Kim St-Pierre: From obscurity to the Hall of Fame
The most decorated goalie in the history of women's hockey was one recruiting visit away from a career as a beer leaguer in Chateauguay, Quebec
The year was 1998 and 19-year-old Kim St-Pierre was aging out of boys’ junior hockey. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to continue playing, it’s just that she was running out of places that would take her. Beer league in Chateauguay, Que., was beginning to look like the most viable option. It was around that time that Dan Madden, the GM of the women’s team at McGill University of Montreal, asked if he could have meeting with St-Pierre and her father. She needed her dad there on account of she couldn’t speak a word of English.
Within a year, St-Pierre was winning a gold medal for Canada at the World Women’s Championship and ensconcing herself in the blue paint for the red and white, where she would establish world dominance for the next five years. It all culminated in the most decorated career of any women’s goalie and, now, a rightful place in the Hockey Hall of Fame.
It should come as no surprise, then, that any discussion about the all-time greatest goalie in the history of the game has to include Kim St-Pierre, along with fellow Canadian Shannon Szabados and Noora Raty of Finland.
The way Madden recalls it, he had taken over a McGill program that had fallen into disrepair in the mid-1990s and was desperately looking for a goalie. He invited St-Pierre to a tryout camp, but she couldn’t attend because she had broken her foot playing volleyball. It didn’t take too many viewings of St-Pierre playing with boys to know that she could really help his program. “We saw that talent from the beginning,” Madden said. “We were an up-and-coming program and she was in a position where she saw a lot of rubber and she thrived on that. She made McGill competitive a lot quicker than what was our game plan at that time.”
Three Olympic gold medals, five World Championship gold medals and two Clarkson Cup titles later, St-Pierre marvels at the journey that got her to hockey’s most prestigious individual honor. It’s really unfathomable that the player who established herself as the best goalie in the world couldn’t even make the Quebec provincial team or get a scholarship from a U.S. university. Her father, Andre, a police officer with Surete du Quebec, had played minor hockey alongside Marcel Dionne and Yvon Lambert in Drummondville, Que., and was drafted in the fourth round by the New York Rangers in 1970. It wasn’t that St-Pierre didn’t want to play girls’ hockey, it’s that it wasn’t available to her in her town. By the time she was offered a spot at McGill to play for the Martlets, she considered turning it down because she had been so turned off by her experience in the women’s game.
“A few times I got asked to try out for Team Quebec and switch to women’s hockey, but for three or four years in a row, they told me I was not good enough,” St-Pierre said. “Once you don’t make Team Quebec, the opportunities are a little less. One day after my junior boys’ game, Dan Madden came to recruit me. I don’t know how he heard about me. I was about to retire. It was February and the year was almost over and I was just going to play garage league. It was my chance and I took it.”
As crazy as it might sound, Madden said St-Pierre “was kind of hidden in boys’ hockey.” He recalled a bus trip one season when St-Pierre turned to him and told him that going to McGill was the best decision she ever made. Suffice to say it turned out very, very well for both the player and the school. “We all have a different path to get to the top,” St-Pierre said. “Sometimes you only need one person to believe in you and for me it was (former Canadian Olympic coach) Daniele Sauvageau. She was part of the Hockey Quebec process, too, but what she told me was that I was not ready. The tryouts were usually three-day tryouts and coming from boys’ hockey, it was hard for a goalie to adjust and they could not see my potential. But it made me stronger.”
St-Pierre hasn’t played since 2013 and has settled into life in Chateauguay with her husband and two children, where there is still no girls’ league. She has done some coaching and remains in touch with the women’s game and is working to help create more opportunities for girls to play in her home province. Despite being the second-biggest province in Canada with a population of 8.6 million, Quebec has only about 6,000 girls’ players registered, which is a pittance compared to the more than 50,000 who play in Ontario and far fewer than play in British Columbia and Alberta.
“(Former NHL goalie) Jocelyn Thibault is now the general manager of Hockey Quebec, so I think things are about to change in Quebec,” St-Pierre said. “We want to get more girls in the game.”