By Michael G. Glab
She places her forefinger over her lips, contemplating the question for a moment. “Umm, yes.”
The WCHL has grown stronger by the year and now has 24 teams in three divisions. Its players range from novices who stepped on the ice for the first time mere months ago to former collegiate stars and Olympic hopefuls. There are lawyers, artists, and housewives. There are Dara Thompson, Lisa Magad, and Andrea Meenahan.
She skates laps around the rink, dodging tots and moms in figure skates and a few nearly middle-aged men who watch her wistfully as she breezes past. She nabs Andy by the collar and steers him to a bench by the warming shack.
“They’re fine,” he protests. “It’s OK.”
“That’s the most tedious thing for a novice,” says Meenahan, speaking of the lace-up ritual. She points at Andy skating off. “Look,” she says, “can you see the difference?” Sure enough, the skate she’s laced up is tight and that ankle is steady. The other ankle wobbles. When Andy does fall, before he even gets to the other end of the rink, it’s because that ankle buckled.
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An hour later, some of the Snappers gather at a sports bar in Northbrook. Thompson is here. So are Hollinger, Kim Overbey, Lisa Magad, and coaches J.J. Jennings and Chuck Olsen. Hollinger, short and wiry, stands at the head of the table like an emcee, telling stories and cracking jokes. She’s talking about a goalie’s blocker and glove she got from HawkQuarters, the official Blackhawks’ gift shop on Michigan Avenue. Supposedly they’d been used by the Blackhawks’ physical trainer. She wore them in practice and promptly broke out in a fierce rash. Hollinger, a high school teacher, visited the school nurse the next day and learned she probably had a staph infection. The nurse told her staph can reside dormant in leather and be reactivated by moisture, by sweat for instance. After undergoing several tests, Hollinger found out it wasn’t staph, just a simple fungus transmitted the same way. For weeks she went around bragging that she was carrying the Blackhawks’ trainer’s fungus.
