Wickenheiser joins program to boost women's hockey

Canadian women's team captain Hayley Wickenheiser and former Olympic team coach Melody Davidson have major roles in a new program to show other countries the way in women's hockey.

Wickenheiser and Davidson have been named the top player ambassador and coach mentor respectively in an International Ice Hockey Federation project to create more parity in the sport.

Coaching mentors and player ambassadors from the top four countries of Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Finland have been assigned to assist coaches and players in nine other countries for the next two and a half years.

The point of the program is for players and coaches from countries with more developed women's hockey programs to be a sounding board and source of information for their counterparts trying to close the gap on them.

Former Canadian Olympic team player Gina Kingsbury, for example, has been assigned to players in France, and Finnish defenceman Emma Laaksonen will be a resource for players from Kazakhstan.

Wickenheiser is the go-between for the athlete-ambassadors and the IIHF. She'll provide guidance and direction to Kingsbury and Laaksonen as they do the same for players in the countries to which they've been assigned.

"To me, it's the first significant thing the IIHF has really done to help women's hockey on a large scale," Wickenheiser said Thursday in Calgary. "This is a good thing.

Groundbreaking

"It might not change anything for the next Olympics, but for the next one (in 2018), this has the potential to be kind of an Own The Podium program where it could transform some nations if they really bought in. I think it's pretty groundbreaking."

Coaching mentors include Sweden's Peter Elander, who will assist coaches in Germany, and Canada's 1998 Olympic coach Shannon Miller, who was assigned to Russia.

Davidson, who coached Canada to back-to-back Olympic gold medals in 2006 and 2010, will co-ordinate all the coaching mentors and will also work with the Norwegian women.

"It's just providing other countries the opportunity to know we've been where they are and we survived," Davidson said. "We're trying to help them do the same thing.

"I'm psyched about the quality of our coach mentors and athlete ambassadors right across the board. I think it's going to help the game grow."

This project depends on players and coaches building personal relationships with each other and much of that will start July 5-14 in Bratislava, Slovakia, where the IIHF is holding a multi-country, high-performance women's camp.

Players from different countries will be put through physical testing and mixed together for on-ice sessions. After that, coaching mentors and athlete ambassadors will have to stay in touch with their clients via e-mail and phone.

Helpful advice

Wickenheiser says the player ambassadors will gently push and encourage players in weaker countries to push themselves harder in their daily training, while helping them solve issues they may have with their respective hockey federations or coaches.

"I think the overwhelming message that goes into every single country is that we need to raise the bar and we need more," Wickenheiser said. "We need better performances on the ice, we need the athletes to be fitter, we need them to be more committed, we need them to buy in, that it's not good enough right now."

The athlete ambassador and coaching mentor program, and the Bratislava camp, are all part of the IIHF's new plan to develop women's hockey.

The impetus for it came from the 2010 Winter Olympics. Lopsided scores in the women's hockey tournament prompted International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge to say the sport needed to become more competitive.

Other Canadians involved in the IIHF women's project include former national team players Jennifer Botterill (Russia), Therese Brisson (Switzerland) and Fiona Smith-Bell (Germany). Coaches include Doug Lidster (Czech Republic), France St. Louis (France), Nancy Wilson (Kazakhstan), Rick Polutnik (Slovakia) and Margot Page (Switzerland).

"The best way to become successful is to have the opportunity to learn from someone who has already been successful," said Tanya Foley, an Edmonton native who is the IIHF's women's program manager.

"By assigning the same team of mentors and ambassadors to a country for a period of two and a half years, the teams that will qualify for Sochi will have a resource that no team entering an Olympic Games has previously had."