Gaining and Earning Her Teammates' Respect

As a little girl in Alberta, senior goaltender Sarah Kennedy used to snuggle up and nap in her dad's enormous goalie pads.

"I know it really sounds disgusting," the Dartmouth senior from Jasper says with a faraway look, "but I thought it was really comfortable." The sour smell of seasoned hockey equipment aside, the image of the pint-sized Kennedy curled up on her daddy's pads is a sweet one. The smile that crosses her face as she shares the memory speaks to why she continues to love a game that hasn't always loved her back.

Growing up in the heart of Jasper National Park where her father worked as a search-and-rescue EMT, Kennedy essentially had two choices in winter. "You were pretty much going to be a hockey player or a skier," she said.

Kennedy chose hockey and when she continually excelled on the ice as the rare girl playing against the boys it was clear she had chosen wisely. And so, as is often the case in rural Canada, once she reached her teenage years she knew that she had little choice but to move away from home to play on better teams against better competition if she wanted to realize her hockey dreams. "If I had stayed in Jasper," she says softly, "I wouldn't be here."

As a 14-year-old she moved in with a strange family in Grand Prairie, five hours from Jasper. A sometimes difficult year did not get off to a promising start.

"Before my very first home game I had my stuff stolen from the rink," she says. "I had to wear the other goalie's helmet and his jersey, and he was a big kid. If I turned my head I was looking into the side of my helmet."

Road games presented their own challenges.

"Sometimes they didn't even have a dressing room for me," Kennedy says. "They'd lay down pieces of cardboard on the cement under the stairs for me, and there was no shower."

Although she had played summer hockey with girls in Edmonton - a four-hour drive from Jasper - it wasn't until the next year that she finally played full-time on a girls hockey team. The following winter she came to the attention of then-Dartmouth assistant Rob Morgan, a graduate of the University of Alberta.

Kennedy's first - and last - recruiting trip was to Dartmouth. It would prove to be memorable.

"On the way down I got food poisoning from pizza I ate in Chicago, so I was throwing up on the plane," she says. "Then I got in the car with Mr. Robbie Morgan and I got sick again. He had to pull over and I had to throw up in a ditch."

The misadventures continued on her trip back to Jasper when she fell asleep on the way to the airport and a water bottle leaked all over her jeans. "I had to tie a jacket around my waist," she says. "It was a whole weekend of embarrassing moments, and still it was one of the greatest trips I'd been on."

Feeling right at home in small-town Hanover, the small-town girl from Jasper committed to Dartmouth a week-and-a-half later.

Kennedy would be the winning goalie in all four games in which she appeared as a Dartmouth freshman. She recorded shutouts of Union and Cornell, made 17 saves in a win over Quinnipiac and finished the season with a 0.75 goals against average.

"I remember my first shutout I got the game puck," she says. "On a piece of hockey tape around it I wrote, 'First game, first shutout, first win. Bring on the NCAA.' It was surreal."

It was during her freshman season that Kennedy's hip started to give her problems. It had bothered her some back home, but nothing like this, and despite working with the Dartmouth training staff it wasn't getting better.

"Around Christmas time we started to wonder if I had stress fractures in my hip," Kennedy recalls, "so I went and had X-rays. There were no stress fractures but the doctor said there's a possibility I could have tears."

After an MRI seemed to confirm the diagnosis, it was determined that Kennedy could play through the pain, have surgery in March, and be back on the ice for the beginning of the next season.

"It was no big deal," she says. "We knew what was wrong. We'd figured it out."

When the season ended the man on whose goalie pads she once napped flew in from Jasper to be with his daughter when she had the surgery that would make her whole again. It was a good thing Paul Kennedy was there.

"All I remember is waking up and him saying it did not go well," she says. "I didn't know what that meant. He essentially explained to me that they just hooked me back up.

"The thing with injuries like this is, MRIs can't get down to the slices they need to see the extent of the damage. So what looked like a little tear was much worse. Essentially, it was like I had no business walking. That's what I was told."

