Szabados, who arrived late Wednesday night from her hometown, Edmonton, Alberta, stepped up to the microphone wearing an oversize No. 40 jersey with sleeves that hung below her wrists and covered her wedding ring.
“Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me,” said Szabados, who married Alex Ritchie, a former goalie, in 2012.
She acknowledged experiencing some culture shock, not from finding herself in America’s South, but in dealing with her sudden celebrity.
“I wish it was just go out there and skate and nobody notices me,” she said.
On Thursday, the Pensacola players lingered outside the entrance to their locker room, their gazes fixed on Szabados as she stopped pucks at the other end of the ice. Bechard said other teams would surely be twice as motivated to score on her for reasons having to do with the male ego. He also said they would not be shy about crashing the net — and that if he were still playing, he would probably do likewise.
“I’m sure I’ll get run into quite a bit because that’s part of the men’s game,” Szabados said.
Johnson, who was seated a few feet away, said in a stage whisper, “Expect more.”
Circumstances have steered Szabados straight into the crossfire of the gender wars. There is no professional hockey league for women that pays a livable wage, so the best female players have limited options if they want to continue playing after college. They can squeeze in training around a job, train full time, and depend on outside financial assistance or find employment with a team in a men’s pro league like Szabados and the Finnish goaltender Noora Raty, who signed with a second-tier team in Finland.
Szabados will make her pro debut one and a half miles from a Georgia Historical Commission marker recognizing the site of the “last land battle in the war of 1861-65.” The juxtaposition of that reference to the Civil War with the new world that Szabados is ushering in is not as jarring as it seems on the surface, Bechard said.