With no local elite minor hockey options, Lethbridge-area female hockey players head to Lloydminster
Global News
A handful of 15-year-olds from the Lethbridge area have been forced to look elsewhere to play at the highest level.
Minor hockey is meant to provide young athletes with every opportunity to develop and chase their dreams on the ice, but a handful of 15-year-olds from the Lethbridge area have been forced to look elsewhere to play at the highest level.
Ava Caputo and Callie McCulloch — as well as two others from the Lethbridge area — are playing this hockey season with the Lloydminster PWM Steelers; one of just six female U18 AAA teams in Alberta.
Caputo and McCulloch played for the Lethbridge-based U15 AA Southern Express last year, but as they aged out to U18, it became clear that their local options were extremely limited.
“We don’t have a AAA team here, and now we don’t have a AA team, so really I can’t play here at all,” Caputo said. “If I wanted to play at the highest level that I possibly could, then I had to move.”
The AA team was forced to fold due to a lack of numbers, with those four players headed to Lloydminster and a few more choosing to go to the South Alberta Hockey Academy program in Medicine Hat.
Caputo said she has seen too many former teammates quit hockey because of limited options.
“I have known, there was like nine of them maybe, that had to quit hockey because we didn’t have enough players to have a team here,” Caputo said.
For McCulloch, it’s been just one more barrier that she’s had to push through to chase her hockey dreams after playing on boys teams all the way up to U15.