Women's Hockey Saw A California Boom In San Diego, Los Angeles, and Berkeley In The 1970s

Today, hockey played in warm weather locations has become normal. In sunny California, it’s often sandy beaches and surfers that come to mind first, but of course there’s also the Los Angeles Kings, San Jose Sharks, and the Anaheim Ducks. Before them, many iterations of professional teams played in the state, including the NHL’s California Golden Seals in Oakland.

While men’s hockey was the main discussion at the time, women began organizing their own games in the state. Women had been playing hockey in San Francisco and other areas of California since 1916 . But there were also long droughts for the sport for women. That is until the 1970s.

In 1972, an inaugural Fourth of July women’s hockey tournament was played in San Diego. That same year another women’s hockey league in North Hollywood popped up.

“Women are still as fair today as they were in Shakespearean times, however, they are anything but frail especially in San Fernando Valley where there is a newly organized girls hockey league called the Valley Girls Associated League of Skaters,” the Valley News wrote in December of 1972. The team was put together by North Hollywood boys’ hockey coach Hank Norwood. He offered training sessions donating his time throughout the summer and fall, and helping North Hollywood’s first team arrange games against the Los Angeles Blues.

Soon, word spread to through Southern California, and games were arranged between North Hollywood’s team, the Valley Ice Capettes. The Ice Capettes were joined by the San Diego Dolphins, Los Angeles Blues, Culver City Flames, and West Covina Comets to form a league that in their inaugural season, scheduled 16 games each. The Valley league was younger than most, with players ranging in age from nine to 20.

Stan Modrak, the league’s coordinator, whose daughter played for the Valley Ice Capettes, was enthusiastic about girls in California playing ice hockey.

“It gives girls a chance to practice real sportsmanship,” he said to the Valley News. “It also fills their leisure time with a lot of physical activity that might otherwise be wasted or get them into mischief.”

Despite the support however, and the young age of many players in the Valley league, that had a reported median age of 14, the Ice Capettes like almost every women’s team at the time, were forced to feist on scraps for ice time playing home games at 11pm.

Soon however, the various organizations in the area laid more formal plans, with a call between Modrak and Lynn Pankhurst, founder of the San Diego Dolphins, resulting in the formation of the Southern California Women’s Hockey League. Working together with others like Dee Blair, who founded the Flames in Northridge, the league took foot.

While many played a role in getting regular competition in Southern California for women off the ground, it was Pankurst who guided this quest. She fell in love with the game through her sons, and as an avid fan of the San Diego Gulls men’s professional team. After overcoming a spinal surgery in 1971 where she was given 50/50 odds to walk again, Pankhurst not only used her new opportunity to teach the game to others in San Diego. She soon became involved in San Diego’s minor hockey association, and started teaching the game to youth, including 19 girls and women who showed up at the House of Ice in La Mesa. Soon however, she found the best way to teach these aspiring women’s hockey players, was to demonstrate the game herself.

“Hockey is a real ego trip,” Pankhurst told the Imperial Beach Star-News in August of 1972. “The question is whether you can stay on your feet and play the game. And it is an even bigger trip when you win.”

Pankhurst advocated for women in hockey saying they had many natural advantages over men in hockey, and that they played a better style of hockey, less focused on “head hunting.” She guided the Dolphins through growth with the team playing showcases at professional men’s games including at the San Diego Gulls’ games, but also in Los Angeles between periods at the WHA’s Los Angeles Sharks games. Pankhurst herself was actively involved in the San Diego community, not only as a builder for ice hockey, but as the Montgomery fire commissioner and as vice president of the Montgomery Civic Council.

Prior to Pankhurst launching the Dolphins in 1971-1972, San Diego had primarily been a men’s hockey city with first the San Diego Skyhawks, founded in 1941, who played at Glacier Gardens which opened in 1939, followed by the original iteration of the San Diego Gulls. The Gulls played in the city from 1966 to 1974 when a WHA team, the San Diego Mariners came to town forcing the Gulls to fold. Instead of losing the historic name however, Bob Breitbard offered it to the women’s team, who accepted.

“When the Gulls left town, Mr. Breitbard gave us permission to use the Gulls’ name as our nickname and also gave us home and away jerseys,” said team manager Lynn Pankhurst in a July 1975 interview with the Imperial Beach Star-News. Pankhurst auctioned off many of those 122 jerseys to help raise funds for her team, and to help keep the Gulls’ name alive.

Where the Western hockey League’s San Diego Gulls were in support of women’s hockey, the World Hockey Association’s San Diego Mariners were not.

“We didn’t have to beg the Gulls to help us,” said Pankhurst. “They came to us and offered to help. The Mariners, though, haven’t offered to help us in any way. I’ve spoken to the Mariner’s general manager and let’s just say he wasn’t particularly responsive to the idea of women in competitive body contact sports.”

