A Group of Hockey Moms is Using Creativity and Community to Bring a Girls Locker Room to Eagle River, Wisconsin
There’s an ice rink in far North Central Wisconsin, about 20 miles from the border with Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, that is the home and pride of many local hockey communities.
Built in 1933, the Historic Eagle River Sports Arena is the first indoor hockey arena built in the state. It is listed on both the National Register and State Register of Historic Places and is home of the Wisconsin Hockey Hall of Fame.
Home to the Eagle River Recreation Association, the beautiful old barn has fostered a love of hockey for Northern Wisconsin residents for more than 90 years. However, when the rink was built in 1933, remodeled in 1963 and expanded in 1995, no one planned for the growth of girls hockey in the area.
The first girls team was formed in Eagle River in 1996, and for the last 30 years, any girls teams in the area haven’t had a space to call their own.
According to Abbey Gatlin, co-chair of the friends of Eagle River Girls Hockey Fundraising Committee, “the girls high school team is literally in the back of a locker room that is shared with coed and men’s hockey leagues. You can’t access the bathroom or get on the ice unless nobody else is in the middle space.”
Therefore, Gatlin and a few other moms of girls in the program decided it was time to do something about that.
They’ve spearheaded a project to build a new girls locker room at Historic Eagle River Sports Arena. First launched in late 2024, the group has already raised half the needed money for the project and plan to break ground later this month.
“This is a chance to create something lasting for our female players,” Gatlin said. “It’s about time we provide a space that fully supports our girls and completes our hockey community.”
The nature of how spread out and small the towns are in North Central Wisconsin means this project impacts girls teams in more than a dozen communities within an 80-mile radius of Eagle River. Understanding how many teams and communities use the facility really highlights why a safe, comfortable and dignified space for female players is so necessary and important.
“We’re in desperate need of a new facility to sustain this program’s growth,” said Jeff Stebbeds, who coaches the Northland Pines girls co-op team. “This isn’t just about space; it’s about creating an environment that inspires pride and teamwork. This is more than a building project, it’s about building pride, community, and opportunity for generations to come.”
Gatlin said she wants to bring attention to this project and bolster the fundraising, but she also hopes other associations see what her committee in a small community has been able to accomplish and are inspired to kickstart change within their own group.
“We all have daughters who play hockey, and we were all talking and thinking about how much the locker room situation sucks,” she said. “We thought, why sit around and watch something that’s not happening? We went from thinking about how there won’t be enough room in the locker room for all the girls next season to breaking ground in about five months.”
Working in marketing has helped Gatlin think outside the box for this project. It can be easy to get stuck in the same fundraising loops, doing things as they’ve always been done, she said. Thinking creatively has helped move the needle and bring needed attention to this project. Attaching creativity creates buy-in and inspires commitment to seeing the project through, Gatlin said.
With a year-round population of fewer than 2,000 people, it’s quite astonishing that the historic rink is both member-owned and all volunteer-led. Gatlin acknowledged that small towns can work together and pointed to what she and a small group of other hockey moms have been able to accomplish.
“The older I get, the more astonished I am at what women are capable of doing,” she said. “This happened so quickly. We all have to play a part, just like on the ice with the team. The high school girls are excited and they’re seeing us as women, as moms, getting this done and seeing how much money we’ve raised. It’s empowering. I just really hope that beyond sports in general, they can apply that to wherever they land in the world.”
Story from Red Line Editorial, Inc.
Source: usahockey.com