Occasionally even the good girls get
written up.
Prior to a two-year playing career at
Wilfrid Laurier University, Kristen Lipscombe was a midget champion with her
hometown Kingston Kodiaks, and arguably one of the best two female youth defencemen
in her region, in the late 90’s.
The prototypical girl next door who rarely
– if ever – got into trouble as a kid, she earned a 92% average at Kingston
Collegiate and Vocational Institute, winning a pair of hockey scholarships to
attend her eventual alma mater.
If you have ever been charmed by the warmth
and congeniality of the former Hockey Canada coordinator of media relations,
you might be surprised to hear that her collegiate stint with the Lady Golden
Hawks inauspiciously started with – a suspension.
Really Lippy, you’d ask her if you called
her by her popular nickname. How does that happen?
A physical rearguard who prided herself on
a style of play that was rugged, but not dirty, Lipscombe got a bit overzealous
in protecting her goaltender in an exhibition game, at least in the eyes of the
referee.
“I was the last man back, I chased a player
into the corner and there was another opponent in front of the net,” she
remembers of the game against Brock University. “Somebody was going to take a
shot from the point. So I had to rush from the corner to the front of the net,
and push that player so that our goalie could see the shot. But I pushed her
from the wrong angle, used a little bit too much body, and I ended up getting
called for hitting from behind.
I had never gotten that before, and I
remember in that moment I felt pretty guilty. But afterwards, when my coach Bill
Bowker reassured me that I had made the right move, it became a funny story.”
Had the whistled infraction occurred within
the first fifty minutes of the game, the worst indignity would have been an
ejection and an early shower. But based on Rule 6I of the OUA rulebook, any
player receiving a game misconduct in the last ten minutes of the third period
means a trip to the woodshed.
So, instead of joining her teammates on the
Waterloo Arena ice on November 3, 1999 versus Toronto to make her scheduled
rookie debut, she was on the outside looking in, watching the game in street
clothes instead of donning the purple and gold colours of her team.
“My coach told me that I made the right
call, so I didn’t feel bad or apologetic. I felt I was doing my job as a
stay-at-home defenceman,” she reflected from her home in Halifax where she now
works as a sportswriter for Metro News. “If I had to sit out a little bit to do
my job, I had no problem with that. At that point I was just happy to make the
team. My coaches believed in me, so I felt fine about it.”
The first time offender missed just the one
game. And while the classy lady would never be confused for a Lady Byng winner,
the disciplinary action arising from that trip to St. Catharines was a blip on
the radar.
For two seasons, Lipscombe was a mainstay
on the Lady Hawks blueline, becoming a CIAU (now CIS) Academic All-Star.
Laurier finished third and second respectively in Ontario over that two-year
stretch. Most of the gamesheet entries in Lippy’s name were in the penalties
column, but she made the most of her only career goal, a game-winner against Guelph that earned her a well-deserved celebratory water bucket dousing from
her teammates.
And despite the occasional roughing and
tripping calls that resulted in two-minute visits to the sin bin, Lippy never
received another major penalty or suspension. After she hung up her skates, she
worked media relations for the Golden Hawks for one year, a season that saw
Laurier crowned as OUA champions in 2001-02, coming within one game of a CIS
title. That edition of the team is enshrined into the school’s athletic hall of
fame.
Reminiscing on her Hawks days fifteen years
later, Lipscombe has no regrets about the suspension, shrugging it off as part what
she was tasked to do to help prevent goals. However, she does wish she could
change one thing: the removal of her first-year photo that still exists on the
university’s athletic website, even a decade and a half after the fact, would
make her very happy.
“I’ve always been a smart player, and if
the result is one suspension in my lifetime, I can handle that,” she said. “But
I don’t like clicking Google images and seeing that picture. That was the first
year we were doing headshots, and I was laughing as it was taken. I haven’t
liked that photo since day one, and I’ve asked them to take it down several
times with no luck!”
(Official gamesheet from Nov. 3, 1999: WLU vs. Toronto. Checking from behind - that's a paddlin')
(Here's how a rookie card for Lippy might look. I won't actually post the photo that she doesn't like, lest I feel the wrath of her hockey stick!)
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