There are few records of actual games played, although it’s known the

San Diego won the tournament in 1975 beating the Costa Mesa Puckers 10-1, and then edging the Los Angeles Royals 2-1 for the title. Kelsay Atkinson led the way for the San Diego Gulls in that tournament scoring six of her team’s goals.

“There was a wide interest in women’s hockey then and there will probably be several more teams on the scene in the next couple years,” Pankurst said. That interest included teams forming including the Van Nuys Bruins, the Gulls, Los Angeles Royals, Costa Mesa Puckers, Warner Stars (Hollywood), and Los Angeles Blues (Norwalk). In 1975, the five team Southern California Women’s Hockey League played a 24 game schedule.

While their were no age restrictions for women in the league, many women did find restrictions. One member of the Costa Mesa Puckers, Liz Aseltine, left the Puckers in search of stronger competition, but was met with opposition from the boys in on her Whittier midget team.

“We were terrible,” Aseltine said of the Costa Mesa Puckers in a 1978 interview with the Ventura County Star. “I left the them for a boys team in a midget league. They gave me a bad time. They used to say things like ‘hey Liz, come on in the dressing room with us if you want to be one of the boys.’ They tried to discourage me. They hit me hard. I suffered a broken rib and my mother tried to get me to quit. They wouldn’t pay any attention to me when I had the puck, as if to say ‘let her alone, she can’t score anyway.’ It was demoralizing, but I was determined to stick it out.”

Aseltine did stick it out saying “hockey is kind of my life.” She joined a men’s league team called The Outlaws, who welcomed her in. She even received praised from Los Angeles Kings defender Neil Komadoski, who said Aseltine was good enough to play for an NCAA team in the East, but she wanted to stay in men’s hockey in California.

Another player in the league was 15-year-old Ellen Brakespeare. Brakespeare loved the game so much that in 1974 she attended a Can-Am Hockey School near Toronto where she was named the Can-Am Poster Girl for 1975. Brakespeare played for the San Diego Gulls, while dreaming of becoming a sportscaster, a field in 1974 that she called “wide open for women.” Brakespeare was not bashful in her confidence related to where she believed she stood in the sport either. “So far as speed is concerned, I could play on a man’s professional team,” Brakespeare told the Sacramento Bee in October of 1974.

Perhaps California’s best player at the time however, was a player by the name of Toni Kordich. Kordich, a San Pedro product, not only played hockey in the Southern California Women’s Hockey League, leading the league in scoring…and often penalty minutes with the Los Angeles Blues, she was also a member of UCLA’s men’s hockey team.

“They were really taking runs at me last game,” Kordich told the San Pedro News-Pilot in 1975 of playing men’s university hockey. “I’m the smallest player in the league. You don’t ever say anything because you don’t want them to say ‘she’s only on the team because she’s a girl.’”

Kordich, who was 21 at the time, used those lessons in women’s hockey however, telling the New-Pilot the keys to her game were “intimidation and hitting.”

By the late 1970s, the game continued to spread, including back to the original site of women’s hockey in the state, the Bay Area. Original teams played out of San Francisco and Oakland, but in the 1970s, the lone operating team in the Bay Area played out of Berkeley, California, and were known as the Berkeley Breakers.

The Breakers started to gain notice in the 1978-1979 season after being founded in 1975, pleading for more women to join hockey, not only for the love of it, but so that they’d have another team to face in the Bay Area.

“We are a non-profit group, and our hopes are that another women’s team could be created…It is difficult to become a good team if there is no competition,” Breakers’ president and winger Linda Marczak told The Berkeley Gazette in February of 1979.

Even without competition, the 17 women who composed the Berkeley Breakers that season loved the game.

“We’re addicted,” Marczak told the Gazette in a separate article in December of 1978. “I like it because you have to be fast, you have to think fast, you have to be in the right place at the right time.”

“It’s the speed, freedom, and aggressiveness,” Rosalyn Malysiak, another member of the Breakers said of her own reasoning to love the game.

The team, which featured women between the ages of 20 and 54 would arrange games whenever possible, traveling to Los Angeles or playing local men’s teams, but there weren’t other women’s teams in the area, and playing men’s teams wasn’t ideal.

“Women haven’t had the training men have had,” Marczak said. “It’s really sad it’s taken this long to get women involved in any sports.”

The Breakers continued into the 1980s playing exhibition games against the Los Angeles Blues and North Hollywood teams and often playing exhibitions against teams from the Berkeley Minor Hockey Club.

It was a slow build, but through the efforts of women like Lynn Pankurst and Linda Marczak, and allies including Stan Modrak and Bob Breitbard, women’s hockey in California continued its growth to where it is today.