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Homesickness, lack of playing time prompts Wickenheiser to go home
DONNA SPENCER
Canadian Press
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
(CP) - Overwhelming homesickness and a sudden reduction in her ice time prompted Hayley Wickenheiser to leave her Finnish men's professional hockey team and return to Canada.
The sacrifice of being away from her adopted son Noah, and boyfriend Tomas Pacina, didn't seem worth it when she played only a few minutes every other game on HC Salamat's fourth line.
The 25-year-old centre abruptly left Salamat on Wednesday just two days after returning from Sweden where she had been playing with the Canadian women's team at the Four Nations Cup.
"I wasn't happy," Wickenheiser said in a statement. "I missed my family a lot.
"I finally came to this conclusion in the end, because I didn't get to show my skills in the kind of role that I wanted. I decided to end my contract with Salamat and return home."
She was expected to return to Calgary on Thursday.
According to a release issued by Salamat on Wednesday, Wickenheiser and Salamat had an opt-out clause in her contract in the event that both parties wanted to end it.
Wickenheiser had said in past interviews how difficult it was to be away from Pacina and Noah. Both came to visit her in September and Noah spent a few weeks with her in Finland last season.
While she liked her male teammates and was treated as "one of the guys," she was also isolated by the language barrier.
Wickenheiser, the all-time points leader on the Canadian women's team, raised eyebrows last January when she signed a contract with HC Salamat to play in the Finnish second division, also called the Suomi league, which is the third-highest league in the country below the elite and first divisions.
There was little on the international women's hockey calendar at the time and Wickenheiser, who lives in Calgary but whose hometown is Shaunavon, Sask., was looking for a venue to further develop her skills. Her decision to play with men was controversial in part because she had been playing in the National Women's Hockey League and she had said she felt she wasn't improving enough in that league.
While the debate over whether women could or should play hockey with men raged at home, Wickenheiser was not out of place with Salamat, based in Kirkkonummi, a town of about 30,000 west of Helsinki.
The five-foot-nine, 170-pound forward played centre on the third line of the team, became a faceoff specialist for the club and contributed two goals and nine assists in 23 games.
Those games included playoffs in which Salamat gained promotion to the Finnish first division, also called Mestis.
Wickenheiser returned to Kirkkonummi in September and after collecting four assists in seven pre-season games, she was named to Salamat's 22-man roster.
She knew she would be a fourth-line centre, but hoped to expand that role.
It didn't happen.
"I don't want to be mealy-mouthed about it: the level of play in this league was very tough for Hayley," coach Matti Hagman said. "It was an enormous step up from the previous season. The tempo is so much faster, there's more speed, and the physical aspects of the game become more important."
Wickenheiser said she made the decision to return to Canada while playing in the Four Nations Cup.
"I was really happy with the games I played last season in Suomi league and I was still happy during the pre-season this fall," she said. "When the regular season started I felt that I wasn't given the right opportunity.
"The most determining factor for my decision was the separation between me and my family."
Wickenheiser appeared in 10 of Salamat's 16 games. She had no points, two penalty minutes and her plus-minus was zero.
The team, owned in part by Teemu Selanne of the Colorado Avalanche, is currently seventh in the league.
Hagman, who played for the Boston Bruins in 1976-77, praised Wickenheiser for her professionalism.
"We've focused strictly on the game throughout her whole stay . . . she wanted to be - and was - 'one of the guys,' without any preferential treatment," he said.
Wickenheiser's presence drew intense media attention in both Canada and Finland and hiked crowd attendance for Salamat and the league.
"Hayley has class and she was a real top athlete until the end of her stay with Salamat," Salamat manager Markku Kulmala said. "Towards the end I sensed that she wasn't exactly happy with her role in the team.
"We would have liked to have kept her until the end of the season."
Last year, Wickenheiser refused Phil Esposito's offer to try out for his Cincinnati Cyclones of the ECHL. She was turned down by a team in an Italian league - her first choice - after that country's winter sports federation said women weren't eligible to play on men's teams.
Wickenheiser has played in four world women's championships and would have played in a fifth in April had the tournament in Beijing not been cancelled because of concerns about the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in China.
She also played in two Olympic Games for the Canadian women's team and was a major contributor to Canada's Olympic gold medal victory in Salt Lake City in 2002. Wickenheiser also played in the 2000 Summer Olympics for the Canadian women's softball team.
In September, a documentary film about her life in men's hockey in Finland, titled One of the Guys was aired on national television.
