Mothers try out hockey's thrills

On ice, women bond, have a blast

WAKE FOREST -- Agi Buchanan battled hard for the puck, hacking at her competitor with her hockey stick, then abruptly fell to her knees.

"Stop laughing," she called to her husband, Bob, who watched through the glass with 11-month-old daughter Brooke.

But Agi Buchanan was smiling too. Even as her momentum sent her crashing into the boards on her next turn through the drill, the grin didn't leave her face. It was Buchanan's second time ever on the ice with a hockey stick, and she made the most of it.

So did two dozen other women, some with their daughters, who turned out for the Carolina Amateur Hockey Association's third-annual Mother's Day Skate at the Factory Ice House.

For the Buchanans, ice hockey is a family passion. Bob Buchanan coaches a team for 9-year-old son Chris, who takes credit for teaching his mom to skate fast. Four-year-old Bridget will start learning to play hockey in the fall.

But on Sunday, as it should be, the focus was on their mother.

"What makes it so special ... is the chance to get away for even two hours," said Agi Buchanan, a medical writer for Quintiles Transnational. Counting the two-hour round trip to Wake Forest from her family's home in Chapel Hill, "that's four hours just for me."

While Buchanan was a novice on the ice, others -- like Kris Patton of Southern Pines -- had more experience. Patton started playing on the local women's team, the NC Trailblazers Women's Ice Hockey club, a year ago after her children got involved in the sport.

"I'm 41 years old, and I said, 'What the heck, I'm not going to be able to do it when I'm 60. Why not now?,' " she said. "It's a rush."

On Sunday, she and daughter Sydney, 9, passed the puck around a circle, skated suicides and competed one-on-one. By the end, Sydney, who also took part in a two-hour clinic for girls Sunday morning, sprawled on the ice, trying to gather enough ice shavings to make a snowball to fling at her mom.

Girls' and women's ice hockey is the fastest-growing division of USA Hockey, the national governing body for ice hockey, with more than 45,000 members registered nationally. That's up from about 10,000 during the 1992-93 season.

In the Triangle, about 80 girls and 50 women play on ice hockey teams, said Lise Barley-Maloney, chair of the Carolina Amateur Hockey Association's girls and women's committee. The sport's competitiveness, camaraderie and fast pace hook players, said Barley-Maloney, who started the area's first girls' and women's teams 12 years ago.

Members of the Raleigh Storm girls' team stuck around after the early clinic to cheer on their friends from the N.C. State women's club hockey team.

Wei Leong, a junior at Durham Academy, started playing six years ago in Maryland. On Sunday, she said it was cool to see girls and women playing hockey together.

"I think it's a really good sport," she said. "It proves we can do anything guys can do, sometimes better -- most of the time better."