Playing goalie on an all-boys hockey team

This year, 9th grader Ashwini Sandanayake started playing hockey on a boys team. 

“I played goalie for hockey, and I joined one of the boys teams, and I feel like that really shaped me as a person…I just had a lot of fun, and it was a good experience. And it’ll probably be my last year of hockey, so I think I ended on a really good note … I used to play girls hockey, and it’s just different from that… It was also my first time playing goalie and I feel like that’s also different, because you feel it harder when you will get scored on or when like the teams get scored on. And you have to learn how to be mentally tough. I feel like I learned that and I feel like I’ll take that with me.”

On playing on an all-boys team: “You can’t change the locker room for one thing. I feel like I got to know a lot of my teammates that way in girls hockey, because we would spend so much time in the locker room. And also, there’s not as much drama in boys hockey, I feel like, because you can just get it out in one punch and you’re done, whereas with girls hockey, they sort of expand on it and then talk behind your back, and I’m not sure I liked that. And also, I guess we support each other in a different way, too. Because… I wasn’t the same gender as all of them. So it was different in that sense.”