Shipe shares her story with Teeland Middle students

PALMER — From Anchorage to Andover, Brown University to international hockey, and back to Anchorage, O’Hara Shipe has quite a story to share.

“Six countries, nine cities, and 10 teams all in five years is hard,” Shipe said.

Speaking to Teeland Middle School eighth-grade students April 17, Shipe kept coming back to her dream. Invited by eighth-grader Kaylee Merrill, who has aspirations to someday play professional hockey, Shipe came to visit with Kristi Shea’s yearbook class. Joining the yearbook students were other eighth-grade classes, eager to hear Shipe’s story and ask questions.

“I wanted to play hockey all of my life,” Shipe explained simply.

But the journey around the world is not simple. Playing in prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, “after a chance meeting with a coach from Yale University,” she told the students, “changed my life.”

In addition to playing hockey, Shipe described her community work, which included outreach to girls in need of encouragement, help, and giving herself to others.

She said she still hears from those students, including one who was suffering from leukemia and is now in her late teens and leukemia-free.

“You will never know how much you helped me,” the girl wrote to Shipe.

Because of an injury, Shipe had to back out of professional hockey, though she still plays and has taken up coaching recently.

“I can never go back on the ice professionally, and that’s hard,” she said.

Shipe offered a few words of advice to the Teeland students: “Keep your head down and keep working.”

Shipe has taken her own words to heart. She worked for years to make it onto a prep team, then an Ivy League team, and finally, a professional men’s team in Russia. For years she was more than 10,000 miles from home, living out of her duffle bag. It was difficult, she said.

Now, having to back away from a professional athlete’s life is the difficulty.

But she is passing the time, working on a second master’s degree in photography.

“I pick up the camera in the morning like I used to pick up my skis and hockey stick,” Shipe said.

All the credit for her accomplishments, she said, goes to her mother. Even when she thought she couldn’t play and was intimidated by the older or bigger players, her mom would tell her, “Get out there.”

“I couldn’t have done any of these things without my mom cheering me on,” Shipe said.

Catherine Esary is the Public Information Officer for the Mat-Su Borough School District.