline, “‘Friendship’ is unfriendly.” No game occurred between Waukegan and Kitchener, instead Waukegan practiced, dressed, and left the rink. The continued discrimination posed by Canadian teams toward Emerson was flushing away her love for the game.
“I don’t think it’s right,” Emerson said. “I realize I can’t play up there, because of their rules. But why should they be able to keep me from playing down here?”
“If this is gonna happen every year, I don’t want to play,” she said to the Associated Press. “It’s just not worth it.”
And it appears her words stood true, as following that season, there was no mention of Emerson in newspapers. Ontario’s rules protected no one, rather they stole the game from a little girl.