Fanni Gasparics has loved being on the ice her entire life. That passion has career her throughout her career across several countries, including to today with PWHL Ottawa.
Fanni Gasparics has loved being on the ice her entire life. That passion has career her throughout her career across several countries, including to today with PWHL Ottawa.
For Fanni Gasparics, current member of PWHL Ottawa, hockey has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember.
“I grew up in Budapest and basically I started playing hockey when I was seven years old. So I can say that all my life, as I remember, hockey was a part of my life,” she said.
School and hockey helped to keep this Budapest, Hungary native busy from a young age and being able to play hockey, despite it not being as popular as some water sports in Hungary, is something that Gasparics is very proud of.
Early on, Gasparics’ parents had planned to ensure all of their children could swim, bike and skate, but it was around the age of three, when her father brought her to the rink and started teaching her to skate that she started falling in love with the sport.
“Back then, we had cold winters and we had open ice rinks in Hungary, and for me and my father, it was a hobby for us and there was skating for everyone,” Gasparics recalls.
Gasparics was a natural at the sport, so when she saw an advertisement in her school about a new hockey team starting up in Hungary, she and her parents knew they should check it out.
“My parents looked at that poster and they were like ‘Okay, that could be a nice sport for you’ because I was so energetic,” Gasparics reflected. “I always wanted to play something. I wasn’t the kind of kid who could just sit at the table and draw or paint. No, I had to do something active!”
The first impressions of this new hockey club were discouraging for Gasparics, as when she arrived, there were only about three girls and 25 boys on the ice.
“[My parents] were like ‘Okay, maybe this sport is more for boys or is it too dangerous?”
Despite the initial outlook on the sport, as well as the next 11 years where she would be playing the sport with only boys, Gasparics stuck with it because of her unwavering passion, but also because her parents enjoyed watching practices and fell in love with the sport, just as she had.
Gasparics dabbled in figure skating early on as her parents still thought hockey was a little too dangerous, but that didn’t last long.
“My parents realized that this is not for me and thank God because I am not a very good dancer,” she said. “I’m more of a tough girl who likes to be hard, so hockey was right for me.”
Throughout her hockey career, Gasparics has consistently produced at a high level, including internationally, where she’s been a mainstay on the Hungarian national teams. Most recently, she competed in and captained Team Hungary in the Four Nations Cup, helping the team to win the championship.
Gasparics has also seen time in Russia, where she played with three different clubs over five seasons, along with a season in the PHF with the Metropolitan Riveters, as well as Sweden with Brynäs IF of the SDHL.
All of that hard work, determination, passion and drive has led her to this moment, where she accepted an invite to PWHL Ottawa’s training camp and impressed the coaching staff, so much so that they offered her a contract. It wasn’t an easy decision to choose which club to sign with, but “sometimes, you just have to listen to your intuitions and your heart, mind and soul,” Gasparics said.
“I just felt like things in Ottawa looked really good, and I knew some of the players and I had heard about Carla from before.”
“You know, we have a really great team culture,” she said, “so we are all friends and I feel like even if we only met in the middle of November, we came together really fast, and obviously thanks to our coaching staff who helped us become that close in such a short time.”
As we embark on the next portion of PWHL hockey, Gasparics continues to showcase her skillset on the ice, her humour off the ice, all while never losing sight of the love she’s had for the sport since that first trip to the open rink with her father.