Meghan Sweezey Carves Out Space for Women in Vermont Hockey

While many of their classmates were no doubt snoozing through the waning days of winter break last month, the Saint Michael’s College women’s hockey team carried on a seasonal tradition: snagging early-morning ice time for practice. Despite the hour, the squad skated hard inside South Burlington’s C. Douglas Cairns Recreation Arena, metal blades carving ice in a whoosh of speed. Sticks slapped pucks, thudding the boards like cannon fire in the cavernous rink.

Laughter and chatter rippled through the chill air as players roughhoused where they collided in a tangle of purple jerseys. The upbeat mood belied the intensity of the drills running at both ends of the rink.

“None of us are morning people,” admitted alternate captain Gaby Tribelli, a senior and double major in business administration and art and design. “But the minute we set foot on the ice, we’re always happy to be there — and obviously taking the sport seriously and striving to win.”

Except for her warm-up suit and white baseball cap, the team’s new head coach, Meghan Sweezey, could’ve been mistaken for a player. On the ice, the 2010 St. Mike’s grad and former hockey standout matched her players stride for stride, goading them to dig down deep and whooping in encouragement. At times she wielded her stick like a professor’s pointer, directing players’ attention around the ice to detail a play. When someone scored a goal or mounted a particularly stalwart defense, she bent her solid, five-foot-four frame at the waist and smacked her stick on the ice in praise.

Success, and how to define it, is often on 36-year-old Sweezey’s mind these days. The first female hockey head coach at St. Mike’s — and only the second coach of the women’s program in its 25 seasons — she inherited a team that went winless the previous season, a low point in a long run of lackluster results. By winter break this season, the Purple Knights had won just one of their first 20 games: a home victory against Connecticut’s Post University back on October 12.

Sweezey could make excuses. Hired last June, she didn’t recruit her current players, including 10 first-years. While St. Mike’s is an NCAA Division II school, the women’s hockey team plays in Division I, facing opponents with vastly greater resources. And Cairns, the Purple Knights’ home ice, is a community rink adorned with banners touting the many teams that skate it, including high school, club and youth squads. By comparison, rival Sacred Heart University in Connecticut opened a new, state-of-the-art arena in 2023 at a reported cost of $75 million.

Instead of deflecting blame, Sweezey is focusing on factors beyond the win-loss column to assess her team’s growth.

“The program historically has had a problem where we get on the precipice of winning and then we just tank in the middle of the game,” Sweezey said. “What is actually going on here?” she wondered, her eyes lighting up like a scoreboard, as they often do when she makes an important point. “What are our psychological barriers that we need to get past? Because we can beat these teams.”

Drawing on her degrees in psychology and counseling, the new coach has explored such concepts as the “scarcity mindset” to help answer her questions. Players fixating on the outcome instead of the process might be “sabotaging” their own efforts, she said.

The team is hardly throwing in the towel, though. Its record following October’s win included two heart-wrenching overtime losses, to New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College and Massachusetts’ Assumption University.

Four days after that January practice at Cairns, Sweezey’s team finally notched another victory against Post — on the road. The following week, it came from behind to beat St. Anselm. Two more overtime losses later, both to Long Island University, and St. Mike’s fans could practically hear Purple Knights skates grinding toward another win.

The very next weekend, Sweezey and her team paid a visit to the Sacred Heart Pioneers’ posh Martire Family Arena — and split the two-game stand.

That makes four wins this season to last season’s zero.

No one knows better than Sweezey that merely looking on the bright side doesn’t win hockey games. She has built a career on helping players, chiefly women and girls, carve out space in the male-dominated sport. While coaching at St. Mike’s has elevated her profile in collegiate athletics, Sweezey has been a rising star in the regional hockey community for the better part of a decade.

In 2016, she launched her hockey training company, Girls 4 Hockey. In its inaugural season, G4H skated by with just eight girls participating. In 2023, the last year for which Sweezey had crunched numbers, it offered 14 different programs, mostly at Burlington-area rinks. They included coed Learn to Skate & Play for kids as young as 4; skills clinics for female, female-identifying and nonbinary youth players; and adult women’s programs. More than 600 players came through the training programs that year, continuing a tradition of G4H participants going on to high school and college playing careers — and even their own coaching gigs.

“As a skills coach, Meghan Sweezey is as good as anybody working with elite-level players anywhere in Vermont,” said Patrick Burke, founder of the Vermont Shamrocks, an elite all-girls club that has partnered with G4H over the years. “What she does with the hockey rink is create that space for these girls to really learn and grow.”

