The story of UConn women's hockey's first team (part one)

In February 1996, UConn announced a five-year plan to become compliant with Title IX. The need arose when Connecticut decided to move its football program up to Division 1-A (now FBS). A commensurate number of scholarships needed to be added for women’s sports.

The first beneficiary of this plan was UConn women’s ice hockey, which evolved from a club sport into a varsity program ahead of the 2000-2001 season.

The Huskies played at the newly-opened UConn Ice Arena (later called Freitas Ice Forum and now the UConn Volleyball Center) and competed as a Division I independent for one season. In 2001-2002, they joined the Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference (ECAC), which was then the power conference in women’s college hockey. The following season, UConn became a charter member of Hockey East’s women’s league.

“We were there by accident, truthfully. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time to get the great experience of being a Division I ice hockey player,” said senior forward Rana Swistak, who served as captain of the first UConn women’s hockey team.

Whether they were seniors like Swistak or underclassmen, the skaters on UConn’s 2000-2001 team knew their varsity careers would almost certainly last just one season. From the outset, the Huskies aspired to become a big-time women’s hockey program. Head coach Heather Linstad had a bushel of Division I recruits ready to stock the roster starting in season two.

Still, the one-and-done varsity hockey players at UConn made the most of their experiences.

“None of us saw it coming. But it was super exciting once it sunk in,” said Diana Cohen, the team’s lone goaltender.

UConn joined the ranks of Division I women’s hockey in the midst of exponential growth for the sport. The number of programs in the United States more than doubled from 31 to 63 between 1995 and 2000. During the late 1990s, many schools in the Great Lakes region added women’s hockey, augmenting the sport’s existing base in the Northeast.

The success of Team USA at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan undoubtedly helped grow the women’s game. The Americans won the gold medal, upsetting Team Canada in the finals of the first full-fledged women’s ice hockey tournament in Olympic history. UConn joined Division I in the first year that the NCAA sanctioned a women’s Frozen Four.

By Connecticut standards, UConn was late to women’s varsity hockey. Yale (1977), Wesleyan (1977), Connecticut College (1997), Sacred Heart (1998), and Trinity (1998) all played varsity women’s hockey at various levels before UConn and Quinnipiac, who both established Division I programs in 2000. Yale and Wesleyan’s relatively ancient programs were rooted in the New England prep school hockey tradition, where women’s hockey caught on decades before it did elsewhere.

UConn’s relatively late entry into women’s hockey followed the trajectory of other public educational institutions in the Nutmeg State. Girls’ hockey grew slowly in Connecticut. While hotbeds like Minnesota and Massachusetts had state tournaments by the mid-1990s, Connecticut did not feature a statewide interscholastic girls’ hockey tournament until 2006. A handful of teams, primarily in Hartford and Fairfield Counties, started as early as 1987 (Simsbury was the first). During the 1980s and 1990s, the primary place for competitive girls’ hockey in Connecticut was at elite prep schools like Taft and Choate Rosemary Hall.

Like any club program, UConn’s team — which formed the core of the school’s first varsity roster — included players with a wide range of experience.

“Some of us had already played for years. Some of us had just started,” said senior forward Marcy Lambert Pellegrino.

She had skated for years but only started playing hockey when she joined Connecticut’s club team. Pellegrino prepared for her season of Division I hockey in a unique way. In the summer between her junior and senior years of college, she interned at Mademoiselle Magazine in Manhattan. After work, she ventured several times each week to a skating rink in Chelsea to work on her skating skills. She joined a hockey club there, competing primarily against men.

“Most of us did not have extensive hockey backgrounds. I played field hockey in high school, and I skated behind my childhood home. I thought, ‘That's close enough,’ but I clearly was delusional,” Swistak said.

Hockey was one of several club sports that Swistak tried during her freshman year at UConn. She also gave polo and rowing a shot but settled on hockey as her primary extracurricular activity.

“I learned about the club hockey team from a student coach that lived in my dorm. He was out one night with his hockey stick, and I took it and shot a few shots and the next thing I knew I was buying skates to be on the club team,” Swistak said.

Others found different avenues into the sport.

“I actually started out as a fan. I started watching the New York Islanders as a freshman in high school,” Cohen said.

She found goaltending particularly fascinating and decided to give it a try.

“I started playing at a local rink in Brewster, New York. I was subbing and going to stick and puck open events,” Cohen said.

When she enrolled at UConn, she decided to play club hockey as a freshman in 1999-2000. The players interviewed for the story all described those days as some of their greatest experiences at UConn.

 “I loved it. Those were some of my most memorable times at UConn. Going to UConn, I was a little bit concerned about the size of the school — how I would fit in and how I would find friends. But I very quickly found the UConn club team and immediately made friends,” Cohen said. “I loved our coach, Andrew Schwartz. He was so knowledgeable and thoughtful. And as a team we had a lot of fun.”

“There was such a sense of camaraderie and friendship. We hung out off the ice. It really made my UConn experience very rich from the get-go,” Cohen said.

Still, it wasn’t exactly easy to jump into. The players interviewed all describe cobbling together their equipment from either hand-me-downs or used sporting goods stores. The practice times weren’t exactly favorable, either.

“Being on a club team meant that an upperclassman with a car would pick you up at 5:30 a.m. for your 6:00 a.m. practice,” Swistak said.

Still, they made the most of it.

“There was such a sense of camaraderie and friendship. We hung out off the ice. It really made my UConn experience very rich from the get-go,” Cohen said.

“I think the special part was that we all wanted to play. And we all had a desire to learn,” Swistak said.

Part two will come out on Thursday.