In January the Premiere Hockey Federation (previously the Nationwide Girls’s Hockey League) made an announcement that truly does change the sport for girls: a $25 million money infusion, which greater than doubled the wage cap for gamers. For many, the brand new common wage of $37,500 nonetheless received’t be sufficient to be a sole supply of revenue, but it surely’s a step. (The deal, the most important in ladies’s hockey historical past, additionally gives medical insurance for gamers, possession over their very own identify and likeness, and fairness shares in workforce revenues.)
That is what retains Coyne Schofield combating. “I reside for these little moments of success, these little victories,” she says. “You then struggle the subsequent struggle, and the subsequent struggle, and the subsequent struggle.”
I ask when she thinks ladies’s hockey gamers received’t must struggle so onerous, when the push for equal funding will attain crucial mass and the ladies representing the USA on the Olympics received’t even have day jobs. “I hope tomorrow. Yesterday. Ten years in the past,” she says. “I might give the whole lot I’ve and the whole lot I’ve achieved, the whole lot I’ve achieved on this sport to vary that for tomorrow.”
After we spoke just a few weeks earlier than the beginning of the Beijing Olympics—Coyne Schofield’s third—she was targeted on main her workforce by way of essentially the most high-stakes second of their careers towards the backdrop of worldwide burnout to deliver dwelling one other gold medal. No biggie. She is characteristically humble in regards to the duty. “I am so honored to be a captain of this workforce,” she says. “However I believe it is really easy to guide this group when each participant on this room is a frontrunner. Each participant has needed to lead on and off the ice; that’s how they received to this degree. We’re a household. The nearer we’re off the ice, the extra profitable we’re on the ice. We get essentially the most out of one another. We maintain one another accountable, and we push one another to be the perfect that we could be.”
If their shared wrestle is what’s made this workforce so tight-knit, it may also be the key to an edge in Beijing—the second Olympics held within the uncertainty of the pandemic, and the primary time they’ll meet Group Canada after dropping the final two pre-Olympics pleasant matches to their rivals. “There’s a variety of uncertainty going into Beijing, however I believe we have achieved an unimaginable job controlling what we are able to management,” she says. “That is our work ethic; that is our preparation. This group’s mindset has been so sturdy, so resilient, particularly after these final 18 months when issues have been canceled with none readability and we do not have as a lot programming as we’d like or as we deserve. However we proceed to struggle. And we do it collectively.”
The ladies’s hockey quarterfinals start February 10. See the place to catch all of the Olympics motion right here.
Supply: Glamour
