Two current and one former NCAA women’s hockey goalies have made history in the past few months. Minnesota Duluth’s Ève Gascon and Cornell’s Annelies Bergmann, both rookies this season, and Maine alumna Mariah Fujimagari have each broken barriers across hockey, paving the way for even more opportunities for women and girls in the future.
Gascon was the first female player to play midget triple-A hockey in Quebec back in 2018. In March, she followed a path blazed by Manon Rheaume and Charline Labonté to play in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League (QMJHL), where she started two games with the Gatineau Olympiques, earning an overtime loss and a win. The win was the second time a woman has won a QMJHL game. Labonté first did it back in 2001.
She was in rookie camp with the Olympiques, where she more than proved she could handle herself at the level. In five preseason games, she stopped 85 of the 91 shots she faced, giving her a .934 save percentage, which was best among the 10 QMJHL goalies who played more than 200 minutes in preseason.
“It was the greatest experience of my life,” Gascon told the Ottawa Sun after her first start. She took a traditional rookie lap by herself as the team entered the ice to great applause.
“I had chills when the crowd gave me that ovation,” Gascon said in the Sun. “It was the greatest atmosphere I have ever had in hockey. I knew I would have a lot of attention, but …”
That start prompted the first sell out in the Olympiques’ new stadium, where fans chanted her name. The win in her second start earned her the game’s first star.
At Minnesota Duluth, Gascon has had one start – a 12-save shutout against Long Island University last Friday. She and Hailey MacLeod are currently sharing the starting duties while fighting to become the team’s top goalie.
__
In April, Bergmann made history by becoming the first woman to play in a regular-season game for a Tier I or II junior hockey team in the United States when she started a game with the NAHL Janesville Jets in April.
As with Gascon, Bergmann started her journey with the Jets through a tryout camp. She excelled in the team’s goaltender camp and was invited to the main tryout camp, where she continued to impress and earned one of four goalie invites to the camp’s all-star game. The Jets gave her an affiliate tag, which led to the start in April.
She made 22 of 24 stops – the two goals were scored on the power play after turnovers at the blue line.
“I always wanted to play in a league that no other girl has. I feel like I put myself out there today and showed that I deserved to be on the ice. It’s incredible. This is what I’ve really been dreaming of since I was little, so to go out there and be able to do this is just indescribable,” Bergmann said at the time.
“I knew it was something bigger than myself. It felt like I was accomplishing something great. It was just a hockey game out there. I wasn’t a girl goalie. I was just another hockey goalie.”
Bergmann was the main goalie for Team USA at the past two U18 World Championships. Still just 17 years old, she accelerated her entrance to Cornell and joined the team this season. The Big Red play their first games this weekend, but Bergmann saw about 50 minutes of ice time in the team’s two exhibition games.
__
Fujimagari signed a professional tryout contract with the Kalamazoo Wings, an ECHL affiliate to the NHL’s Vancouver Canucks and begins training camp with the team this week. If she makes the roster, she would be the third woman in ECHL history to sign with a team and the first since 1995.
At 29, she has spent several years playing professional hockey in the US, Slovakia and Sweden. During her summers, she trains at In-Tech High Performance Training in Toronto alongside men who play professionally in the NHL and overseas. Facing that competition day in and day out and training alongside them showed Fujimagari, who prides herself on her work ethic, that she was in a good position to take this opportunity.
Coach Joel Martin, himself an ECHL Hall of Fame goalie, met Fujimagari at a goalie coaching symposium a few years back and was impressed with her, so she was on his radar when it came to putting together a list of possible candidates to take on netminder duties this season. Beyond her on-ice skills, Martin was impressed with Fujimagari’s preparation and how she carries herself off the ice. He’s a proponent of finding not just good players, but good people and he feels like she could be an important part of building the culture of the program.
“I’m just really grateful to Coach [Martin] for identifying certain qualities and skill sets within me as a goalie and as a person to be able to bring me here for training camp for the K-Wings,” Fujimagari said.
For her part, Fujimagari feels like this opportunity is a natural next step in her progression and growth as a goalie. She said she’s learned things at every level and with every team she’s played with that will help her in this tryout.
As a goalie in the SDHL in Sweden last season, she played under their new rules that included body checking. That allowable contact changed the flow and pace of the game pretty significantly from what we normally see in women’s hockey. It puts her in a really good position to transition to the men’s game.
