'Giving young girls the opportunity to dream': Canadian Olympian finds gold in street hockey

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Heartbroken from Team Canada’s loss to the U.S. at the 2018 Olympics in South Korea, Laura Stacey found solace in a pickup game of street hockey. And then she found purpose.

That pickup game sparked an annual road hockey tournament fundraiser that not incidentally celebrates the growing success of professional women’s hockey.

“I think giving young girls that opportunity to dream that opportunity, to see what they can become is pretty special,” said Stacey, the great-granddaughter of hockey Hall of Famer King Clancy. She joined the Montréal Victoire of the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) in 2024. (She also brought home gold with Team Canada in Beijing.)

On July 5, Stacey held her sixth annual road hockey tournament in Toronto, and raised over $60,000 for Canadian charities encouraging youth sport and fitness.  Another event is scheduled to be held in Montreal on Aug. 23. She spoke to the National Post:

Can you tell me more about the Toronto event?

No rain at all. Blue skies. It was literally a perfect day. We had 20 teams, over 140 players playing. We had 22 pros and some special guests. Kate Beirness did our whole introduction, which was absolutely amazing.

Basically, how it worked is once the kids in the community and all the players showed up, they threw their sticks in the middle and all the pros were given a team. We tossed the sticks around early in the morning, made the teams and all the different players got to play with different people.

There was a little 10-year-old French girl who came up to me so nervous in the morning that she wanted to play with her friends and they were split up because their sticks were thrown different ways. And by the end of the day, she came up to me and her mom said, “This was the most amazing thing.”

By the end of the day, the little girl – who was so shy that she wasn’t gonna be able to talk to anybody — was high-fiving and hugging and saying goodbye to her new teammates. So, pretty cool to hear. It was by far our biggest one yet. I have no idea how many people showed up, but it was packed until the very end. We ended up raising over $60,000. So it’s been amazing to be honest with you.

What does the money go to?

It’s our mission as a foundation, we’ve just become a foundation this year — we’re waiting for our CRA number to come in the next little bit as well, because we wanna become a registered charity as well. Because we are now a foundation, we actually partnered with four different charities this year: KidSport Ontario, Fitspirit-Fillactive, a small chapter in Montreal for Jumpstart, and then Laureus (Sport for Good Foundation). Those are the four charities we partnered with and it’s all kind of around our mission of helping kids and individuals find their passion in sport or just live a healthy, active lifestyle.

What has life been like since the Olympics? What drew you to work with young kids?

It all started after 2018. It was my first Olympics, and we had lost. We came home with a silver, and honestly, I was pretty lost. I had no idea what to do. I felt like it was the pinnacle of my life. Like I had been to the Olympics, but I was also so disappointed that we had lost. So I was kind like, what do I do now? What’s next?

In that short kind of period where I didn’t know what to do, my sister and her husband were in town in Toronto and the two of them and my parents and myself kind of just went outside on our birthday one day and we were shooting the puck on one of the nets that we had. Eventually, a bunch of people in our neighbourhood kind of came out, and were like, “Hey, can I play, too?” and it turned into this really fun road hockey game. My sister’s husband looked at me and he said, “Laura, why don’t you do this? Why don’t we run a charity road hockey tournament right here in this neighbourhood?”

And I was like, “Oh, OK. Let’s see how it goes.” I basically just messaged all my teammates from 2018 and my Markham Thunder teammates at the time, and yeah, a couple other pro athlete friends that I was training with. I was like, “Let’s just see if we can pull this off.” If worst comes to worst, we just have a fun day with my friends and family, and my neighbourhood playing outside.

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It ended up blowing up. We ended up raising money, which we thought we were just gonna be able to cover our costs but we ended up raising, I think, $5,000 our first year, just out of the blue kind of.

Then we were like, “OK, well now, now we need to figure out what to do with these funds now that we’ve raised them.” So the first year we contacted two underprivileged schools and we gave sports equipment and sports supplies to the schools; those two schools that couldn’t really afford the supplies. I went there for half a day to the schools and we had a little activity day and got to use the new equipment all together and play sports. It was amazing.

I think from then on it was like, “Wow, this can have so much more of an impact than I even know.” Ever since that moment, ever since that kind of initial spark of the tournament, it’s just been something I’m very proud of, something that I want to keep pushing further and further and that’s exactly what it’s done.

Can you say more about the mission of promoting women’s sports?

I think, honestly, my foundation’s growth and the fact that it’s become what it is is a huge part due to women’s sports thriving in Canada. People, kids, young girls, are having the opportunity to see us play on a consistent basis with the PWHL and this league that we get to play in is completely taking off. Now all the fans are wanting to come to my event in Toronto and Montreal, and honestly, it is due, in large part, to the NWSL (National Women’s Soccer League), to the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball League), who’ve kind of pushed those boundaries before.

When we arrived as female hockey players, we had that basis to push for, to ask for more. To see what Caitlin Clark has done in terms of ticket sales, I think, for women’s sports in general, it’s just gonna continue to move the needle forward because people are realizing that when it is available, when you can see it, people fall in love with it.

I think giving young girls that opportunity to dream that opportunity, to see what they can become is pretty special. Even at my tournament, to have the parents come up to me and say, “My daughter has always wanted to be an Olympian, but now she also wants to play in the PWHL. She wants to be like you guys.” It’s pretty amazing to see, and it’s just opening our eyes to how big of an impact that really is.

This conversation was edited lightly for length and clarity.

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