It must have been infuriating, seeing the same headlines year after year.

“Are these the first girls to play hockey?”

“Joyce Ellersich, the first girl to play hockey”

Similar headlines announcing the first women’s tournaments, leagues and broad participation in hockey can be found across the state of Minnesota for decades. They range from broadly accurate, where in 1917 the University of Minnesota announced its first women’s hockey tournament to the 1960s where an International Falls headline proudly—and falsely—announced it had “the nation’s first organized girls’ hockey program.”

“That’s the headline every time, and sometimes it’s the same reporter who’s writing that same headline again, about a different girl two years later,” laughed Lisa Imbryk, Marketing and Membership Coordinator with the Lawshe Museum and one of the creators of the Lawshe’s newest exhibit “A Dream of the Future: 125 Years of Women’s Hockey in Minnesota.”

A Dream of the Future examines the long history of women’s hockey in Minnesota from its origins to the proliferation of city and university leagues to adoption of high school leagues in the 1990s to that state of women’s hockey in Minnesota today.

As with many projects at the Lawshe, the exhibit was initially envisioned as something much smaller: a two-page insert into the monthly newsletter. From scouring local newspapers to microfiche to interviewing participants, the story “just kind of blew up,” said Imbryk.

In fact, the 125-year period for the exhibit isn’t even the beginning of hockey in the state. 1901 is simply the earliest definitive evidence Imbryk and other researchers were able to uncover of girls playing hockey in the state.

That 1901 article came from Atkin County and blithely discussed girls and boys playing hockey together on a local rink.

“There’s probably more before that because the article doesn’t make it sound weird. It just is like ‘this is what they are doing in Wagner’,” said Imbryk.

Snippets of articles can be found about girls teams, leagues and players throughout the early 1900s before the University of Minnesota adopted the sport in 1917. Other leagues would begin to appear in cities and colleges across the state from Crookston to Duluth to Carleton College.

Women playing Hockey often crashed into changing gender norms over the ages. At the turn of the century, hockey was often held up as an ideal for women’s athleticism: “The respectable young lady of the day needed to be physically fit, and hockey was a community-oriented way to get there,” said the exhibit’s introduction.

Those norms would change into the 1940s where soldiers returning from WWII coupled with gendered marketing would reinforce and help create separate spheres for men and women. Evidence of this shift in marketing can be found in advertisements for skates throughout the years.

Ads for girl’s and women’s hockey skates can be found through the early 19^th century including alongside unisex skates. Later advertisements, however would push figure skates for girls, separate from “hockey skates for the rugged boys,” said one 1969 ad.

“The big picture thing for me is that, especially right now, people don’t understand that the way that we think about men and women and how they’re different is propaganda from the 40s […] marketers realized that if you separate boys and girls, you had an opportunity to sell every family at least two of everything,” said Imbryk.

Attitudes about women in hockey shifted so far that one Minneapolis Park Board employee created the new game of “snow hockey,” to solve the problem of women playing hockey.

Another obstacle to women playing hockey was proliferation of the sport ringette in Minnesota. Ringette is a hockey-adjacent sport that restricts players to certain zones and emphasizes passing. While still played today, at the time it was advertised as a gentler sport and many women’s teams and leagues especially in the south metro area transitioned from hockey to ringette in the 1960s and 1970s.

This switch to ringette would eventually lead to the creation of girls high school varsity hockey when in 1991 five south metro school districts filed a sex discrimination complaint with the State Department of Education on the grounds that schools were out of compliance with Title IX.

In December of that year, the first high school varsity ringette tournament was held in West St. Paul. In an effort to be recognized by the Minnesota State High School League and gain more players, players voted overwhelmingly to switch back to hockey with the first sanctioned state varsity tournament for Minnesota girls hockey held in February of 1994.

That is where Hastings girls hockey enters the picture.

Some residents may remember the beginning of girls high school hockey in Hastings which began with only a junior varsity team in the 1995-96 school year under coaches Jeff Shelstad and Terry Hartman.

“It is history in the making,” mused Columnist and Sports Reporter Chris Brown in an article in the Star Gazette on the first girl’s practice on Monday Oct. 30, 1995.

The team started as junior varsity in order to ease into the already-competitive sport. The team’s first game was against Inver Grove Heights where the Hastings girls lost 14-0. At 6 a.m. the next morning all but one of the players were back out on the ice for a morning practice.

“It is a testament to how dedicated and how much they wanted it,” said Imbryk.

While the team faced steep competition in that first year, the goal was simply to have fun and grow the program: “They just hope it’s a fun season for the girls, which is key in the early stages of a growing program,” said Brown later about the first junior varsity practice.

By the next year, the program shifted to varsity and hasn’t looked back since.

A Dream of the Future will be featured in the Lawshe Museum through the end of the year. After that, however, Imbryk hopes to have the exhibit tour. For more information on hosting the exhibit, email dakotahistory@co.dakota.mn.us