Sweezey has proven herself a gritty, resourceful entrepreneur with a preternatural passion for hockey. That drive has brought her up against a formidable foe in recent years: flagging participation in the Vermont girls’ game. She’s confronting the challenge head-on, drawing on all she knows, an agent of positive change amid the complex forces shaping athletic opportunities for girls and women.

Opportunities, she’ll be the first to tell you, that she never had.

Bay State Breakaway

Like many girls of her generation, Sweezey began her hockey journey on figure skates. Her family lived in Lynnfield, Mass., and her mother, Suzi, was a professional figure skating coach in nearby Reading. Sweezey started skating around the time she could walk.

Being steady on blades prepared her, at age 6, to take up hockey. By 12, she felt like she’d hit a wall with figure skating and wasn’t leveling up.

“I was over it,” she recalled. Her mother understood her frustration. “She was like, ‘OK, you can be done. You’ve given it a try. Go do hockey. You obviously like that better.'”

Sweezey might also have had a nudge from her father, Bob, a construction company owner who had played hockey at Salem State University and also coached locally.

“He said, ‘You’re a girl, and you’re too small, and I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt.'” Meghan Sweezey

Massachusetts offered Sweezey pathways to develop as a player through middle and into high school — albeit with no female head coaches and few nonparent coaches. She traveled a few towns over to Tewksbury to play with the all-girls North Shore Vipers club, but playing high school hockey meant joining the boys’ junior varsity roster at Lynnfield High School, where there was no girls’ team at the time.

Sweezey’s younger brother, Ryan, recalled her “holding her own” against boys as she got older and the game became more physical.

“She’s very competitive in general, very driven, and really wants to prove herself,” he said. She “also had that extra chip on her shoulder being the girl playing boys’ hockey.”

During varsity tryouts her junior year, she “laid an epic hit” on another player, Brian Flynn, sending them both sprawling. Flynn’s name may be familiar to fans of pro hockey: He later played in the National Hockey League for the Buffalo Sabres, Montréal Canadiens and Dallas Stars.

Sweezey was sure the takedown had earned her a varsity spot. “I thought I had done it,” she said. “I was like, That was it. He’s usually the best player on the team. I’m in.”

The varsity coach came to the opposite conclusion.

“Literally, he said, ‘You’re a girl, and you’re too small, and I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt,'” Sweezey remembered. The rejection knocked her flat.

Sweezey picked herself up and finished the season on the JV team. The next year, she took advantage of a partnership with Reading Memorial High School and suited up with the all-girls Rockets squad.

There she played for the first — and only — female head coach of her career, Olympic gold medal winner Sandra Whyte.

“There wasn’t a lot of drama. We were just a good group,” Sweezey said. “It helps when you win a lot of games.”

She recalled Whyte challenging her squad to play “above our skill level,” trying out strategies and tactics that would inform Sweezey’s collegiate playing and coaching. And she credits Whyte with advocating for her in the recruiting process.

“She had a lot of respect for my game,” Sweezey said. Whyte showed it by starting Sweezey on the first line with Dominique Lozzi, who went on to play at Maine’s Bowdoin College and coach college hockey, and Michelle Benjamin, who would play for Connecticut’s Trinity College. Sweezey quickly found her groove.

“I was lighting it up,” she said. By season’s end, playing as a forward, she’d tallied 57 points and helped her team reach the state championship after years of not even making the playoffs. The Rockets lost in the game’s final seconds.

That season would prove pivotal both in Sweezey’s playing career and in her finding a deeper sense of purpose in hockey. A few weeks after that bittersweet finale, a Reading teammate died in a car crash. That player had worn No. 4. Sweezey still chokes up at the memory.

“She had a big impact on my confidence,” she said.

In tribute, Sweezey wore No. 4 for her entire four-year St. Mike’s playing career. She also used the numeral in Girls 4 Hockey.

Like her youthful quest for on-ice respect, Sweezey’s transition to college hockey was a scramble.

“I had five coaches tell me I’d never play college hockey,” she said. Her notoriety with the Rockets had come a little too late: Many college teams had already landed their top recruits. Sweezey used the rejections as motivation, she said, “kind of like what I was doing my whole life with boys.”

