When Samm Holmes found out she wasn’t going to crack the Canadian women’s hockey team ahead of the 2006 Winter Games, she knew she had to stay involved in the game somehow.
But her options were pretty limited: It was either beer league, or the odd game of pickup.
“There were a bunch of us girls in this same situation. (We had) just missed making the national program, and we were all in Calgary,” Holmes said. “We needed to have a nine-to-five job and still play a high level of hockey. There wasn’t anywhere for us to do that.”
And so, Holmes created a place from scratch. At 26 years old, she started the Strathmore Rockies — and no, she doesn’t remember how they came up with their name. The elite women’s team began playing in the Western Women’s Hockey League in the 2008-09 season. And Holmes, who’d won a pair of 4 Nations Cups with Team Canada in 2000 and 2004, didn’t limit her roles to just founder and player for the team in Strathmore, which is also the site of this week’s Rogers Hometown Hockey stop.
“I’m running the team as its GM. I’m fundraising for the team, booking the ice, and I have a full-time job,” she says, laughing. Her nine-to-five was with a publishing company. “It was quite interesting. I was the team’s Reggie Dunlop,” she says, referring to the player-coach in the iconic movie, Slapshot.
But she did a heck of a lot more than Dunlop did. When the team travelled to Edmonton for games, she booked the rental mini vans and drove one. She recruited players who’d just graduated from university, or had just finished with the national team — including Bobbi-Jo Slusar, who played six games with the Rockies the same year she won a world silver medal with Canada.
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The Rockies played out of the Strathmore Family Centre Arena, and they’d get 50-some-odd fans out to each game. That’s in large part thanks to promotion from the team’s local sponsor, Encana, an oil company with a big footprint in Strathmore. The Rockies got that sponsorship because one of its players worked there. Within a couple weeks of starting the team, Holmes organized a 210-item silent auction to help fundraise for ice time and other team costs, but fundraising remained a constant concern.
“It was quite stressful for me to know that we had enough money to travel and actually have a team,” Holmes says. “There was a lot of things to do, even on game day when I was getting ready. I didn’t train as much as I wanted to because I was doing all these other things, and really it just stemmed out of me wanting to continue to play hockey.
“I took on this role of running this team and I didn’t know what I was getting into, really,” she adds, laughing.
Because of the day jobs players held down, the Rockies would practise just once a week, “and hopefully we’d get everyone out,” Holmes said.
You can imagine how they did against teams that practiced daily, like the Calgary Oval X-Treme.
“We weren’t in shape enough to compete with most of the other teams,” Holmes said. “But … I don’t think the scores always mattered to me. If you can love that game and want to play competitively at that age, then that’s the reward.”
Looking back on all the work she did to start and maintain the team, Holmes admits it looks “totally crazy,” but it seemed then to be the only option.
“It was about providing a place for people to play so they could continue their passion,” she said.
And that’s also why in 2011, after three seasons in the WWHL, the Rockies folded along with the rest of the league. The league’s western teams amalgamated into one (the Calgary Inferno) to compete in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, which ran for 12 years before shutting its doors last season.
“That was the best decision for women’s hockey at the time,” Holmes said. “We made the executive decision that we weren’t building something strong enough to be sustainable.”
Starting and running the Rockies wasn’t the first time Holmes took matters into her own hands in search of better circumstances for female hockey players. Far from it.
She grew up in Mississauga, Ont., in a hockey family, and she joined her first team at age four. But it wasn’t until she attended the 1988 Winter Games in Calgary that Holmes, then 11, learned she couldn’t dream the same dreams as her two older brothers — there was no women’s hockey on the Olympic stage.
“That’s where I think my dream came alive,” said Holmes, who would go on to play for Canada’s national team, though never at the Winter Games. “I didn’t think it was fair that my brothers could play and I couldn’t.”
Young Holmes started writing letters, expressing that it was unfair. First, she wrote to Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion. The mayor forwarded Holmes’s letter along to others in hockey and in politics. Holmes was suddenly all over the local news, protesting the fact women couldn’t play Olympic hockey. A TV crew even flew in from California to interview her for the Mickey Mouse Club Hall of Fame.
“It was one of those things that caught fire,” Holmes said. “I think it was just my age and the fact that I was one of the first players to say, ‘Hey, I want to do this,’ and as a kid. It was a small part of everybody’s push to hope for change and show that the girls are good players, and we should be on the Olympic stage.”
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That dream came true in 1998 in Nagano, when women’s hockey made its Olympic debut. Holmes attended her first national team camps just after the Games while a junior at the University of New Hampshire.
She moved to Calgary in 2002 to focus on training for the national team, and was a carded athlete on Canada’s development team from 2002–2006. Holmes didn’t get centralized with the team ahead of the 2006 Olympics in Turin.
“It was exciting and disappointing all in the same breath, as sport often is,” she said.
The good news is, it led Holmes to start the Strathmore Rockies and provide an opportunity for so many elite women to continue their careers in hockey.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” she said. “The (Strathmore) community wrapped its arms around us. I couldn’t have asked for a better town. It was short-lived, but it served its purpose and it kept girls playing who were still passionate about the game. What more could you ask for?”