Before Angela Ruggiero and Cammi Granato, before Hilary Knight and Natalie Darwitz, there was Cindy Curley.

She showed the way for women in the United States, demonstrating that a future in hockey, collegiately, and internationally, was possible. The result has been generations of success in the sport for American women.

It's why her induction to the Hockey Hall of Fame in the class of 2026 was long overdue. 

Curley's journey began on Boon Lake in Massachusetts, behind her family home. It was there she first played hockey alongside her brothers and neighbours. They play for hours, including at times playing teams of kids from other shores of Boon Lake.

Now 62, Curley made her move to one of the United State's burgeoning, and most dominant all-girls programs at age 10 joining Assabet Valley.

“At Assabet, we got the best ice time, because it was primarily a girls’ program there,” Curley explained in Ice In Their Veins: Women's Relentless Pursuit of the Puck.

By the time she was a high school senior, Curley led Assabet to a national championship in 1981. The tournament was played at Lake Placid on the same sheet as the "Miracle on Ice" at the 1980 Olympics only months before. But there weren't any miracles for women in international hockey yet.

At the end of the 1981 season, Curley went to Providence College to play NCAA hockey. It was there she met another Hockey Hall of Fame inductee Lou Lamiorello, who played an integral role in her on-ice development.

"If Lou saw something in your game that he didn’t like, or that could be improved, he was going to tell you, but he was also going to help you. Lou always wanted women’s hockey to be successful at Providence, and he made sure we had opportunities that women at other schools didn’t," Curley recalled in Ice In Their Veins.

At Providence College, Curley established herself as one of the best in the world, including being named the Eastern College Athletic Conference Player of the Year.

Finally, in 1987, Curley got an opportunity she thought would never come. That season, Fran Rider had worked to launch the first women's World Championship, albeit an unofficial version as governing bodies including Hockey Canada and USA Hockey would not yet support an official tournament. 

Still, Curley and USA made history that season winning bronze at the tournament, dubbed the World Women's  Hockey Tournament. It was an event that paved the path to the inaugural women's World Championship hosted in 1990 in Ottawa. The 1987 tournament featured many stars of the game, including future Hall of Famers Angela James and Geraldine Heaney, along with Curley, who would all join the inaugural World Championships in 1990.

Curley, then 26, represented the USA at the tournament setting a single tournament record that still stands today, scoring twenty-three points in only five games. She would go on to represent the USA at the next two world championships as well, winning silver at each. She captained that inaugural Team USA.

Without Curley's representation however, another legend and Hockey Hall of Fame inductee who played on those teams may not have seen herself in the game, or a path forward. For Cammi Granato, Cindy Curley was her role model.

When she turned sixteen, Granato found a brochure featuring the Providence women’s hockey team, with Cindy Curley on the cover. 

“I had no idea women played hockey out East,” Granato said in Ice In Their Veins. “I got a brochure with Cindy Curley’s name at the top and at that moment she became my first women’s idol. I said, ‘I want to be that, I want to be her, I want to go play college hockey, I want to be at the top of the statistics with her.’ It was really cool for the first time to understand that women play hockey.”

When Curley stepped on the ice for the inaugural World Championships, there was a young Cammi Granato by her side as teammates on the American national team.

But Curley's career came at a time when women were still being excluded from the sport in many ways. Leagues were few and far between, governing bodies were not funding athletes and programs, the World Championships was still taking place only every other year, and there was no women's hockey at the Winter Olympics.

The IOC voted to include women's hockey at the 1994 Olympics in Norway, but it came too late. The nation was not willing or able to provide venues for a tournament, and so women's hockey was pushed to the 1998 tournament in Nagano. By that time however, Curley was at the end of her career, and she missed the opportunity.

“There were some of my teammates in college, or even some of my opponents who were . . . right there too . . . but maybe just a year or two older. Like Cindy Curley, who just missed that opportunity. She’s one of the pioneers of the women’s game," Lisa Brown-Miller, an American women's hockey legend who passed away in 2025 said in Ice In Their Veins.

Curley was one of the best to ever play the game in the United States, and has remained a builder of the game since. She was inducted into the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 2013, and in 2026, will take her rightful spot in the Hockey Hall of Fame.