St. Mike’s head coach Chris Donovan wasn’t one of those coaches. He took a chance on underrated prospect Sweezey in 2006, although, the way she remembers it, he wasn’t sure where she’d fit into the program. “He was sure that I was good enough to play,” she said, but added: “I don’t know that he expected me to perform to the extent that I did.”

Over her four seasons, the relatively new program recorded way more losses than wins. But Sweezey racked up impressive stats nonetheless, all while cultivating the leadership potential that later led her back to the Purple Knights bench.

She’s quick to credit Donovan for helming a team with a mix of developing and “impact” players. Above all, she remembers his guidance when she got in her own way by putting too much pressure on herself — precisely what she has been trying to help her own players manage. “He’s a good dude,” she added. “He’s like my second dad.”

By the time Sweezey graduated, with a combined degree in psychology and English, she had worn the alternate captain’s patch for two seasons, captained the team her senior year and tied the program record for career games played: 103. She also earned a spot on the Eastern College Athletic Conference’s East All-Academic team in her final two seasons. Her accumulated goals and assists still rank high in school history.

A League
of Her Own

The college hockey record books tell a tale of Sweezey’s contribution to the St. Mike’s program. While her influence on developing players through Girls 4 Hockey isn’t as black and white, it is no less profound.

On the ice at a recent clinic for tween players, Sweezey was in perpetual motion, setting up skills stations, offering encouragement, pausing here and there to correct a technique.

“Meghan’s the boss out there,” said Adam Routhier, a hockey dad and girls’ coach with the St. Albans Skating Association, whose squad is one of several area youth teams that have trained with G4H. “You can tell she just knows what she’s talking about, and it comes to her so naturally,” he said, adding that the coach can be stern with players, but “in a good way.”

“They’re listening,” he said, “but it’s fun.”

The fun factor is especially important with the youngest players. At a recent Learn to Skate & Play clinic at Gordon H. Paquette Ice Arena in Burlington, some kids started out skating with the assistance of milk crates but were soon making unaided strides, hockey sticks in hand. They pushed pucks before switching to swatting rubber duckies — a playful challenge. Sweezey smiled readily with the beginners, crouching down to make eye contact and pay a compliment.

“Meghan’s the boss out there.” Adam Routhier

After a single Learn to Skate & Play session, Elyssa Nagle’s 4-year-old daughter was hooked. “She had a smile from ear to ear every time she went on the ice,” said Nagle, who lives in Colchester and later signed herself up for G4H’s adult women’s program. Her 2-year-old daughter has taken to asking, “Where’s my hockey stick?”

“She’ll be signing up the day she turns 4,” Nagle said.

Hockey mom Lauren Gulka, who played at Yale University and has also coached with the Burlington Amateur Hockey Association, praised Sweezey’s on-ice persona, calling her “charismatic and welcoming.”

“She knows how to run a fun but disciplined session,” Gulka said, “and she tends to pick coaches who fit well.”

St. Albans Skating Association player Maddie Halsted, 14, started hockey about four years ago. Over that time, she estimates she has skated roughly 200 sessions with G4H — from learning to skate to teeing up slap shots from the blue line. Sweezey’s ice is a comfort zone of sorts for Halsted.

“She doesn’t criticize. It’s an open space,” she said. “She’s funny. She’s easy to talk to. She just wants to help you learn to be a better hockey player.”

Sweezey’s elite college team members might agree with Halsted. Although their skipper, by her own admission, can bring tough love to the locker room, “She’s very much [focused] on development and bringing people up on the ice,” said first-year St. Mike’s player Alicia McDonald, a business administration major. She described a signature Sweezey coaching move: charging players, off-ice, with setting goals and creating plans to achieve them. The coach pushes McDonald and her peers to explore their potential instead of wringing it out of them.

Giving players the kind of mentorship she mostly lacked growing up energizes Sweezey. After graduating from St. Mike’s, she returned home to Reading and coached youth teams and girls’ clinics for a couple of years, including at the USA Hockey New England District Development Camp. She rejoined the St. Mike’s women’s hockey program as an assistant coach in 2013 and worked for the college in alumni and parent relations and admissions.

Back in Vermont, Sweezey scanned the local hockey landscape through a coach’s eyes. What she saw looked awfully familiar.

“I got to see who was coaching and obviously realized that there weren’t a lot of female coaches out there,” she said. “So I was motivated to sort of jump in and do some clinics just to have some female role modeling.”

G4H weathered lean seasons in the early years, especially during the worst of the pandemic, when gatherings were restricted. Sweezey wouldn’t let the program be derailed.

