As the days ticked down towards the Isobel Cup Final last March, the Boston Pride seemed poised to add another chalice to its trophy collection. With a 23-1 record, a National Women’s Hockey League championship felt more like an inevitability than a goal.
The only thing that could stop the team, it turns out, was the coronavirus. The NWHL postponed the final between Boston and the Minnesota Whitecaps a day before the championship game was scheduled to take place in March as the sports world began to wise up to the viral threat.
Pride forward and captain Jillian Dempsey remembers the emotional elevator, when excitement about the game plunged to shock and disappointment.
“As everything settled, it was starting to become more frustrating,” she said. “Like, ‘Aw man, we never got that chance!’”
The NWHL eventually canceled the match as the pandemic continued to spread, leaving the season finale on a cliffhanger the league never resolved.
Now, more than 10 months since the team’s last game, the Pride are preparing to return to the ice as the entire NWHL packs its bags for a two-week bubble season at the 1980 Rink-Herb Brooks Arena in Lake Placid, New York. Games begin Jan. 23.
Bubbles have become common as pro leagues navigate COVID-19. For Pride President Hayley Moore and the rest of the NWHL, the challenge of setting up the protective shell has been worthy of its own trophy.
“We want to be sure that the safety of our players, our staff, our fans, our communities are the top priority,” she said. “And as things evolved, this was really just the natural fit to be able to salvage a season.”
The league started working on return-to-play options back in April. The plan has shifted and changed several times as the NWHL saw what other leagues got right and wrong and as the world has continued to live with the pandemic.
The league has worked with the New York State Olympic Regional Development Authority to put up the bubble. COVID testing will be provided by Yale Pathology Labs. The plan is for each of the NWHL’s six teams to play one game against each other. That will be followed by playoffs and the Isobel Cup Final.
Still, Pride Head Coach Paul Mara points out that what the NWHL will do is an entirely different animal from other leagues like the NHL, which had bubbles in two Canadian cities at the start of its return over the summer. Mara’s squad will be in a hotel in the frosty confines of upstate New York in late January, where he’s expecting subzero temperatures.
“Everyone understands that we’re up there to play hockey,” he said, refering to the site of the 1980 Winter Olympics. “We’re not up there on vacation. We’re not up there to relish in everything in the history of Lake Placid. We’re up there to win an Isobel Cup. And, you know, I think that’s been our focus since this has been announced in November that we have a lot of games in a short amount of time. And our focus is to win.”
The team has been practicing for this moment since September and has used that time to acclimate themselves to the protocols for the return to play. Pride rookie forward Sammy Davis, the first overall pick in the 2020 draft, has gone through what seems like an endless preseason.
“It’s hard for everybody, not just the rookies. It’s been a hard year. There’s been a lot of emotions. It’s been frustrating to show up to the rink some days, not show up to the rink some days, not be able to come to the rink some days,” she said. “The hardest part is the unknown.”
Still, Davis has found comfort in being on the ice and in a locker room.
“I’m just excited to play hockey and finally put on my jersey for the first time and play in an actual game,” she said.
When Davis and the Pride reach Lake Placid, it will be to win hockey games. But the players, who are often studying or working other jobs, will also have to carry on with their lives. Davis will continue work on her doctorate degree in occupational therapy while she’s in the bubble.
Jillian Dempsey teaches fifth grade in her hometown of Winthrop. She taught remotely all fall and just started hybrid classes at the beginning of this month. In Lake Placid, she’ll be teaching on Zoom from her hotel room during the day and skating out on the ice at night. It’ll be a grind.
“It’s gonna be a number of games in 13 days. When we were little, we used to play six in a weekend at tournaments. It’s gonna be close to that feeling again," she said. "But obviously these games are gonna be more taxing and more demanding than when were playing youth hockey. It’s pretty much gonna be a game every day or every other day. That’s a tremendous amount of hockey.”
Dempsey’s been playing organized hockey since she was five and said this period has probably been the longest she’s gone without playing a real game since then.
But with games back on the calendar, the Pride have a chance to feel something like normal again, if just for two weeks in the bubble (which has been christened #Ndubble on Twitter). When the league hosts the Isobel Cup Final on Feb. 5, which will be broadcast to a national audience, maybe they can claim a crown that never found a head to rest on last March.
