As a veteran Canadian hockey player, Dr. Peggy Assink’s goal is to grow the sport globally and ensure women have the opportunity to play the game they love.
Growing up, Dr. Peggy Assink was very athletic. It was not yet recognized that she was born with spina bifida – a birth defect of the spine – so she had a perfectly capable body and played a variety of sports.
That’s why when she suffered complications from her condition and was paralyzed from the waist down at age 11, she felt like she lost a little bit of her identity.
“It was really hard to be honest with you, because I think I defined myself as an athlete,” says Asink, 38. “My parents really wanted to find a way to get me involved in sports, even though I had ongoing medical issues and issues with paralysis below my waist.”
A recreational therapist recommended I try one of the only adaptive sports near Peterborough, Ontario, at the time: hockey. Assinck and her family traveled 90 minutes away from home to try the sport for the first time. Although it wasn’t necessarily a first love in skating, she was thrilled to meet other kids just like her.
“Because I grew up in a remote community, I never met anyone else in a wheelchair or anyone else using adaptive equipment,” she says. “It was great just meeting other disabled kids.”
Over time, her passion for parahockey grew and blossomed. Now, Assink is one of the veteran players on Canada’s women’s national hockey team, and her goal is to ensure other women and girls around the world have the opportunity to experience the sport she has dedicated her life to.
Ensuring positive experiences for women
One thing Assinck emphasizes is ensuring positive experiences for women when they try out hockey for the first time. While the women’s team holds its optional camp in Yellowknife, northwest Australia, from April 25-30, a grant from the Canadian Hockey Foundation will help provide tryout opportunities and grassroots sessions in the community.
“I want to make sure that more kids and more people with new infections have a good first contact experience,” Assink says. “I think the Canadian Hockey Foundation grant really helps the women’s hockey team do that in remote communities [and] To help support female-specific programs.
“We believe as an organization that girls grow when they play hockey, and hockey grows when girls play,” says Alexandra Wise with Hockey Canada.
“Working with an organization like Para Hockey Canada is something that allows us to align our missions and continue to develop the game from a grassroots level, but also at a higher level,” adds Wise.
It is no coincidence that wherever Assink went in her life, women’s hockey developed thanks to her guidance and support. Motivated by her desire to learn more about spina bifida, she enrolled at Brock University to pursue her studies in neuroscience. When she completed college, she played for the Niagara Thunderbirds and volunteered with the Brock Niagara Penguins, an athletic program for youth and young adults with physical disabilities.
After graduating in 2008, Asink began her master’s degree and completed her doctorate in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. She was looking to continue training as an elite hockey player, and looked for a club team to join in her new home province.
“Having grown up in southern Ontario, where ice hockey was everywhere, I was quite surprised by how little ice hockey existed in British Columbia as a whole,” she says.
Once she joined a team based out of Surrey managed by SportAbility, Assinck helped create new hockey programs in Vancouver and Victoria, and helped create opportunities across the province to try out the sport. From there, she helped organize a provincial team with support from BC Hockey.
Travel across the pond
A postdoctoral fellowship took Assinck abroad in 2017 to the University of Edinburgh and the University of Cambridge. There were few club programs in Great Britain when she moved, and the Canadian soon joined her closest team – Manchester Mayhem – to continue training.
“I’ve been involved as an athlete on this club team for a while, but I think it became pretty clear that I had a lot of hockey experience, and about a year into playing here I was asked to join as an assistant. [Great Britain’s] “The Para men’s ice hockey team,” she says.
Assinck traveled with Team Great Britain to the IPC World Para Hockey Championship, B Pool, in 2019 in Germany.
“I think I was probably the only athlete who was also a coach, and I was probably the only woman who was also a coach,” she says. “It was a really great opportunity to be on the bench and to help support the men’s program in what they were doing and in their goals.”
With coaching added to her CV, a new opportunity arose in 2021: the coaches of the Great Britain men’s Paralympic hockey team were contacted by the International Paralympic Committee to ask if they would field a women’s team.
“I suddenly had the opportunity to start a team in another country… and this seemed like the right place for me,” says Asink.
Assinck quickly got to work. It put out a call for athletes with lower-body disabilities living in Great Britain, interviewed potential players and selected 27 athletes – most of whom had never played hockey before – to participate in the new programme.
Although Asink was leading the mission overseas, she continued to receive support from Team Canada staff back home. One difficulty she faced was the lack of time on the ice, which meant she was often teaching a group of athletes how to play hockey without being on the ice.
“She spends time in the classroom teaching them the basics of hockey,” says Tara Chisholm, head coach of the Canadian women’s national hockey team. “She’s renting out gymnasiums so they can play floor hockey and learn about the systems that way. She’s literally putting together everything she can to teach these athletes how to be hockey players in a space that’s not really meant for hockey players to thrive.”
Despite limited resources and the challenges of creating a new team during the COVID-19 pandemic, the newly formed Great Britain Women’s National Team is ready to compete in its first international event, the IPC Women’s World Challenge, this fall.
“I honestly don’t know how she does everything she does,” Chisholm says. “I am so grateful for all the work she did that went unnoticed and that essentially helped grow women’s para hockey to where it is now.”
Growing the game in Canada and abroad
When she created the team, Assinck compiled a document on how to launch the program with the aim of sharing it with other countries so they could replicate the processes.
“That’s the big goal right now, not only to grow the game within our borders in Canada, but then to make sure that other girls and women with disabilities around the world have the opportunity to play hockey,” Chisholm says.
“In order to participate in the Paralympics, we need more countries to create teams,” Asink adds. “We just want to make sure they have a great first experience and that we are creating a sustainable program that can continue for many years.”
I’m a true believer that if I don’t participate in it [para hockey] “When I was young, when I was going through the struggles that I went through, I wouldn’t have been the person I am today,” Assink says.
Although it’s a bit strange to be playing against the team she created in the competition, Assinck had the full support of her fellow Brits to return to Canada and prepare for the Women’s World Challenge. Despite everything she has done to grow the sport, she still prioritizes being the best athlete ever and trains hard to have the honor of wearing a maple leaf on her chest.
She hopes people will see her as someone who has dedicated much of her life and financial resources to becoming an elite athlete, and someone who has gone above and beyond to support women and hockey in Canada and around the world. It’s the least she could do for a sport that changed her life.
“I’m a true believer that if I hadn’t been in it [para hockey] “When I was younger, when I was going through the struggles that I had, I wouldn’t have been the person I am today.” “I wouldn’t have the confidence to speak in front of thousands of people about neuroscience or even the confidence to be able to jump from team to team in some of my coaching roles.” .
“I hope I can look back and feel that I did everything I could to make sure that people with disabilities, especially women with disabilities, learn about this sport that means so much to me and can mean so much to them.”
