How two Schmucks became part of the best-ever women's hockey team

The following True Story was submitted by Poor Len Canayen, who, being our National Sports Editor, is disqualified from the competition. 

Some say it all began as a dare. In the first summer of the Great Depression, two girls -- 17-year-old Hilda Ranscombe and her younger sister Nellie -- from the western Ontario town of Preston, were looking for a way to keep together their local softball team, after a very successful season. A team member suggested the formation of a women's hockey team. When an onlooker scoffed at the idea and challenged them to follow through, that's just what they did!

So was born, in 1930, the Preston Rivulettes, a women's hockey team whose name was a feminized version of the term for a small river. No one could have dreamed how successful the team would become. 

The Rivulettes entered a league composed of teams from Toronto, Kitchener, Stratford, London, Hamilton, Guelph and Port Dover. They quickly rose to the top of the league, miles ahead of the opposition.

The players on that first team were Nellie Ranscombe in goal, Marg Gabbitass, Myrtle Parr, Toddy Webb, Pat Marriott and Helen Sault. The offensive stars were Hilda Ranscombe, and Marm and Helen, the Schmuck sisters. Really.

The success of the Preston Rivulettes was, and remains, unparalleled in the annals of Canadian sports history. The team played an estimated 350 games between 1930 and 1940, tying three and losing only two. In that ten-year span the Rivulettes were ten times the winners of the Bobby Rosenfeld Trophy that was presented each year to the champions of Ontario. 

They also won, all of the six times they competed for it, the Eastern Canadian championship and the Elmer Doust Cup that went with it. But the team's crowning achievement was their 1933 capture of the trophy donated by Roberte de Neuflize Ponsonby (better known as Lady Bessborough, wife of the then Governor-General), given to the best women's hockey team in all of Canada.

Poor Len adds that since Canada dominates women's hockey even now -- much more so than men's hockey -- it can truly be said that the Preston Rivulettes rank as the Best. Women's. Hockey. Team. Ever!

Further reading: This True Story was excerpted from the History of the Preston Rivulettes on the team's official website. Poor Len was inspired to research it after reading Chapter 16 of It's Our Game: Celebrating 100 Years of Hockey Canada, by Michael McKinley (Viking 2014). If you love hockey and are tired of reading about the National Hockey League (G. Buttman, Prop.), you'll love this book!