Ice breakers

A women's hockey puck at the collegiate level typically travels between 70 and 80 miles per hour. At 8:37 on a recent Wednesday morning, Kaitlin "Finny" Finnegan took one to the hip. She winced through her facemask and peeled away from the bulldog drill, a two-on-two activity that looks equal parts elegant choreography and feral improvisation. A moment later, the team captain shook it off and skated back into the action.

"It wouldn't be practice if Finny wasn't throwing herself in front of a puck," smiled Allison Coomey, the head coach of women's ice hockey at the University of Delaware.

A little farther down the rink, from the player's bench, athletic trainer Alex Davisson shook her head. (She's both a rehabber of injuries and keeper of the "graveyard," a pile of broken sticks accumulated through hard shots and harder collisions.)

"I cringe sometimes," she said. "I want to yell, 'Be careful! I just put that player back on the ice!' But they just laugh. They're really tough."

That word - tough - surfaces often around this Division I team. As the inaugural class of women's ice hockey at UD, they've just closed out the final game of a punishing season. On paper, the numbers read exactly as you'd expect from a brand-new roster carrying 17 freshmen: two wins, 31 losses, plenty of growing pains. But the box score misses the more compelling story: a foundation taking shape through grit, conviction and the particular ferocity of women whose place at the table - and at center ice - has never been a given.