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Back in 2008 I was in net at tournament in Chicago with the boys team I was on, and there was a coach from the local USHL team scouting our game. He liked what he saw from me on the ice, and he was talking to my goalie coach up in the stands.
“Whoa, man, that guy can play. Look at his movement — the way he reads the play.”
“Incredible.”
But I changed ends after the period and he saw a whole lot of curly blonde hair coming out of the back of my goalie mask. And that's when he suddenly started sounding less certain about what he was seeing.
Alex Rigsby Cavallini
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What We're Fighting For
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U. S. Women's Ice Hockey National Team
“'Please tell me that’s a guy with long hair.'
Not quite, Coach – I’m a girl."
What We're Fighting For
BY ALEX RIGSBY Cavallini
"Please tell me that’s a guy with long hair."
Not quite, Coach – I’m a girl.
I have a lot of respect for that coach because he saw past gender and clearly appreciated my ability enough to draft me to the Chicago Steel in the 2009 USHL draft. I became the first and so far the only woman ever selected by a USHL team.
Pretty cool.
I didn’t end up making the Steel, but the tryout was an experience to say the least. It started out as a 46-goalie tryout that was, um, as insane as it sounds. But I did make it down to the final three before getting the tough news. Which, I think, is a good accomplishment in it’s own right. And one that absolutely would not have been possible without years of playing on boys’ travel teams when I was a kid.
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I even just married one of my old teammates, hence the name change from Rigsby ... a story for another time….
I had a few encounters with other girls growing up, but they happened to be with a couple of my current Team USA teammates and best friends. I played on the same team as Brianna Decker and Kendall Coyne Schofield, and played against Amanda Kessel and Megan Bozek. We’d all play on boys’ teams whenever we had the chance. As a goalie with little body contact, I was able to stick it out until college.
That’s just the way it was. But not the way it should be.
That, right there, is why I’m writing this.
I only got the chance to become the goalie I was because I had to play with the boys — there wasn’t an option elsewhere. There was a girl’s hockey team in Wisconsin, where I grew up, but it wasn’t the level I wanted to play at. Year after year I proved I could hang with the boys, and they respected me and treated me like their sister (I actually played with my younger brother, Chase, as a U18), so I never felt the need to switch over. Even when I had coaches and parents from other teams telling me it was time to play with my own gender.
PHOTOS BY:
Lauren Justice/The Players' Tribune
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I remember the ’98 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and the U.S. Women’s team winning gold. I didn’t watch many of the games — but I heard about it from my parents and coach. I didn’t know women’s hockey was a thing until then, but from that point forward that was the team I wanted to be a part of.
I was just six years old, but my dream was ignited — and it would be lived out 20 years later. Still, my role models, even as I grew up, were mostly the NHL goalies I saw on TV and those golden women I could only watch play every four years.
I think about this when I meet young girls at one of our national team games or events. I wonder who their favorite hockey players are. Are they NHL players, or maybe Hilary Knight, or Kendall, or Brianna? Or maybe me?
Those little girls are the ones I think of now when the group of women I’m incredibly proud to be a part of meets and we put into motion our plans regarding the future of our sport.
As many people around the sport saw this spring, more than 200 women have decided to sit out the upcoming season from a professional league.
My USA teammates and myself are used to fighting for what we believe in. With one collective and powerful voice, we reached an agreement for equitable treatment with USA Hockey in 2017. I believe that accomplishment set us up for this moment to create a bigger wave with a bigger purpose and a bigger voice.
And I know that if we could get all of our best players, well-supported and paid, into one league — we could match that performance and raise the bar not every four years, but every day.
I know, about as well as anyone, how hard it is to have to rely on the Olympic and World Championship cycle. And when you become a post grad it is an entirely different game. Before we started getting paid a living wage by USA Hockey, we had to balance training and jobs.
I was cut from the 2014 Olympic roster after being on the national team for the entire previous season. I sat in that room in Lake Placid and listened to three other goalies get their names called, instead of mine. And when that happened my world was turned upside down. I felt my dream was shattered. I knew I could go back to the University of Wisconsin and finish my senior year there, but what came after that … I really didn’t know — and my story isn’t unique.
I believed I could make the team again, but when I graduated in 2014, my options were limited. I didn’t see much value, professionally or, honestly, financially, in joining any of the leagues that were running at the time, but I also needed to make a tough decision: Join the working world and give up my lifelong dream, or to try out for the national team and dedicate everything I had to making the team again. So I stayed in Wisconsin, and I did what I knew best: played hockey and trained with the boys.
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Our collective decision to take a gap year came after the unexpected and heartbreaking news that the CWHL would be folding. My time in Calgary last season with the Inferno was really, really incredible. And the high competition level established by playing against national team players from different countries, along with the support we had from the NHLPA, makes the fact that we won’t be playing next year very frustrating. I’ll miss that team, and that league, a lot.
But that feeling motivates me, and my teammates, when it comes to what we’re trying to do with our sport. Because the goal here is simple, as we’ve stated: Create a single, viable women’s professional league in North America.
That’s it. That’s not only what we want — it’s what we need.
Because the women’s game is a great product — I, as unbiasedly as possible, believe that. I hear from people — from men and women — all the time that their favorite Olympic event is women’s hockey, and the TV ratings back that up. The games are incredible. The pace, the skill, the intensity — it’s unique and must-see stuff. Google Jocelyn Lamoureux-Davidson’s shootout goal. You won’t regret it.
