Growing up in New England, Kelly Dyer was a product of the Bobby Orr explosion. On the streets in front of her house, children from the neighborhood imitated their hero. Dyer put together a set of goalie pads from trash she found in dumpsters, sewing materials, and shoe glue. Soon, Massachusetts began to build more arenas, and it was at one of these rinks that Dyer stepped onto the ice for the first time.
“I started out as a figure skater because that was the only way girls could get on the ice at the time,” Dyer recalls. “But my brother David, who is two years older, was a hockey player, so I got off the figure skating rink and ran to the hockey field to see. I always wanted to play hockey and I begged for two years until my father found Assabet in Concord, a neighboring town. My first day skating with Assabet was in my brother’s figure skating gear.’
It didn’t take long for Dyer to soar in Assabeta, aided by a high school program that included future NHL players Bob Sweeney and Jeff Norton. Her goalie partner at school was future hockey hall of famer Tom Barrasso. She went on to play four years of NCAA hockey at Northeastern, graduating just in time to try out for the national team before the inaugural World Championships in 1990. When tryouts were held at Northeastern, Dyer didn’t even need to move equipment from her booth. She just changed her jersey color when she was named to Team USA.
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Dressing for Team USA in the gold medal game changed her life forever. “It was one of the biggest events of my life, probably second only to having my baby,” says Dyer. “It was amazing to see and feel the energy in the arena for a women’s hockey game.”
When Dyer returned home from her first World Championships in Ottawa, she saw a huge gap in the women’s game that often left women’s bodies unprotected. Even the top players in the world were forced to use equipment designed for men. There was no other alternative.
Dyer also acknowledged that women were an afterthought in the hockey equipment industry. Now she saw an opportunity. “I would see players — Cammi Granato is a perfect example — I think she played at 5-foot-7 and, say, 130 pounds. So she would have to wear medium men’s pants for the pad to reach her shin guards. But then she would have to take her belt and tighten it tightly because she was thin. So now his kidneys are in front of his stomach,” he explains. “Players who bent over to tie their skates had to unzip their pants again so the hard plastic kidneys would catch fire and then put them back on. So the players wore this extra bulk where they needed dynamic movement and didn’t have any protection on the kidneys. I thought, this is ridiculous.
Dyer had one mission in mind: to find a company willing to manufacture canes and protective gear specifically made for women. “Coming from USA Hockey, we only had hockey pants that men wore. They were heavy and not good for performance or protection. So it became my motto, performance and protection. Protection because our gear kept the padding where the players needed it, and performance because it fit and didn’t shift.
“I had a lot of attention during the 1990 World Cup. I just came home and I was so pumped and full of energy and visions of a thousand ways women’s sport could go,” she explains. “I just picked up the phone and called every single person I could think of and called every single hockey manufacturer. I had a long conversation with Bauer and they seemed to support me, but then they just couldn’t devote the time or production to it.”
But one company said yes. And that changed the game forever.
“I ended up with Louisville Hockey because they were Canadian, so there was less time trying out new equipment while we were tweaking it,” she explains. “They were small enough to be flexible, and they were loyal to me, so I switched to wearing their product in 1992. As soon as I started working, I really became part of the family.” She would spend the next 17 years working for the company.
In the back of the Team USA bus, Kelly Dyer sketched out ideas, using her teammates as models: Lisa Brown-Miller for size small, Cammi Granato for size medium and Kelly O’Leary for size large. “Everybody kept pulling their pants up and you couldn’t keep them down,” Dyer explains. “Same thing with the shoulder pads. We had kids wearing these massive shoulder pads, so I really saw the need. With gloves, women don’t have depth in their fingers, so all that material takes away from maximizing your strength. Just the thinning of the wedges on the fingers and the subsequent narrowing of them meant that when you went to make a grip, you used the full strength of your hand. Instead of an outstretched arm, you’ve actually maximized your energy transfer through the club. Before, a lot of girls would cut out their palms, but then all this extra material would be swinging on the backs of their hands.’
It was a significant shift for women who had been collecting skates and wearing their brothers’ gear for decades. “The mallets – at first we were doing wood, but then we went with composites. Louisville bought Fontaine so we had wood blades with a fusible composite shaft. We made women’s clubs with a smaller radius, we made gloves, we made shoulder pads with breast protection, and we made pants that were shorter in the torso and longer in the legs.”
“Sports equipment manufacturers have finally realized there’s another gender,” wrote the Chicago Tribune in 1996, as Louisville prepared to announce its groundbreaking women’s hockey lineup. “The industry is quickly realizing that there are millions of women who want to play sports and have the purchasing power,” said Mike May of the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. “They need things to fit into their bodies.” The plan was to fill a growing gap in the market and preview gear before the debut of women’s hockey at the 1998 Olympics — and prepare for the explosion afterward.
In another first for women’s hockey, Dyer began signing endorsement deals for athletes to join her as ambassadors for Wallaceburg. “I didn’t want to make it all about me, so we signed Erin Whitten and made the Whitten goalie stick.” Then I thought we need a Canadian, so I signed Geraldine Heaney.”
“From the moment I first tried the new equipment, I could tell it was different from anything I had used before. It is designed for female proportions. It holds the pads in the right places and provides protection that unisex gear can’t offer,” said Cammi Granato in the Louisville ad. Granato also appeared in an iconic Louisville poster alongside Mark Messier, each wearing the other’s jersey and looking back at the camera, decked out head-to-toe in Louisville hockey gear.
Granato and Heaney, both future Hall of Famers, became the faces of the women’s gear industry, promoting “proportionally designed hockey gear for female athletes.” On their photos, in large yellow letters, was the slogan of the campaign: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”