Those Who Came Before: The Impact of Role Models

Cassie Campbell-Pascal (Ontario Captain) watches from the bench while Team Ontario plays against Team Québec, 1991.

The first girls to play in the Canada Games in 1991 and 1995, the same women who represented Canada in Nagano in 1998, did not grow up with the opportunity to have female hockey players as their idols. With no high-performance hockey programs for women, in their youth these women “imagined she was either Mark Messier or Wayne Gretzky.”²⁸ This would change by the turn of the millennium. Meghan Agosta-Marciano, for example, represented Team Ontario in 2003 and began her Olympic career with Canada in 2006 playing alongside her idol, Campbell-Pascal.²⁹

Carla MacLeod played for Team Alberta in 1995 and 1999, and was their coach in 2019. She was inducted into the Canada Games Hall of Honour in 2017, and is also a two-time Olympic gold medalist. MacLeod is pictured here with her Vancouver 2010 Olympic gold medal.

As Carla MacLeod explained in 2020, “Girls nowadays, you know, they follow Blayre Turnbull or Poulin on their Instagram and kind of get a feel for them every day, that’s different.”³⁰ MacLeod played for Team Alberta in 1995 and 1999, and was their coach in 2019,³¹ and is also a two-time Olympic gold medalist.³² For MacLeod, representation matters, and it is key to growing the game. Today, young girls in hockey can look up to athletes they can see themselves in, such as Wickenheiser, Campbell-Pascal, Agosta-Marciano, or MacLeod. “It all starts with us girls, we’re the ones trying to inspire the up-and-coming girls and we want to leave a legacy by making women’s hockey the best of the best, and knowing that it was us girls that got women’s hockey where it’s at today,”³³ Agosta-Marciano said in an interview with the Hamilton Bulldogs. When coaching Team Alberta in 2019, it was important to MacLeod that her players understood this legacy and those who came before them. The coaching staff paired each player in 2019 with a previous Team Alberta player and had them complete a project on that player to understand their historical impact.³⁴ In essence, passing the torch from one generation to the next to safeguard the legacy so many had built. The Canada Games not only kept some of these elite athletes in the sport but continually provides a high-performance pathway for those who idolize them. The success of these women turned them into role models that inspired the next generation of female hockey players, encouraging grassroot programs for girls’ hockey while also demonstrating that elite success was finally possible.