We’ve made a tremendous amount of economic and personal sacrifices so we can represent our country on the biggest stage.
It felt like I had come full circle. That first year out of college I practiced with the Madison Capitals of the USHL — a 22-year-old woman with essentially a bunch of boys — just getting ice time wherever I could. I also got goalie lessons alongside two-time Olympian Jessie Vetter, and I continue to get those lessons. I trained — and continue to train — with some NHL and pro players who workout during the summer in Madison, and who show me nothing but respect and support for the creation of one viable league. They see how hard we train for so few opportunities. Even when I played for Calgary I was flying back and forth from Madison because I wasn’t making enough to uproot my life to a different country.
I use the resources and incredible support system I have at my disposal to try to get ready, and stay ready, for national team events, and I am going for my seventh year with the team. It’s sort of crazy, when I spell it out like that. Lots of women do the same thing in regards to training. The best players in the world do this. And this will be our life for this upcoming season without a league. Piecing together games, practices, lifts, treatment — all that stuff.
That’s insane.
And that’s what we need to work on fixing. I know people can grow tired of hearing empty platitudes about women’s sports and what needs to change. I understand that. But we believe there is a real, simple, attainable goal that we can reach as a collective. There is a great product here, with incredible potential. We just need sponsors to take a chance on us. Lots of sports leagues — heck, lots of businesses — lose money in the initial stages, only to prosper down the road. It’s not easy to make that choice, we know. But we as players, as women, have been doing that our entire lives. We’ve made a tremendous amount of economic and personal sacrifices so we can represent our country on the biggest stage and be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
Alex Rigsby Cavallini
U. S. Women's Ice Hockey National Team
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"Alex says something here."
Alex talks about this or that or the other. (1:00)
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AUG 22 2019
Here I am, once again, facing a new struggle. Am I too old? Am I fit enough? Am I done?
I took a DNP-Rest….. but here’s the truth of what it should have said.
Yes, this game is big — but it’s not Canada. That is the unspoken sentiment in the U.S locker room any time we’re not playing our biggest rival.
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—Alex Rigsby Cavallini
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—Alex Rigsby Cavallini
By Alex Rigsby Cavallini
Aug 21 2019
The more than 200 women in our group — from Hilary to Marie-Philip Poulin — are inspired by what we see in other women’s leagues around the world, and right here at home with the U.S. soccer team. They’ve shown what is possible and continue to voice what they believe in. And now look at them, and look at their league. And they aren’t even done showing us what they are capable of accomplishing together.
That’s what we’re trying to do.
Because there is a little girl somewhere who dreams of not only representing her country, but also of going on to play professional women’s hockey. And there is a teenage girl somewhere who wants to watch women’s hockey on TV more than once a year. And there’s a college girl somewhere who wants to follow her passion and continue to play the sport she loves rather than hanging up the skates to pay the rent.
And there’s a group of grown women here, of all ages and nationalities, who are ready to help them and to be the change.
So when we get to where we want to go, come watch our games — give us a chance. And keep putting your little girls into skates, keep empowering them and keep giving them an opportunity to chase their crazy dreams.
We’ll make sure that when they get there, it’s everything they’d hoped it would be and more.
—Alex Rigsby Cavallini
I was cut from the 2014 Olympic roster after being on the national team for the entire previous season. I sat in that room in Lake Placid and listened to three other goalies get their names called, instead of mine. And when that happened my world was turned upside down. I felt my dream was shattered. I knew I could go back to the University of Wisconsin and finish my senior year there, but what came after that … I really didn’t know — and my story isn’t unique.
I believed I could make the team again, but when I graduated in 2014, my options were limited. I didn’t see much value, professionally or, honestly, financially, in joining any of the leagues that were running at the time, but I also needed to make a tough decision: Join the working world and give up my lifelong dream, or to try out for the national team and dedicate everything I had to making the team again. So I stayed in Wisconsin, and I did what I knew best: played hockey and trained with the boys.
It felt like I had come full circle. That first year out of college I practiced with the Madison Capitals of the USHL — a 22-year-old woman with essentially a bunch of boys — just getting ice time wherever I could. I also got goalie lessons alongside two-time Olympian Jessie Vetter, and I continue to get those lessons. I trained — and continue to train — with some NHL and pro players who workout during the summer in Madison, and who show me nothing but respect and support for the creation of one viable league. They see how hard we train for so few opportunities. Even when I played for Calgary I was flying back and forth from Madison because I wasn’t making enough to uproot my life to a different country.
I use the resources and incredible support system I have at my disposal to try to get ready, and stay ready, for national team events, and I am going for my seventh year with the team. It’s sort of crazy, when I spell it out like that. Lots of women do the same thing in regards to training. The best players in the world do this. And this will be our life for this upcoming season without a league. Piecing together games, practices, lifts, treatment, etc.
That’s insane.
And that’s what we need to work on fixing. I know people can grow tired of hearing empty platitudes about women’s sports and what needs to change. I understand that. But we believe there is a real, simple, attainable goal that we can reach as a collective. There is a great product here, with incredible potential. We just need sponsors to take a chance on us. Lots of sports leagues — heck, lots of businesses — lose money in the initial stages, only to prosper down the road. It’s not easy to make that choice, we know. But we as players, as women, have been doing that our entire lives. We’ve made a tremendous amount of economic and personal sacrifices so we can represent our country on the biggest stage and be a part of something bigger than ourselves.
