Former Canadian women’s hockey team member Carla MacLeod.Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press
Retired Canadian hockey player Carla MacLeod has been flying to Japan from Calgary once a month for nearly a year. What she has found there makes the dizzying sense of jetlag all worth it.
Since winning gold as a defenceman for Canada at the 2006 and 2010 Olympics, MacLeod has become an assistant coach with Japan's women's team. She recently helped them earn Olympic qualification for the first time, garnering the team nationwide attention in Japan.
MacLeod is all too familiar with the criticism about the lack of parity in the women's game between the two North American teams and the rest of the world. But she has been inspired by the Japanese women. They are ranked No. 11 internationally, but MacLeod says her squad won't be satisfied just to be at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. With aggressive preparation planned for Sochi, Japan dreams of making a surprise push onto the podium.
"It didn't take long for me to fall in love with this group and their potential and grow really passionate about it," MacLeod said. "I really believe in what's going on within Japanese women's hockey. Those 20 girls in that room are as dedicated to hockey as the women on Canada's roster, and that's what gets me so excited about the future of women's hockey. We have such negative media attention on the discrepancy between the nations, but many countries are really trying to improve. It's going to take time, but with the right people involved, that gap can be closed."
Japan's women spent most of the past few seasons relegated to the second division of international competition. There are only 1,980 registered female hockey players in Japan, compared to almost 90,000 in Canada. Japan's only female Olympic appearance in the sport came in 1998 when it got a host spot while staging the Nagano Games.
After failing to qualify for the Vancouver Olympics, Japan dedicated itself to improving its women's squad, inspired by the nation's groundswell for women's team sports after Japan's female soccer team won the 2011 women's World Cup. The Japan Ice Hockey Federation brought in MacLeod, enlisted a sports psychologist and began bringing the players together once a month for camps at Japan's national training centre in Tomakomai, the country's one small hockey hotbed, in the northern prefecture of Hokkaido.
The Japanese players, a little smaller in size than their North American counterparts, have shown tremendous skating speed and fitness, but they have lacked strength and confidence.
The Japanese federation called Melody Davidson a few years ago, head coach of Canada's 2006 and 2010 Olympic gold medal-winning teams, to ask for advice in finding someone to help advise Japan. She recommended MacLeod, who had Canadian college coaching experience and a background as captain at the University of Wisconsin, where she once played for 2010 U.S. Olympic coach Mark Johnson.
"We had an opportunity to get a dynamic individual with vast successful playing experience who had been exposed to two of the most successful coaches in North American women's hockey," said Mark Mahon, the Canadian-born head coach of the Japan's men's team, who is in charge of development initiatives for all of its national teams. "In Japanese hockey, you get immediate respect based on your playing past. She came in on a pedestal. She's been even more that what we expected."
MacLeod travels to Japan once a month for the camps, while also holding a second coaching job in Calgary with the Mount Royal College women's team – a 16-hour time difference dividing her two lives. She has joined the two men already coaching the Japanese women, currently communicating on and off-ice through translators.
MacLeod, who was an aggressive defender playing at 5-foot-4 and 133 pounds herself, has helped the Japanese tweak their training regimen. They had exceptional skating speed and endurance, but she thought they needed to hit the weight room more to add explosive strength. She also wanted to teach them the confident mindset of a Canadian player.
"They're fast, and they work hard, which is a terrific combo, but we had to coach them not to hesitate – just go, be more aggressive," MacLeod said. "One of the differences between Japan and the North American teams is that every time those teams go out on the ice, they expect to win. In Japan, they are not accustomed to winning. We worked a lot on confidence."
She shared some of the team-building tactics she experienced with Team Canada. She had them share emotional stories about the people for whom they are playing. She played a rousing game of Flip Cup with them, a drinking game she re-vamped with water to introduce them to the bonding power of down-time laughs among teammates, something that been the glue for close-knit Canadian teams. In turn, MacLeod has taken to the Japanese team traditions – players bowing to their fans after a game and tossing a coach in the air after a big victory.
"We have not experienced a lot of team building before, so the new activities improved our team," said Japanese forward and captain Chiho Osawa in an e-mail. "From the activities, we were able to eliminate the walls between players and we became a very united team."
Japan used four lines of relentless, fast skating to tire out opponents and emerge from the qualifier in Poprad, Slovakia. The test will come in the eight-team Sochi Games, starting out in Pool B with Russia, Sweden and Germany, opposite the one with top-ranked Canada, the United States, Switzerland and Sweden.
"I hugged every one of them afterward, and some were jumping for joy, others broke down in tears on my shoulder," said MacLeod, whose highly ranked Canadian teams never had to go through qualifying. "I had arrogance about me as a player and never gave these developing teams credit for what they were doing to improve. These women are realizing dreams just like we were. But they had such a different journey from what I had been used to in Canada."
All of their qualifying games were televised live across Japan, and they were mobbed by media at the airport when they returned to Japan. They plan to keep up frequent camps and plan trips to either Europe or North America in preparing for the Games.
"The Olympics are absolutely huge in Japan," said MacLeod, who said she would welcome the chance to stay on with the Japanese federation for five or 10 years. "If we could show well at the Olympics, just imagine how it could grow the sport in Japan."