Valley hockey players celebrate 30 years with league win

ANCHORAGE — A youthful team doesn’t guarantee a win in the adult women’s hockey league championship.

On the final day of the Anchorage Women’s Hockey League championship, March 28, the Valley women’s hockey team, All Creatures, beat the Anchorage Women’s Clinic team in “an exciting overtime finish,” said defensive player Judy Masteller.

Masteller, a veterinarian at All Creatures Veterinary Clinic (the team’s namesake) in Wasilla, is one of many women who have been playing in adult hockey leagues for more than 20 years. She started playing as an adult in Anchorage in 1992, and joined the Valley team in 1998.

At 55, Masteller knows she’s no spring chicken, but that hasn’t seemed to affect her skills on the ice.

“It’s nice to see that we can have somebody 60 years of age playing in a competitive league against 18 year olds and still win a championship game,” Masteller said.

Although the Anchorage teams tend to bring in younger players more frequently, the Valley team only has six players on their 18-person team under 40: Colleen O'Bryant, Kaitlin Lenoir, Ashlen Welch, Laura Crum, Julia Frank and Mindy Hardin.

O’Bryant was one of four scorers for All Creatures in the 5-4 win over the Women’s Clinic in the championship game.

Another scorer was captain Shelly Eller, a member of the Valley team since 1992. Eller said she knew how to skate prior to joining the team, but had only watched the game of hockey when her husband played as a high school student. She played softball though, and a few teammates encouraged her to join them on the Valley women’s hockey team.

“There’s nothing like a (sports) team to bring women together,” Eller said.

But it took her a while to discover that. As a young student living in Anchorage, Eller said she only knew one girl who played hockey, in junior high.

“Hockey was just so male-dominated for so long,” she said.

Larson Elementary School librarian Diane Firmani could attest to that. With more than 10 years on Eller, Firmani graduated from high school before Title IX requirements were in place — meaning exclusion from participation in certain sports on the basis of sex was legal.

Firmani gave cheerleading a try in high school, but longed to play the sports her brothers enjoyed.

Finally, in 1984, she saw an advertisement in the newspaper by Sue Fujimoto, calling for adult, female hockey players. Like Eller, Firmani knew how to skate, but didn’t know hockey. Still, she decided to give it a go.

“It was scary and it was fun, and it was good ’cause all of us were pretty much starting at the same level,” Firmani said.

She was 33 at the time. Thirty years later, she’s still playing hockey. She even married a referee, and now has a son who plays hockey for St. John’s University in Minnesota.

And she’s not quitting any time soon.

“You get old when you stop playing, you don’t stop playing when you get old,” Firmani said, paraphrasing Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.

That seems to be the philosophy the team lives by, though their motto is “do what you gotta do” — which makes sense for a group of mothers juggling jobs and families.

Wasilla High School basketball coach Jeannie Hebert-Truax is another one of those mothers, and the team’s designated “legend.”

Hebert-Truax scored two goals in the championship game this year, and has been the strongest player on the team for the last decade or so. She took a year or two off when she had her son Trent, but has years upon years of experience to fall back on as she grew up playing hockey in Fairbanks.

But basketball became her main sport in high school, and since she began coaching at Wasilla in 1995, it’s been harder to make hockey games. Not that she wasn’t accomplishing equally great (and greater) feats on the court — she coached the Wasilla team to four state championships and was inducted in the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame in 2013, the first woman honored for the sport of basketball.

But like Firmani — and probably most of the rest of the Valley women’s hockey team — she plans to be on the ice for many more seasons to come.

“Hockey is kinda like my outlet,” Hebert-Truax said. “It’s my stress reliever.”

And even as she gets older, she doesn’t think the risk of injury is high.

“I think it’s just a matter of knowing what your body can do and what your body can’t do,” she said.

All Creature’s championship win this year marks the first in six or seven years, Hebert-Truax said, though they did come in second to the Anchorage Women’s Clinic in 2012.

All Creatures currently consists of the aforementioned ladies plus Holly Rauchenstein, another scorer in the championship game; Carla Swick, an English and Japanese teacher at Wasilla High; Joani Welch, Ashlen’s mother and an original Valley team player; Sammye Pokryfki, another original player; goalie Tanya Boehm; Leslie Isaacs; and Allegra Butler.

The team is sponsored by Northern Industrial Training and Inkspot.

Contact Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.