Calgary goalie Emerance Maschmeyer hits the ice prior to a Les Canadiennes-Inferno match in Montreal in December. The league’s top two teams meet again this weekend in Calgary.Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail
In her day job, Jessica Campbell is the director of communications for the Sheldon Kennedy Child Advocacy Centre, which is why she was at Holy Cross Elementary Junior High School in southeast Calgary on a Wednesday afternoon, co-ordinating a mental-health initiative with the local middle school.
By night, Campbell has a second profession – playing forward for the Calgary Inferno, the No. 1 team in the Canadian Women's Hockey League and the defending Clarkson Cup champions.
This weekend, Campbell's twin career paths collide when the Inferno play Les Canadiennes de Montreal in a first-place showdown Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon at Calgary's WinSport Arena A, a season-ending two-game series between the two best teams in the league with first place on the line.
For the Saturday game against Montreal, the Inferno players will be wearing limited-edition purple jerseys, provided by Scotiabank, which will be auctioned off on behalf of Start the Spark, an annual mental-health awareness campaign supported by the team and the Kennedy organization.
Campbell, the liaison between the two groups, is expecting sellout crowds, thanks to an online ticket campaign, in which sponsors and donors purchased tickets for the game and then returned them to the team to distribute in schools and arenas across the city.
The Inferno, at 19-3-0, leads Montreal (16-4-2) by four points. The two teams ran away from the pack this season with second-half surges.
"We've been prepping for this weekend for weeks and months – pretty much the whole year – so when the puck drops, we're going to be so pumped up," said Campbell, who noted there will be a significant home-ice advantage for the Inferno, "a massive fan base behind us, hooting, hollering and cheering and making it that much more exciting for both teams.
"I know we're deserving of a sold-out crowd," Campbell said.
"This is an opportunity for fans to come out and see two unbelievable teams. Once they see us play the Canadiennes, they're going to be hooked and want to come back and buy season tickets for next year. It's a great game, an awesome match-up and first place is on the line. You can't ask for anything more." Campbell added.
Montreal features the top line in the CWHL – the trio of Marie-Philip Poulin, Caroline Ouellette and Ann-Sophie Bettez.
Many of the top players on Montreal and Calgary have also been teammates on Canada's national team, and they will get together again in the fall, when they centralize in Calgary to prepare for the 2018 Winter Olympic Games.
Until then, however, friendships are, out of necessity, put aside.
An example, in a game last month, Inferno goaltender Geneviève Lacasse was caught in a playful moment when she put Poulin into a headlock after Poulin had crashed her crease. Lacasse wasn't about to let her up – at least not right away. Cameras caught it all – and the two had a good chuckle about it afterward.
"Poulin crashed into the net, and I put her in a headlock a little bit, and the play had left our zone, and I just kept holding on," Lacasse said. "And she's trying to scramble out of it, and I'm laughing, and she's looking back and laughing, too, and gives me a shove and gets out of there.
"It's definitely weird to play against her, but there's so much respect on the ice. I'm sure, if you're at a game, you'll see – if you make a save, there's a little tap on the pads of a goalie, or a little chirping going on, but it's all done in a friendly way.
"But it is small things like that that make it real fun as well."
Lacasse is a perfect 8-0 this season for the Inferno and her numbers trail only Montreal's Charline Labonté in the overall goaltending stats. Lacasse, a Providence College grad, is in her first season in Calgary. At her request, she was traded to the Inferno this past August from the Boston Blades in order to pursue a job opportunity. Living in the United States, where she couldn't work, was becoming increasingly expensive, as a result of the shrinking Canadian dollar.
Just about every CWHL player juggles work and hockey schedules, which occasionally means practice times are adjusted to accommodate scheduling conflicts. Earlier this week, after the ice plant broke down at their regular practice facility, the Inferno players endured the fresh hell of 7 a.m. practices on both Tuesday and Thursday in order to prepare for this weekend's games.
That sort of flexibility and adaptability is necessary in the CWHL, though Lacasse will tell you it wasn't all bad.
"It was a little tough to get the legs going that early," she said, "but once they were moving, it was good. It gets your day off to a good start and brings you back to the old days, which is kind of nice."
Lacasse described her experience playing for Boston last season as one of the best in her career because of the camaraderie that developed on a rebuilding team. But coming to Calgary this year opened her up to a whole different world.
"Just to see the development in the skating, which has improved the most over the years – girls just getting to play with better girls means you're pushing each other on the ice. The speed obviously, too – you've got so many good up-and-coming players, the Jess Campbells, really speedy, really fast. It has been really amazing."
For her part, Campbell believes the CWHL's profile is growing incrementally, largely because of greater community awareness, something that didn't happen by accident.
"I know we've taken the right strides in Calgary," she said. "We have a partnership with Girls Hockey Calgary, with over 40 teams from novice to midget that we mentor and go to their practices. They've rebranded this year as the Junior Inferno so when we've been in the rinks we see our logo, literally all over the place. Seeing those kids, in the malls, in the movie theatres, wearing that Inferno logo, that's what's going to grow the league – people in the community, asking, 'Who are the Inferno? Oh, we have a professional women's team? Let's go watch. Tickets are only $15? Let's take the whole family.'"
The next step is generating enough revenue to sustain a salaried league, which Campbell believes is "absolutely on track.
"What it will take is creating a consistent fan base. But we're in it for the long haul. It's a different game than the NHL, so we're starting from a point of showing fans, 'This is what women's hockey is. Don't compare it to men's hockey.' It's just as good, it's just a different game. That's what it's about. So I'm very optimistic about the direction we're going as a league."
As for the weekend showdown against their rivals, the Inferno's Rebecca Johnston is cautiously optimistic, noting that this year's team includes a lot of new faces "who've helped us throughout the year.
"I think definitely we are a better team. We are more prepared. We've been to the Clarkson Cup before, so for us, that experience will go really far.
"Our end goal is to win the Clarkson Cup again, so we take every weekend and every game and focus on that and try not to get too far ahead of ourselves. Montreal is a great team. We've split with them both weekends we played against them, so it should be close. Hopefully we continue to move in the right direction."