'Sticks' and 'Clubs' Were The First St. Louis Women's Hockey Team In 1920

On February 5, 1920, a brief advertisement ran in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was promoting “Young Ladies In Ice Hockey.”  The first women’s game in the city of St. Louis would take place the following evening, a “new and novel attraction.”

The game was to be played at the St. Louis Winter Garden, formerly the Jai Alai Building. The building, originally used for the Basque sport of Jai Alai, was converted to an arena in 1916 due to, as the St. Louis Globe-Democrat called it, "a renewed revival of the ice-skating craze."

In 1920, when two women's teams stepped on the ice, nicknamed ‘Sticks,’ who wore red and white, and ‘Clubs,’ who wore blue and white,’ the teams were said to be composed of “society girls” who were “debutantes” and “sub-debutantes.” The first women's hockey game in St. Louis history, was played on February 6, 1920, with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch stating it was “quite unusual for debutantes to tackle anything as strenuous as hockey, but they say it is a great sport…”

While the papers discounted that first game leading up to the contest, after the ‘Sticks’ and ‘Clubs’ dropped the puck for the first time in front of several hundred fans at St. Louis’ Winter Garden, women in hockey received something new in the city, praise. After the Sticks defeating the Clubs 4-2, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch declared “Girls Show Skill and Daring in Hockey Match.” Annette O’Reilly scored a pair for the Sticks, while May Cabanne and Jeanette Granville also scored. For the Clubs, goal scorers were Agnes Benoist and Louise Moser.

The papers described the athletes as wearing bloomers and thin stockings, with the exception of one player who “went into the game bare-kneed, but after a few scrimmages with the sticks swinging like flails in all directions she pulled up her stockings.”

Two weeks later, the teams met again. The Sticks again proved the top team beating the Clubs 2-1. May Cabanne scored her second goal of the series, while Olivia Harbaugh had the other for the Sticks, and Dorothy Walker had the lone Clubs’ goal.

Finally in their third game, the Clubs came out on top earning their own 2-1 win, this time played at the St. Louis Ice Palace. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote about the March 5 game, it “was the best played and most hotly contested meeting of the season.”

Catherine McMahon scored both goals for the Clubs in the win, while Agnes Benoist had the Sticks’ goal. The final game of the 1920 season took place on March 19 seeing the Sticks win again, this time by a score of 4-3.

In 1921, the Sticks and Clubs returned to the ice. As May Cabanne, captain of the organization stated, there were many good reasons for women in St. Louis to get involved in hockey.

“It’s awfully good exercise and more fun than anything one can do in the winter time,” Cabanne told The St. Louis Star and Times.

In 1921, it was not just the Sticks facing the Clubs, the “Sticks and Clubs” were now taking on outside teams, including a women’s hockey team from Washington University in St. Louis. The Washington University team, known as the Inter-Sorority Hockey Team was, as the name suggests, composed of hockey players from four sororities at the school. The former Sticks and Clubs were now at times being referred to as the St. Louis Debs, short for Debutantes.

Following that season however, a near half century of silence followed for women's hockey in the city. The sport undoubtedly remained active, but like many women's hockey programs, changes during World War II, and shifting gender roles of the 1950s stalled women's hockey

The late 1960s and 1970s however, saw a North American revitalization of hockey for women. It was no different in St. Louis.

Debbie Rosa was one of the first women's hockey players in St. Louis to break into the news again in 1973. She'd been attending Bill Selman's hockey camp. Selman was the head coach for the Saint Louis University Billikens, a new NCAA DI program in the city, looking to build on the excitement the city had experienced through the arrival of the the NHL's St. Louis Blues in 1967.

Rosa would secretly change in a women's washroom before sliding onto the ice to participate. Today, women no longer need to conceal their competition in St. Louis including the thriving St. Louis Lady Cyclones, St. Louis Lady Blues, Hockey Club of St. Louis, Chesterfield Lady Falcons, St. Louis Frenzy, and many women's organizations and high school teams.

St. Louis does not just have the Blues, it also has a rich history of women’s hockey that’s more than a century old.