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As a young woman growing up in the Eugene area with a yen for ice hockey, Jess Duggan’s options were few. It was either play with the boys or don’t play at all. “I started playing when I was 16 on an adult coed rec team,” she recalls. “There was no girls hockey for kids.”
After moving to Portland, the dilemma continued as pickup games for women and nonbinary players came and went, forcing Duggan and her fellow hockey enthusiasts to join local coed leagues. She soon began bugging the Winterhawks Skating Center in Beaverton in 2022 for some rink time, insisting that “there’s a lot of women who would like to play hockey. If we had a league, I think we could fill it.”
Duggan was proven right with the creation of the Portland United Hockey League (portlandunitedhockey.com). What began as two teams, grew quickly to a current roster of eight squads of female, trans and nonbinary players from throughout Oregon and Southwest Washington—all with delightfully playful names like the Boobies, the Bushtits, and the Honkers—and developing new players at regular “skills and drills” sessions a few towns over at Sherwood Ice Arena.
“A lot of the people that have joined since we started, some of them are brand new to hockey, and some hadn’t been playing because they felt like there wasn’t a space for them,” Duggan says. “All of the things that maybe make people not feel as safe and comfortable playing in a coed league that’s predominantly men—we don’t have that.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2024 here!