Just by reaching the gold medal game, the U.S. women have shown what they can do, said Anita DeFrantz, the U.S. member of the International Olympic Committee's executive board and a former Olympic rower. Now young girls can aspire to be hockey players. It's just tremendous. For hockey to grow from grass roots upward, for it to be embraced by a professional sports culture, will be a slow, arduous and perhaps impossible process. The majority of high schools in the United States do not have a men's hockey team, much less a women's squad.
International depth is also a problem.
The United States and Canada have crushed the four other teams here by a combined score of 61-19. In Canada, a few more opportunities exist for girls and for women, although few in that hockey-crazed country believe it could support a serious professional league, either. Many of Canada's elite women play in the amateur Central Ontario Women's Hockey League, but the talent pool is so shallow that when the national team began touring last year, three of the six teams stopped operating because of a lack of players, Canada Hockey spokesman John MacKinnon said. You just have to play on the boys' teams. When I first started there were hardly any teams at all, but then Wayne Gretzky came to Los Angeles, and the rinks came.