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THEBACHA/FORT SMITH
When Jessica Cox says she loves hockey, she is not exaggerating. A recent posting on Facebook proves that.

Jessica Cox of Fort Smith has been deeply involved in women's hockey for a dozen years. - Paul Bickford/NNSL photo

On Dec. 9, she sent out the following message at 9:16 a.m.: "Off to the rink on this crisp -34 C morning for women's hockey practice. Anyone else going?"

The 34-year-old has been playing hockey since her final year at Carleton University in Ottawa.

"My life is consumed by hockey in the winter," she said. "But I enjoy it."

Cox said she still plays for the same reasons she started - the social component, the exercise and the challenge.

"You're always learning and your skills are always progressing," she said. "The more you play the better you get, in theory."

Cox noted, during her final year at Carleton, the university started a female hockey team.

"I could skate because I had played ringette," she said. "So I went and tried out for the team and I made it, even though I'd never played hockey before."

When she was seven, Cox began playing ringette - a game on ice played with a ring - and started coaching the sport when she was 16. She even coached ringette in Ottawa for three years while at university, but did not play the sport there.

After university, Cox, who is from Stony Plain, Alta., took her new-found love for hockey and her journalism degree to Fort Smith, where she initially worked as a reporter.

She arrived in April 2000, and found there was no women's hockey in town, although she helped coach girls minor hockey.

Later that year, she was invited to play in a men's recreational hockey league.

"Basically, my skating ability that I had developed as a child allowed me to start playing hockey here in Smith," she said, noting she was not the first woman to play rec hockey in town.

It was not long before Cox started to help organize the league and referee games, and was invited to become a female hockey rep on the board of Hockey NWT and learned about hockey organization on a territorial level.

Cox was instrumental in seeing the rebirth of women's hockey in Fort Smith for the 2004-05 season.

The previous year she and her friend Shari Olsen, a figure skater, started to practise hockey on Sunday afternoons.

"We would go out and horse around with a puck," Cox said, adding they were eventually joined by a couple of other women. "That was the resurrection of women's hockey, because there was a women's hockey team, very similar to what we have now, in the early '80s."

At a crowded birthday party in October 2004, Cox and Olsen - who is now president of the women's hockey group in Fort Smith - talked about their hockey practices, and other women expressed interest in learning to play.

Two days later, seven women showed up for practice, and 21 were involved by that Christmas.

"By the end of the season, we had 30 women playing and the vast majority of them were brand new to hockey. If they had skated before, it had been on figure skates as a child. It just took off," said Cox.

There are now about 30 women registered for hockey in Fort Smith. They divide up into teams for games, and travel to tournaments.

These days, Cox is a stay-at-home mom of two young children, but she still stays active in hockey.

Over her years in Fort Smith, she has worked to grow the women's game in town, in the North and even across Canada. From 2007-2011, she was the female hockey officer for Hockey North, which represents the NWT and Nunavut.

In that volunteer role, she would participate in two annual meetings of Hockey Canada and talk about female hockey with people from across Canada, she said. "It was awesome. I loved it."

In addition to playing hockey, Cox officiates for the oldtimers and rec leagues and occasionally instructs at hockey camps, plus she was co-coach of the Arctic Winter Games female team and head coach of the NWT female team for the National Aboriginal Hockey Championships.

This year, she is coach director with Fort Smith minor hockey.

"I am not coaching a team, but I am providing support to the minor hockey coaches," he said.

Cox believes it's important to keep attracting new people to the game.

"That means you have to be welcoming to new players who aren't skilled, but who want to learn how to play," she said.

"There is nothing more empowering than seeing yourself get better at something that is hard and something that you didn't think you could do."

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