For Jess Duggan, a young woman passionate about ice hockey growing up in the Eugene area, there were few options: play with the boys or don't play at all. “I started playing on adult co-ed recreational teams when I was 16,” she recalls. “There was no girls' hockey for kids.”
The dilemma continued after moving to Portland, as pickup games for women and non-binary players kept popping up, forcing Duggan and her fellow hockey enthusiasts to join local co-ed leagues. She soon began pestering Beaverton's Winterhawks Skating Center for rink time in 2022, arguing, “There are a lot of women who want to play hockey. If we had a league, I think we could fill it up.”
Duggan was right. Portland United Hockey League (source:). What started as two teams has quickly grown to eight made up of women, transgender and non-binary players from throughout Oregon and southwest Washington, with fun, playful names like the Boobies, the Bushtits and the Honkers, who develop newcomers in regular “skills and drills” sessions at Sherwood Ice Arena a few towns away.
“A lot of the people that have been there since we started, some of them are new to hockey, some of them didn't play because they felt like they didn't belong,” Duggan said. “When you play in a co-ed league with mostly men, all the things that people might feel like they can't feel safe and comfortable playing in, we don't have.”
Check out the rest of Willamette Week's Best of Portland 2024 here.
