Rene Gangarosa

I started participating in sports around the age of 5. I was lucky enough to have parents that pushed me to try everything, including soccer, basketball, baseball, tennis, hockey, and judo. Gender was never really an issue, at that age. As I got older my top four sports were judo, hockey, lacrosse and tennis. Then once I got into high school it turned into hockey, tennis, and lacrosse. From the age of 10, I started playing boys travel hockey because it was a higher level of competition.

Around the age of 12 is when I first started noticing pushback for being a girl in a “boy’s game”. I was up at a tournament in Canada, when my mom saw a father of a boy on the opposite team actually hand-signaling to his son to knock me, the girl, out on the ice. Why you might ask? Probably because he was chauvinistic and couldn’t stand that I was better than his son. Did that stop me? No. I continued to play with the boys throughout high school, which is not very common due to checking.

Again, in high school, a kid named Phil, who I actually knew, targeted me the entire game, hitting me as hard as he could, even after the play was over, and sneering at me that “I don’t belong here”. This was more motivating to me as anything could ever be, you are not really breaking down barriers if you are not pissing people off in the process. If anything, it made me enjoy a goal or stopping him on a one-on-one even more because it meant despite what anybody tried, I was still good enough to hang with the boys, who are supposedly so much better than girls. However, it was no piece of cake getting to where I was. It required a lot of commitment and I couldn’t have gotten to where I am today without my dad.

My dad was my biggest influence, he would take work off to bring me to the best skills camps in this side of the country, he would stand on the cold bench while I was on the ice coaching and instructing me on what drills to do. If you are lucky enough to have a parent or sibling that wants to see you succeed that much take full advantage of it. My dad’s line was “you might not be the best, but you will be the hardest working” and I think that is something valuable in all areas of life. Because of what I already have accomplished in various sports and now playing division I college hockey I know I will have the ability to work hard enough to get anything I want out of my life.

- Rene Gangarosa