When many schools shifted to online classes, she and partner Kaila Krouse, whose background includes a graduate degree in clinical psychology and work in special education, fashioned a work-around called GRLS — Girls Remote Learning Support. The program brought together about a dozen girls in a room at South Burlington’s Delta Hotel for their remote school sessions.

Sweezey and Krouse coordinated the kids’ schedules to make sure they were logging on to learn at the right times. During shared breaks, they’d lead the girls in movement activities or maybe catch a women’s hockey game on TV. Eventually, they’d all pile into a van, masked up, and head to a rink for their hockey session.

Hockey parents Christine and Chris McGinty, both coaches in the Essex Youth Hockey Association, had two daughters in the GRLS program. “It really took that stress off us as parents,” Christine said. For parents working full time, she said, GRLS offered something “much more active than we might have been able to provide.” Her husband called the program “one of the highlights of that crazy, chaotic time.”

His daughters made lasting friendships in those challenging circumstances, Chris said, and still reunite happily with their GRLS pals when they meet at a rink, even when showing up for opposing teams.

To make up for lost revenue during the pandemic, Sweezey fell back on skills she developed as a young “rink rat” in Reading. She picked up shifts at the Cairns snack bar, sharpened skates and drove the Zamboni. (On a rare day, you might still see Sweezey behind the wheel at Cairns, filling in if the rink is short a driver.)

Once the pandemic loosened its grip, Sweezey and G4H quickly regained momentum. By 2023, the company was running two weeklong summer camp sessions, each drawing 50 to 60 participants, on top of its other programs. G4H was bigger than ever.

A Numbers Game

A lot has changed since Sweezey was battling boys in greater Boston, with few female hockey players to look up to. Girls now have pro role models in hockey — the Professional Women’s Hockey League is in its second season — as well as in other marquee team sports, such as basketball and soccer.

Still, challenging dynamics in Vermont hockey culture find the girls’ game on thin ice, despite surging popularity nationwide.

Over the past decade or so, several area high school programs have consolidated to fill out sparse rosters, among them the Burlington High School Seahorses and Colchester High School Lakers. This season, the SeaLakers — reigning Division I state champs — also made room for players from South Burlington High School, which canceled its own girls’ hockey season due to low numbers. In other words, players attending schools in Vermont’s three most populous cities now form a single team. (The roster also includes one player each from Milton High School and Winooski High School, which do not have girls’ hockey programs.)

The reasons for the downturn in girls’ hockey are varied. Cost is an obvious one — buying equipment adds up quickly. And ice time is a scarce commodity in parts of Vermont, increasing registration costs for the youth teams that feed high school rosters. Some youth athletes are opting for other, year-round sports, such as soccer.

Theories rooted in demographic data point to Vermont’s low birth rate and a possible recession-related population dip. The pandemic hampered youth sports in general, and participation may still be in recovery mode.

The ripple effects of declining hockey numbers echo declines in a more obvious metric: school enrollment. In parts of the state, enrollment has dried up to the point that the Vermont Principals’ Association now advises on its website that “some districts are unable to provide opportunities for middle school athletes to play on appropriate girls’ teams, forcing girls to play on the boys’ teams.”

That’s an especially serious barrier for girls starting hockey, according to Molly Burke, a former Columbia University club hockey player who now coaches girls at Stowe High School and with the Vermont Shamrocks, the all-girls club founded by her father, Patrick Burke.

“It’s very rare that you’re going to find a girl to sign up to do something the first time ever with boys,” she said.

Why haven’t boys’ teams taken a similar hit? According to Becky Street, a former St. Lawrence University hockey player and the current coach-in-chief and girls’ hockey coordinator at the Vermont State Amateur Hockey Association, boys make up roughly 80 percent of Vermont youth players, so diminished turnout doesn’t necessarily dash entire teams.

But “when you lose a few girls, it makes a huge impact,” she said.

Then there is the proliferation of select and travel teams, which can draw players away from community associations — a problem lamented throughout the Vermont hockey community, with its already limited player pool.

As Molly Burke put it, “Every time that a select organization is created, somewhere a youth girls’ hockey team is folding.”

Since it’s not a team or club, G4H exists outside of some of youth hockey’s contentious debates.