Like most athletes who have suffered significant injury, Kennedy can speak almost clinically about her hip. About a genetic deformation made worse by years of ice hockey. About two more operations, including one in Boston by one of just a handful of doctors in North America who can do the type of surgery she needed. About how they essentially disconnected her leg but for skin and muscle.

"It just looked like a whole pile of shredded meat," she says of the X-rays she's seen. "And there were bone spurs from bone constantly hitting bone."

Kennedy will tell you she spent much of her sophomore year simply learning how to walk again. Hockey? No, she wasn't going to give that up. Not yet, at least.

"I was basically told that I could try to play again but if I do it's going to mean hip replacement by the time I'm 25," she says. "At the time it was a risk I was willing to take."

By the end of her sophomore year she was able to practice with the team. She was able to go up-and-down, the staple of any goalie. She was, she figured, all the way back to where she was before the surgeries that left her with a 12-inch scar on her side.

But during the summer between her sophomore and junior years the pain unaccountably returned. She had to take a month off from work because she couldn't handle sitting or standing for long periods of time. Still, when her junior year rolled around she held hope of returning to the ice.
"I came back and tried to play," she says, "but it got to the point where although I felt I could handle the pain I wasn't going to be good enough to compete. There's only so much you can do playing through the pain to be quick enough to get there."

"That's when I made the decision that I wasn't willing to sacrifice the rest of my life to not even get to play. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to skate with my kids when I was 30."

An English literature major, Kennedy has completed a 114-page screenplay, an action romance that taps into her love of Shakespeare. She's working on her teacher certification, which she'll complete next fall. She's an ECAC Hockey All-Academic honoree. She's engaged to be married back home in Canada next year. Clearly, she has a lot on her plate.

And yet, even though she knew her career was over, she chose to stay with the team as a practice player last year, and to return this season for one telling reason.

"They needed me," she says.

"We would only have two goalies if I didn't do it," she goes on. "They couldn't really do what they needed to do. It's a lot of shots in 1 1/2 hours ice time. They'll be making mistakes if they are too tired." She spent her junior year on the ice when her body would allow it, videotaping practice and doing whatever she could to help out when it wouldn't. She even made it to team lifts.

"Last year I practiced almost every day but by the middle of the season I really couldn't go up and down anymore," she said. "This year I definitely can't. I usually can't go more than two-or-three days in a row. Then I have to take a day off."

Kennedy won last year's Big Green Unsung Player Award, a deserving honor according to coach Mark Hudak, who marvels at her dedication to the team.

"She's still dealing with the pain, but she's out there with us probably four of the five days of the week," he says. "She's done a great job and gained an incredible amount of respect from her teammates."

When she first got off crutches as a sophomore, Kennedy says she "walked at kind of a 90-degree angle, bent in half." Today, she will tell you, she only walks, "kind of funny."

But take in a game at Thompson Arena and there she is in her No. 29 sweater, skating - if a little gingerly - with her teammates. Goalie pads on her legs, her signature "quack" helmet on her head, she'll spend the game at the end of the bench, opening the door for her teammates between shifts, patting them on the back as they come off the ice, encouraging them in a difficult season.

For a talented goalie Hudak expected to bid for a starting role when she arrived on campus, it can't be easy, but Kennedy has come to terms with her situation. Doctors, the training staff and what she laughingly calls her "grandmother's pillbox," have helped with the medical side. Tincture of time has helped with the mental side.

"I can deal with it more now," she says, philosophically. "I'm managing it better. The nosedive has slowed and it's not worsening at such a fast pace anymore. I'm not pushing myself on the ice as much as I was. I'm being careful, I'm listening, and I'm doing whatever I can."

"She struggles just to walk sometimes," says Hudak. "There have been times when just sitting in class was difficult for her, and yet she wants so much to remain a part of the team.

"It's important to her, but also incredibly important to her team." (Bruce Wood)