Growing up in New England, Kelly Dyer was a product of the Bobby Orr explosion. On the street outside her house, neighborhood children imitated their hero. Dyer put together a set of goalie pads from trash she found in dumpsters, her sewing kit and shoe glue. Soon, Massachusetts began building more arenas, and it was at one of these rinks that Dyer stepped on the ice for the first time.
“I started as a figure skater because that was the only way girls could get on the ice at the time,” Dyer recalls. “But my brother David, who is two years older, was a hockey player, so I got off the figure skating rink and ran to the hockey rink to watch. I always wanted to play hockey and begged for two years until my dad found Assabet in Concord, the next town over. My first day skating at Assabet was in my brother’s figure skating equipment.”
It didn’t take long for Dyer to rise through the ranks at Assabet, aided by a high school program featuring future NHLers Bob Sweeney and Jeff Norton. Her goaltending partner at the school was future Hockey Hall of Famer Tom Barrasso. She played four years of NCAA hockey at Northeastern, graduating just in time to try out for the national team ahead of the first 1990 world championships. Because tryouts were taking place at Northeastern, Dyer didn’t even have to bring the equipment out of her stable. to fetch. She just changed the color of her jersey when she was named to Team USA.
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Joining Team USA in the gold medal game changed her life forever. “It was one of the biggest events of my life, probably second only to the birth of my child,” Dyer says. “It was great to see and feel the energy in the arena for a women’s hockey game.”
When Dyer returned home from the first World Cup in Ottawa, he saw a huge divide in women’s football, a divide that often left women’s bodies unprotected. Even the best players in the world were forced to use equipment designed for men. There was no other alternative.
Dyer also recognized that women were an afterthought in the hockey equipment industry. Now she saw an opportunity. “I would see players – Cammi Granato is a perfect example – I think she played at 6-foot-4 and let’s say 130 lbs. So she would have to wear men’s mid-length trousers so that the chamois would reach her shin guards. But then she had to tighten the waist because she was slim. So now her kidney pads are in front of her stomach,” she explains. “Bending over to strap on their skates, the players had to open their pants again to allow the hard plastic kidney pads to flap out and then put them back up. So players carried this extra volume with them where they needed dynamic movement and had no protection for their kidneys. I thought, this is ridiculous.
Dyer had one mission in mind: find a company willing to manufacture poles and protective equipment made specifically for women. “Coming from USA Hockey, we just had hockey pants that the guys wore. They were heavy and were not good for performance or protection. So that became my motto, perform and protect. Protection because our gear kept the padding where players needed it, and performance because it fit and didn’t shift all the way around.
“I got a lot of attention after the 1990 World Championships. I just came home and was so excited and so full of energy and visions in a thousand directions of where women’s sports could go,” she explains. “I just picked up the phone and called every person I could think of, and I called every hockey manufacturer. I had a long conversation with Bauer and they seemed supportive, but they just couldn’t dedicate the time or the production to it.”
However, one company said yes. And it changed the game forever.
“I ended up at Louisville Hockey because they were Canadian, so there was less time lag trying out new equipment while we were adapting it,” she explains. “They were small enough to be flexible and they were committed to me, so in 1992 I switched to wearing their product. I really became part of the family as soon as I started working.” She would work with the company for the next 17 years.
In the back of the Team USA bus, Kelly Dyer sketched out ideas, using her teammates as models: Lisa Brown-Miller for size small, Cammi Granato for size medium and Kelly O’Leary for large. “Everyone was constantly pulling up their pants and you couldn’t keep them up,” Dyer explains. “Same with shoulder pads. We had kids wearing these huge shoulder pads, so I really saw a need for them. With gloves, women don’t have the depth in their fingers, so all this material deprives you of maximizing your strength. By just making the inserts on the fingers thinner and then making them narrower, you were using the full strength of your hand when you wanted to make a grip. Instead of spreading your hand, you were actually maximizing the transfer of your energy through the stick. Many girls used to cut out their palms, but then all that extra material would dangle from the backs of their hands.”
It was a significant change for women who had been ditching figure skates and wearing their brothers’ gear for decades. “The sticks – at first we did wood, but then we went with composites. Louisville bought Fontaine, so we had the wood tops with the fusion composite shaft. We made women’s poles with a smaller radius, we made gloves, we made shoulder pads with chest protection and we made pants that were shorter in the torso and longer in the legs.”
“Sporting goods makers have finally realized that another gender exists,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1996, as Louisville prepared to announce its groundbreaking women’s hockey line. “The industry is quickly learning that there are millions of women who want to exercise, and that they have purchasing power,” said Mike May of the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association. “They need things that fit their bodies.” The plan was to fill a growing void in the market and preview the equipment ahead of women’s hockey’s debut at the 1998 Olympics – and be prepared for an explosion afterward.
In another first for women’s hockey, Dyer began signing athletes to agreements to join her as ambassadors for the Wallaceburg company. “I didn’t want to make it all about me, so we signed Erin Whitten and made a Whitten goalie stick. Then I thought, we need a Canadian, so I signed Geraldine Heaney.”
“From the moment I first tried the new equipment, I could tell it was unlike anything I had ever used before. It is designed for feminine proportions. It keeps the pads in the right places and provides protection that unisex equipment cannot provide,” Cammi Granato said in an ad in Louisville. Granato also appeared in an iconic poster in Louisville alongside Mark Messier, wearing each other’s jerseys and facing the camera decked out from head to toe in Louisville hockey gear.
Granato and Heaney, both future Hall of Fame members, became the faces of the women’s equipment industry, promoting “proportionately designed hockey equipment for female athletes.” Their photos bore the campaign slogan in large yellow letters: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”
