Seattle is a women’s hockey city through and through. Since the early 1900s, the game has been avidly played and watched by women in the biggest city in the Pacific Northwest.
In 1917, the Seattle Hockeyettes were the first group of women’s hockey players in the area, playing games against one another, including teams called the Down Easters, who were led by Violet Wilson, and the Sourdoughs. The members of the initial group were wives of the Seattle Metropolitans team, including Wilson, whose husband Cully Wilson won two Stanley Cups, one with the Toronto Blueshirts in 1914, and another with the Metropolitans in 1917. They weren’t however, the first in Washington State. As the Spokane Chronicle read in December of 1906, “A hockey team for women will be formed at the ice rink in the near future.”
Rink manager Perry Morgan stated “There are seven or eight ladies in the city who are anxious to get into a hockey team and it has been decided to form one with the view of scheduling games with British Columbia teams later in the season.” Only days later, the Chronicle reported that the women’s team had practiced for the first time.
Seattle’s women’s teams in 1917 did play for a championship with the Metettes beating the Glacier Girls 1-0. “Girls are not afraid of anything nowadays,” the Seattle Sunday Times wrote in Mach 1917. “Who ever thought after witnessing a “really and truly” hockey game with the minor features of broken noses, limbs, and cracked heads that the young misses of this day and age would feel like “taking a hand” in the excitement. Yet that is what a number of girls in this city have been doing this winter-playing hockey, ice hockey, just like the boys and men.”
Driving the growth of the game among women in the city were the wives of the Seattle Metropolitans, along with Seattle head coach Pete Muldoon. Muldoon coached the Metropolitans from 1915 to 1924, including to their Stanley Cup title in 1917, and later became the first head coach of the Chicago Black Hawks. Muldoon provided the guidance to Seattle’s early women’s team.
“Ladies’ ice hockey has just struck Seattle, or will in a few days when the first feminine puckchasers ever in the sound city will be on the ice practicing,” Vancouver’s Daily News Advertiser wrote on January 14, 1917. “Two teams are being picked up, one by Pete Muldoon and to consist of the Wives of the Seattle Mets for the most part.”
On March 8, 1920, a team composed of players from the University of Washington faced the Vancouver Amazons. The Washington team, as the Vancouver Daily World wrote, “under the tutelage of Pete Muldoon have developed into good hockey players.” It’s believed this was only the second time ever teams from Canada and the USA had crossed paths, with the first international games taking place in 1917 between the Ottawa Alerts and Pittsburgh Polar Maids in a three game series in the Steel City.
In 1921, it was Muldoon again who helped form the most famous of Seattle’s early teams, the Seattle Vamps.
Looking to play in a three team series in 1921 along with the Victoria Kewpies and Vancouver Amazons, in conjunction with Frank and Lester Patrick’s Pacific Coast Hockey League, Muldoon took to assembling and coaching the Seattle Vamps roster, which was captained by Jerry Reed. Seattle did not finish their series, dubbed the International Ladies’ Hockey League, with much success, losing three games, although they ended their campaign tying the Victoria Kewpies 1-1. Seattle’s
Following that season, women’s hockey went quiet in Seattle, but it didn’t disappear.
In the winter of 1930, two women’s teams were formed, playing their first game on January 4, 1931. They were known as the Seattle Royalettes and Octonek Knitters.
The Royalettes were also called the Langendorf Royalettes as they were primarily a company team from Seattle’s Lagendorf Unitied Bakeries. They played another company team the Octonek Knitters, also nicknamed the Amazons, who were composed of women from the Octonek Knitting Company. The Octonek Knitting Company were responsible at the time for making some of the hockey uniforms for local teams including those of the Seattle Eskimos, a team run by Pete Muldoon, who played in the Pacific Coast Hockey League.
Soon the Royalettes found competition in another reincarnated team from across the Canadian border, the Vancouver Amazons. On March 7, 1931, the Seattle Royalettes beat Vancouver 2-1 in Seattle. It was a series, as The Vancouver Sun called it, to decide “the Pacific Coast champion of the sweeter sex.”
Following Seattle’s opening game win of the two game, total goals series over Vancouver, Doris Parkes of the Vancouver Amazons spoke of her confidence in Vancouver being able to come back to win the series.
“It is true that we lost the first encounter to them by the odd goal,” said Parkes. “But total goals on the two games count and we are not a bit downhearted.
At the time, there was one significant difference between the teams, that being the rules they followed. In Canada, there were many places where forward passing was still not permitted, although the NHL began allowing the rule in 1929. At the time, Seattle played with the forward pass, while Vancouver did not.
In the second game of the series, Jean Robertson scored the lone goal of the contest, “beating the Amazons’ goalie in a mixup in front of the net,” to give the Royalettes a 1-0 win, a two game series title.
As The Vancouver Sun reported on March 14, 1931, “The “(Royalettes) turned out a well balanced team and as far as skating was concerned were superior to the Amazons.” The paper also touted the goaltending of Seattle’s Sophie Balaskan. Despite it being a decade later, Seattle Vamps veteran Jerry Reed returned to the ice with the Royalettes as well as other members of the Vamps.
It would be decades more before Seattle developed a women’s hockey association that would last, but today the city is considered a top candidate to host women’s hockey events, and someday a professional women’s hockey team.
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