Published: Feb. 19, 2014
Breckenridge adjusting to new game
West freshman a good fit for 1st-year team
By NICHOLAS DETTMANN
Daily News
MEQUON — West Bend West’s Emily Breckenridge has a mean
streak about her that’s fun to have on a team for a hockey coach. The problem
is, however, she plays for a team — a league — that doesn’t allow her to check
to take out some of that aggression. As a result, she sometimes finds herself
in the penalty box.
Her coach, Scott Matczak, doesn’t mind, though.
“It’s fun to watch her,” he said.
“It’s definitely an advantage for our team to having that,”
he added about Breckenridge’s mean streak.
Breckenridge, a freshman at West, plays for the Lakeshore
Lightning, a co-op high school girls hockey team with girls from Grafton,
Homestead and Cedarburg that plays its home games at the Ozaukee Ice Center.
The Lightning is in its first year as a team. It is a
varsity reserve, meaning it won’t play in the upcoming WIAA tournament, but
played varsity teams.
“I was really excited,” Breckenridge said when she found out
the team was created.
Breckenridge grew up playing with most of the girls on the
team up until about two years ago. She decided to play for a Pee-Wee team with
the Washington County Youth Hockey Association with the boys.
The two years with the boys played a role in the kind of
player she is today. It had its pros and cons.
“The boys push you to skate harder,” she said.
“Playing with the boys, I feel like I’ve gotten more skilled
because the boys push you harder.”
She also thought the long hair streaming out the back of her
helmet was a target for the boys.
“Just being a girl, they always go after you,” Breckenridge
said. “That’s just not fun.”
One of those boys was her brother, Nate Breckenridge.
The older brother was always tough on his little sister, but
for good reason. He wanted her to be a better player. He didn’t take it easy on
her.
“We would just go in the garage and play one-on-one against
each other,” Emily Breckenridge said. “He would try to teach me new things to
go around people.
“He really wanted me to get better and see my full
potential.”
Breckenridge has another reason for having a bit of that
mean streak: She is short, barely 5 feet tall.
Being so small wasn’t all that bad.
“When you’re small, you usually are faster,” she said. “I
use my quickness to my advantage.”
Matczak couldn’t agree more.
“When she turns it on, she’s skating faster than anybody on
the ice,” he said. “She has natural speed. She has a very good awareness of the
game.”
At this level and with these rules in place, Breckenridge
can exercise her strengths.
“You just play the game,” she said.
Breckenridge was introduced to the sport of hockey through
her brother. However, when she was about 3 or 4 years old, she and her family
often went onto a lake during the winter months to ice fish. The siblings
skated from tip to tip.
Until she knew how to skate, she wore a pair of
hand-me-downs from her brother and he pulled her across the ice.
Breckenridge thought about trying figure skating, mostly
because she didn’t want to wear a helmet. However, it wasn’t tough enough for
her.
“It was too girly,” she said with a smile. “I wanted to play
with the guys.”
“I like the friends you get to make (in hockey),” she added
as a reason she’s stayed with hockey.
When Breckenridge approached high school, she didn’t want to
play for the Ice Bears, the same team her older brother plays on.
“My brother broke his leg while checking and that changed my
mind,” she said. “I didn’t want to check.”
The girls can make contact on the ice, but they’re not
allowed to check along the boards.
The Lightning took the place of a U-16 team at the Ozaukee
Ice Center and that’s the team Breckenridge would’ve likely played for had the
Lightning not gotten started.
After some time away from the girls she grew up playing
with, she was proud and excited of how far they’ve grown as hockey players.
“They’ve been trying to make this team for like two years,”
Breckenridge said. “My family was really excited about it. It was a new
opportunity to play girls hockey.”
The Lightning are 4-9-1 this season. Breckenridge is fourth
on the team in scoring with four goals and four assists in those 14 games.
“It’s been an experience,” she said. “We don’t care if we
win or lose. We just want to have fun. Like in our first game, we were losing
7-0 and we were all having fun.
“We didn’t care. It was our first-ever game with the
Lightning.”
The Lightning started 0-4 before it won three straight
games, including two victories by a total score of 13-2 over Arrowhead.
Breckenridge is the lone West Bend resident on the team,
which is a bit of a downfall. She can’t talk to other members of the team about
what happened in school. Yet, she said the team does a nice job of being
friends with everybody.
And, most importantly, she’s having the most fun in hockey
since she was about 6 years old when her Squirt team made it to state.
As for that aggression, it’s gotten better. However, early
on, she often fought off the instinct to go check somebody. And other times,
she found herself thinking about it in the penalty box.
“We talked about it the first couple weeks and I remind her
here and there,” Matczak said. “It’s kind of an advantage for her to come from
that.”
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