What follows is an excerpt from the anthology Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and the Pursuit of Credibility in the Emerald City (University of Arkansas Press, 2021). The full chapter that I contributed focuses on Seattle’s oft-forgotten hockey history, with a special emphasis on the city’s place in women’s hockey history.
In 1921, the PCHA started a women’s hockey team in each city that they had an extant hockey fan base. Seattle, of course, qualified as a market for the expansion team given the enthusiasm surrounding the Metropolitans. The PCHA decided that they would have the women’s teams compete against one another in a tournament played during intermissions of the men’s game. Thus, the Vancouver Amazons, the Victoria Kewpies, and the Seattle Vamps came to play in what might be considered the first women’s hockey league, though women’s hockey tournaments had taken place previously. While the Seattle Vamps do not bear the same kind of storied history that the Metropolitans do, with only five games on record, their presence as a women’s hockey team at such an early point in hockey’s history is worth noting. Unfortunately, records on the women’s team are hard to track down. The season, such as it was, ended with three losses, a tie, and no wins, putting them in last place. The only recorded victory for the Seattle Vamps was in an exhibition match against the women’s hockey club at the University of British Columbia, in which star forward Jerry Reed scored three goals and goaltender Mildren Terran kept all shots she faced at bay for a final score of 3-0.
What scant records we do have of the Seattle Vamps are somewhat obscured by the fact that during their trip to Vancouver and Victoria, the Vancouver Sun repeatedly referred to the team as the “Seattle Sweeties,” though the reasons for this are lost to time. Was it intended as a denigration of the team, or of the women’s sport in general, or was it simply a misidentification on the part of the reporter assigned to cover the games? While there can be a strong case made for the first two possibilities, the third seems like a stretch – after all, this reporter attended at a minimum three games: in Vancouver against the Amazons, in Victoria against the Kewpies, and against the University of British Columbia. It’s also possible that the same reporter had attended the games in Seattle, though these would come later. Even in the Vamps’ victory against the University of British Columbia, the reporter referred to the Seattle team as the Sweeties. Given this repetition, it is far more likely that the name was intended to belittle the Seattle team or women’s hockey more generally than a simple error on the part of the reporter.
Seattle’s press covered these games very lightly, where they were covered at all. While there was coverage for the Seattle Vamps’ first game, a loss against the Vancouver Amazons, no further coverage was offered for the ladies’ team until the series came to Seattle. This meant that the Vamps’ sole victory at the University of British Columbia was not covered by local press.
Whether it was because women’s hockey was treated as a novelty that failed to catch on or simply a symptom of the financial ailments of the PCHA, official support for the women’s teams folded after their sole season. If the Seattle Vamps continued play beyond 1921, they did so as an independent entity, and what little coverage they got in the papers vanished without even a notice that the team was folding.
Sadly, the deadline for this piece was well before the Seattle Kraken franchise was made official, so my chapter focuses on possibilities rather than the concrete realities of the forthcoming 32nd NHL team when talking about the future of hockey in Seattle. I am currently working on a companion piece updating my chapter with a focus on what our new team is doing to promote diversity in the hockey community.
