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Mila Ramdas’s hockey life had been so male-dominated, she didn’t even notice the lack of women around her.
When she was 14 years old, she realized she’d never had a female coach and it made her question if the sport she loved growing up in Mississauga even wanted her.
Now 16, Ramdas is looking to be the role model she never had.
Ramdas launched a pilot project where high schoolers who play for the Mississauga Hurricanes’ girls team coach the under-seven girls team. The goal is to expand the initiative into a self-sustaining coaching tree, giving young girls someone to look up to and at the same time, offer leadership experience to teenagers.
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“(The girls) can really relate to us, and they can open up so much easier and share what’s going on in their lives and feel a lot safer in the community that we’ve built at practice and in the change room,” Ramdas says.
In 2024, only 16 per cent of the province’s hockey coaches were women, according to the latest annual report from the Coaches Association of Ontario, which also suggested that dads serve as the default coaches for their kids’ teams. One in eight male athletes is coached by their fathers, but only one in 100 girls has their mom at the helm.
The plan is to develop a pipeline where the girls on the under-15 team will serve as assistant coaches, so they can learn the responsibilities before graduating to head coach when they are eligible at 16 years old.
The season began Dec. 13 with Ramdas and her friend Kaitlynn Cheng, also 16, as the sole coaches behind the bench of the white team, named the White Daisies. They are responsible for everything from teaching the fundamentals of hockey, solving logistical issues and communicating with parents.
The group of three to six-year-old girls follow their coaches’ orders at practice as they’re asked to jump over the blue line and slide on their stomachs at centre ice. Cheng says that many of the kids follow her around the ice like ducklings.
“I think the girls love it,” Cheng says. “They ask us if we’re 100 years old still.”
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They’ve been supported by the parents, too.
“Right now for female hockey, there’s really only the PWHL to look up to, and it’s starting to grow more and more, but what the girls need is a realistic role model in their communities and in their lives,” Ramdas said. “It definitely made an impact on me as a child, thinking that there’s nothing else that I could do with this sport once I graduate from high school.”
Ramdas added that the PWHL is giving more representation, but it’s only really inspiring the best players, which she is not. She is trying to create more day-to-day heroes that the sport needs just as much.
Ramdas says her initial epiphany was spurred by meeting a female trainer during a power skating camp. She gained confidence when she was conscripted to help out at sessions with younger groups and thought it was something she could do.
She started sending emails to any connections she had in the Hurricanes organization and asked her teammate Cheng if she wanted to be involved. Matthew Thomas, the league convener and a father of four hockey-playing girls who have never been coached by a female, offered a chance for Ramdas to prove herself by helping out during introductory skates.
Ramdas wants the league to be exclusively female coaches in a few years, but Thomas is looking even further ahead. The convener believes some of the discrepancy between genders can be explained by the dads sliding into coaching roles because they grew up playing, an opportunity that the moms weren’t always given. He hopes that getting more girls involved will pay off later and create a generation of mothers who can assume leadership opportunities in hockey.
“I’d really like to have that whole cycle of the girls having a girl mentor, coach, or whoever’s out there helping them, a big sister on the ice, Thomas says. “Then, as they move up their years, they have friendships at all the levels.”
The league is already growing, and the under-seven girls division will field four teams for the first time in the club’s history.
“Once we make them feel confident in their place in the sport, they can feel confident playing the sport, and that confidence can transfer to everyday life,” Ramdas says. “That’s really important, you can see it in their skating as they’re developing their confidence.”
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