When people speak of trailblazers and barrier breakers in officiating, it's often Katie Guay, Kirsten Welsh, or Laura Schmidlein who gets brought up. They each had their firsts, but like today's players who are often referred to as pioneers as well, the groundwork for their firsts, was being laid long before they stepped onto the ice. In fact, long before they were born.
The fight for space on the ice for women has not only been for players, it's been for women in officiating as well.
In 1972, a group of officials were calling games in Indianapolis, who were "believed to be the first ice hockey referees in the nation," according to Indian's The Star Press in December of 1972. One of those women, Niegel Allen, became an accredited official with the Amateur Hockey Association of the United States while working in the Indianapolis Youth Hockey League. The women had all spent years figure skating prior to becoming hockey officials.
"We had to re-learn to skate," said Allen. "For instance, when you push off figure skates, it's different. But I think hockey skates are easier."
Allen was one of four women who trained at the Mid-American Hockey Association clinic in Bowling Green, Ohio alongside Indianapolis' Irma Morris and Phyllis Minott, and Pittsburgh's Jan Galloway.
They may have been preceded in the United States by Mona Bouthillier, who began officiating hockey in Vermont sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
In the 1970s, stories popped up across North America with infrequent mentions of referees who were women. In Edmonton it was 19-year-old Barbara Mandrusiak who the Canadian Press opened with a sexist address describing the official in 1973 writing "Long dark hair, great legs, a beautiful smile - not exactly attributes one usually associates with a minor hockey referee." That same year a story was published in The Hamilton Spectator about a trio of women - Brenda Lisson, Theresa Eaton, and Sandy Chapman - officiating in Burlington.In 1977, it was Dana Williams in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1978 it was Candy Kotcher in Saginaw, Michigan, or Doreen Borger in Edmonton in 1979.
Women were officiating hockey in a variety of roles and leagues across North America throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including newsmakers like Michigan's Kotcher, and Ontario's Toni Onichuck, who in 1982 openly discussed her goals to officiate in the NHL. Onichuck, 23 at the time, had officiated at the inaugural Canadian women's national championships in Brantford, Ontario in 1982, and had advanced to referee all levels of minor hockey. But it was the NHL she wanted.
"It takes a long time to achieve that level. But if a person can stick with it, who knows?" she questioned.
"I'll have to be in the right place at the right time," Onichuk stated of potentially officiating in the NHL. "I don't think the NHL will discriminate against any woman."
But progress was slow.
In 1990 at the inaugural World Championships, Deb Maybury stepped on the ice to officiate the first ever IIHF sanctioned game for women. She'd been a long time player, including participating in the 1987 Women's World Hockey Tournament, and chose to stay in the game on the other side of the calls.
“I went from playing, to playing and refereeing, to playing, refereeing, and coaching, but at that time, I needed to choose and decide how I was going to achieve what I wanted to achieve. I knew I would be the best I could be as an official,” she said. “It didn’t matter that all of a sudden I was going to be out of it, it’s a different game, there’s no accolades, you get yelled at, you get questioned, you really need to have a strong core.”
When she first travelled to the women's national championships in 1988, officials weren't paid. There were other women serving as linespeople at the World Championships, but Maybury was a history maker as the first woman in history to referee a World Championship game.
"...[T]here was a combination of male and female, but I was the only female referee," Maybury explained of the first Wolrds. "There were certainly others at the time capable of refereeing. There were people who really fought to get females there to referee, but the powers that be wanted only male officials, they didn’t feel females should do it.”
Following Onichuck's comments, and women breaking into major tournaments like Maybury it took years longer until 1994 for a woman to officiate a men's professional game at any level. That woman has also often been forgotten while discussing women in hockey officiating. In 1994, 22-year-old Heather McDaniel became the first woman to serve as a referee for a professional men's hockey game in the Central Hockey League.
McDaniel faced many sexist comments in her time on the ice. "There's been plenty...You know, 'Go back to the kitchen where you belong.' 'Why don't you bake a cake?' 'Hey, this isn't ballet out here, you know.' Stuff like that," she said in an October 30, 1994 interview with The Boston Globe. The NHL however, wasn't closing the window of possibility for McDaniel or any other woman to some day join their ranks as an official.
"I firmly believe a lady could be a referee," Bryan Lewis, the NHL's head of officiating told the Globe. "And I think it would be far easier for a woman to be a referee than to be, say a lineslady - simply because calling lines means you would have to break up fights, too. Could a woman handle the pressure of refereeing? Absolutely. Could she make the snap decisions? Definitely. Can she skate? My son took power skating lessons from a woman and there are some women who can outskate a lot of men. So, why not?"
In 1992, Sandra Dombrowski became the first woman to officiate a World Championship gold medal game, a feat she duplicated in 1994 and 1997. She would later become the referee supervisor for both the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation and IIHF, and in 2023, Dombrowski became the first woman inducted as an official to the IIHF's Hall of Fame. But even in international women's competition, the progress was slow.
With the 1998 Winter Olympics approaching, many women were striving not only to be on the ice in Nagano, Japan as players, but as officials. 1998 was not only a paramount year launching interest in women playing hockey, but also in serving as referees and linespeople.
At that tournament several women stepped on the ice to call the games including referees Laurie Taylor-Bolton and Marina Zenk. Both had officiated at the 1994 World Championships, among other international events leading up to the Games.
Zenk went on to call the first ever gold medal game between Canada and USA at the Olympics that year. The tournament also included several other women including Debra Parece, Evonne Young, Manuela Groeger-Schneider, Sandra Dombrowski, Johanna Kuisma, Sigrid Nonas, Victoria Renfer-Kale, and Isabelle Giguere.
Zenk had been a player herself, competing at Seneca College alongside a famous teammate, Angela James, who had encouraged her to begin officiating intramural games as a job. That was the beginning. Following Nagano, Zenk joined Hockey Canada as the organization's first development coordinator in charge of women in officiating.
Today, women are breaking into all levels of hockey, from Junior A, to professional leagues in North America and Europe, and at all levels of international play. And while those firsts, whether it's Katie Guay who was the first woman to call an AHL game. Kirsten Welsh joined as the first woman to call lines in the OHL and AHL in 2021. They are crucial steps to seeing women regularly calling NHL games. With the launch of the PWHL, who used primarily AHL officials in their inaugural season, more women are calling elite professional hockey on a regular basis. When the puck dropped on the first ever game on New Years Day 2024, Lacey Senuk was one of two referees, and Erin Zach one of two linespeople.
Many significant firsts have occurred in recent years, but none would have been possible without the many women who called hockey games more than 50 years earlier.
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