From Collegiate Times
By Shelby Brann
Virginia Tech is well-known for a few specific categories — school spirit, food quality and, especially, football intensity and pride. One would be hard-pressed to find an undergraduate student who has never attended a Hokies football game, even with the less-than-optimal recent seasons. Virginia Tech, simply, is a football school — and with good reason, considering the team’s legendary past and upward trajectory. However, it’s more than fair to say that Virginia Tech’s athletic presence is expanding rapidly, recently, to women’s ice hockey.
Appalachia isn’t a hockey-centric area of the country, much less in the town of Blacksburg, where football and basketball reign supreme. Hockey, additionally, is only recently becoming a sport more open to women; the Professional Women’s Hockey League, the female counterpart to the National Hockey League, only began in 2024. In a state with little connection to hockey, and therefore a smaller opportunity for female participation, the presence of women’s ice hockey at Virginia Tech has been minimal. However, this has been changing in the past few years, and women’s ice hockey at Virginia Tech is growing.
Founded in 2020, the Women’s Ice Hockey Club at Virginia Tech recently concluded its sixth season of participation in the Women’s Atlantic Coast Collegiate Hockey League, a Division II club league in the American Collegiate Hockey Association. The team currently boasts a championship title from its inaugural year, and has repeatedly been successful in making it to the final round of the championship since. It’s also been triumphant, of course, in beating the University of Virginia’s team every year of competition — the true mark of success for any Virginia Tech athletic organization.
Other teams in the league include George Mason, George Washington, High Point, North Carolina and NC State. These colleges’ teams, also located in the Southeast, are fairly new to the women’s hockey landscape as well, providing an empowering and supportive environment for the league to grow.
Virginia Tech forward Sydney Haddox, who doubles as the team’s public relations manager, spoke with positivity and excitement about the relative novelty of many of the college teams and the league as a whole.
“It isn’t quite big yet. But that’s OK,” Haddox said. “We still have a lot of fun playing the teams that we do play. … We’re all growing.”
Beyond the championship title and competitive success, the Women’s Ice Hockey Club is commendable for its players’ simple love of the game and their dedication to the sport. In addition to multiple independent workouts, the team practices twice a week through the months of September to February at the Berglund Center in Roanoke and the Lancerlot Sports Complex in Vinton — each a 45-minute drive from campus that the team often travels in carpools.
“It’s a super fun way to get to know the rest of the girls and I really enjoy that part of getting to practice,” Haddox said.
The camaraderie and community of the team were evident in her voice; even just glancing at the team’s pictures on Instagram nods to the positive energy fostered as well as the competitive spirit.
When speaking to Haddox, the amount of effort and dedication that the players put into their game is more than apparent. Hockey is an expensive and time-consuming sport; the team’s commitment to the ice and each other must be appreciated, particularly when considering factors such as equipment expenses, travel time and a relatively small — though growing — environment in which to participate. In a sport widely dominated by men, and at a college located in central Appalachia, it requires sincere tenacity to grow a group like the Women’s Ice Hockey Club.
With their official season over, Haddox and the team are looking forward to next year with high hopes. Haddox was recently elected the team’s president and said she hopes to implement positive change to expand the women’s hockey community. Now that the team has been active for five official years, its transition from a Virginia Tech registered student organization to a sport club can begin. This will present a new field of opportunity for the team to grow student body interest and potentially secure funding.
“We’re at year five right now, so hopefully, this is going to be the entrance into club sports and that’s going to be a massive rebrand for us,” Haddox said, smiling.
The Women’s Ice Hockey Club will take to the ice with excitement again this fall in pursuit of another championship title. It won’t be long before the team blossoms into even more of a presence on campus. Virginia Tech may be a football school right now, but women’s hockey is surely growing with a competitive drive that one could argue is only seen in hockey players. This team is on the rise and the best is yet to come.
(Originally published at https://www.collegiatetimes.com/sports/breaking-the-ice-virginia-tech-women-s-hockey-leaps-forward/article_d777bb11-8539-4d07-bef9-1a422bafa4a4.html)
