Why EmpowerHer Exists

Two years ago, alongside an incredible team, I helped build a hockey camp for girls called EmpowerHer.

The story of why is not particularly dramatic. The short version is that I had spent enough time in the hockey world as a female player and then a female coach to notice what was missing in most of the camps available for young female athletes.

What was missing was integration.

Most camps treat development as a series of separate components. Skill on the ice. Strength in the weight room. Maybe a guest speaker on a Saturday night who talks about mindset for forty five minutes and then disappears. The athletes leave with a notebook full of disconnected ideas and no real framework for how it all fits together.

I had also noticed something subtler that took me longer to name.

The female athletes I worked with were often waiting for permission. Permission to take the shot. Permission to speak up in the locker room. Permission to ask for what they needed from a coach. Permission to be the best player on the ice without apologizing for it.

No one was teaching them that the permission was never required.

EmpowerHer was built to address both gaps.

The mental side of the game is woven through every session, not delivered as a guest appearance. The same coaches who run the on-ice work are in the conversations about pressure, identity, and self-advocacy. The athletes do not have to translate between the physical and mental parts of their development, because we never separated them.

And every staff member, from the on-ice coaches to the strength staff to the mentors to the mental performance team, is a woman who has walked some version of the path the athletes are walking.

That part matters more than I can fully explain.

You cannot ask a young female athlete to imagine a path forward if no one she trusts has walked one. You can talk to her about confidence and resilience and identity, and those words can be useful. But until she sits across from a woman who has done it, the words stay theoretical. Once she sees it modeled, it becomes possible.

That is what EmpowerHer is built on.

Three days every summer where the athletes are surrounded by women who have already done what they are dreaming about doing. Three days where the mental and the physical parts of development are not pretending to be separate. Three days where these young athletes get to drop the armor and just be themselves.

I have watched athletes come in on day one barely making eye contact and leave on day three with a presence that completely changes the trajectory of their season.

It is the work I am most proud of in my career.

If you are reading this and you have a young female hockey player in your life, the camp registration and information are on our website. We sell out every year, but the conversation is always worth starting.

And if you are reading this and you are involved in any sport that develops female athletes, the bigger invitation is to think about what your version of integration could look like. Where are the gaps in your program? Who are the women in your athletes' development? How seamlessly is the mental side woven into everything else you do, or how often does it get treated as the side dish?

The programs that develop female athletes most effectively are the programs that build this in on purpose.

It starts with a decision.

That is where it always starts.