Patrick Burke of the Vermont Shamrocks called G4H a good “on-ramp” for girls entering the sport. The range of Sweezey’s programs enables players of all skill levels to turn to them when needed. Girls stuck on coed teams, for example, who want to bolster their confidence and skills in a more hormonally hospitable environment can find talented female coaches to inspire their progress. What’s more, players on different teams who “hate each other,” Molly Burke joked, can find common ground through G4H. “It helps breed that culture of support,” she said.

“We’re starting to see the impact that Girls 4 Hockey is having,” said Savanna Poole, a former St. Anselm hockey player and current Vermont Shamrocks coach. While Poole noted the “amazing amount of players” who travel from as far away as Rutland and New York State to participate in some of G4H’s more popular programs, she added that the training company’s effect is hard to quantify because the “girls-only space” for hockey is so new. She said a clearer picture of its influence should emerge five years or so down the line.

In the meantime, the rosters of local high school girls’ teams offer a clue. At a glance, Sweezey counted 17 G4H alums among the SeaLakers’ 23 current players. Given that there are 1,000 or so female hockey players registered in Vermont, hundreds of whom go through G4H programs each year, Sweezey is likely to have helped train girls on virtually every local team.

Playing It Forward

While Sweezey is the face of girls’ hockey to many Vermonters — she seems ubiquitous at area rinks — her work is increasingly a team effort.

St. Mike’s assistant hockey coach Spencer Fascetta helps Sweezey run practices, manage the team and screen the steady stream of player recruiting videos that arrive for review. Krouse handles much of the G4H administrative work and also coaches on the ice. The company teams up for occasional coed programs with Light the Lamp Hockey School and Post2Post Goaltending School, owned and directed by St. Mike’s women’s goaltending coach Leon Lifschutz.

“She’s giving those girls role models.” Becky Street

Sweezey’s most visible resource, however, is the all-female G4H coaching rotation — about 15 to 20 coaches. Street, of the Vermont State Amateur Hockey Association, acknowledged Sweezey’s role in helping many of those coaches get their start.

“She’s not only helping to build female players in the state, she’s also helping to build female coaches,” Street said. “She’s giving those girls role models.”

Sabina Brochu, a Northeastern University student and club hockey player from Williston, has been both a participant and coach with G4H. She took a preseason clinic before joining her high school team — a cooperative including students from Champlain Valley Union High School, Mount Abraham Union Middle/High School and Mount Mansfield Union High School.

“I loved being on the ice, surrounded by other girls,” she remembered. “Why would I play hockey any other way?”

Brochu came on as a trial coach with G4H during one of its popular three-on-three scrimmage series. She found her niche, she said, with some of the younger players, so she joined the summer camp coaching staff “to learn the ropes,” she said.

She shadowed another coach leading drills and observed Sweezey at work with kids. Brochu said the experience boosted her confidence — an outcome she thinks Sweezey injects into the G4H coaching culture.

“Rather than ‘Do what I say and not what I do,’ she’s a ‘Do what I do’ person,” Brochu said. “When something goes wrong at camp, we all, as coaches, try to solve the problem before we go to her because we’ve seen how she solves problems.”

The G4H coaching bench gets deeper each season as Sweezey’s network expands. Sweezey has created openings for her collegiate players, such as Tribelli and McDonald, to develop coaching skills. Some of her former G4H coaches are now coaching teams of their own, including at the college level.

When she was considering the St. Mike’s coaching job, Sweezey shared a mantra about “building good team culture” with returning players raring to win and rookies eager to be a part of positive change. For Tribelli, that effort goes deeper than practicing power plays and penalty killing.

“We love hockey, but what comes first is the well-being of everyone,” she said.

McDonald believes the substantial time that Sweezey and her team have spent bonding off-ice, especially between semesters, has fostered mutual support — and a winning attitude.

“Now, girls who maybe had a few doubts about how they played or how the team played realize that if we can trust each other and we can continue to play confidently, we’re going to get success,” she said. “We know that if we bring each other up, we’re going to succeed.”

With two more games to go before the league playoffs — a Cairns home stand this Friday and Saturday, February 21 and 22 — the newly invigorated team has reset expectations for the program and for the players themselves. Having witnessed her culture-changing work with G4H, Sweezey’s fans aren’t surprised she’s making a difference.

“It’s a total task that she has taken on, and she is fighting the fight to do it,” Poole said. “She’s definitely a long-game person.”

Disclosure: The author’s daughters have participated in Girls 4 Hockey programs.

This article appears in Feb 19-25, 2025.

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