Amanda Fontaine began playing hockey when she was 5 years old.
Her parents were working at Northfield Mount Hermon School and all of the NMH employees’ kids played together.
When she first started playing in the Franklin County Hockey Association, she skated out on the ice because the team already had a goalie in Derek Pratt — the son of Tom Pratt, former NMH athletic director and hockey coach. Derek Pratt eventually decided he didn’t want to play goalie anymore, however, and Fontaine decided to give it a try.
“I just said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’” Fontaine said with a laugh.
The move worked out for both players.
Pratt is now a defenseman and captain on the UConn men’s hockey team where he is entering his junior year, while Fontaine went on to play Division I hockey at Sacred Heart and was recently drafted by the Boston Blades to play in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League as a professional.
The CWHL, which began in 2007, is a five-team women’s professional hockey league, the largest in North America. The Blades are the only team in the U.S., as the other four are based in Canada — Montreal, Quebec, Toronto and Brampton, Ontario, and Calgary, Alberta.
The league is unable to pay players a salary, but is looking to do so in coming years. Instead, the league pays for equipment and uniforms, as well as travel and ice time. Games take place once, sometimes twice a week (on the weekends) and teams hold practices twice a week. The Blades play their home games at the New England Sports Center in Marlborough.
Playing professional hockey has been a dream of Fontaine’s since she was a young child, attending Northfield Elementary School and Pioneer Valley Regional School. But like most children’s dreams, she began to doubt the possibility of making that a reality as she grew up, even as she moved on to attend NMH, where she successfully led her school’s girls’ team.
Her play at NMH helped land her at Sacred Heart University, a Division I hockey program. Fontaine had multiple offers but said Sacred Heart was close enough to home but also far enough away, and it also had her major, which was exercise science. She also picked up an academic scholarhip to attend the school.
Fontaine played in nine games combined in her first two years with the program, but saw her playing time increase during her junior and senior seasons. During her junior year, she owned a 4-11-3 record with a 4.16 goals againt average and an .889 save percentage, but those numbers improved drastically last winter with her goals against dropping all the day down to 1.82, and her save percentage rising to an incredible .936. Her career save percentage of .917 is not too shabby.
Even with her glowing numbers during her senior campaign, Fontaine still saw the end in sight for her career. Her final collegiate game was a 3-0 shutout victory over Neumann, and the week after Sacred Heart was ousted from the New England Hockey Conference playoffs, this time without Fontaine between the pipes, but rather her teammate Nicole Magee, who she split time with this season. After the game, Fontaine took to Instagram where she posted a picture and said, “Yep, hanging up the skates, retired now.”
Little did she know at the time but within a month she would be taking a phone call from Krista Patronick, the general manager of the Boston Blades, who was gauging Fontaine’s interest in playing for the team.
“She pretty much described what the Blades were about, what they could offer me and what I could offer them,” Fontaine said.
Patronick also offered Fontaine the opportunity to play in the Beantown Classic in July, which she did with some of the current players on the team. She then decided to enter the CWHL draft and on Aug. 21 she was selected in the 13th round by the Blades.
“It’s kind of surreal, I really don’t think it has sunk in yet,” Fontaine said. “I don’t think it really will until I head to tryouts.”
Her first tryout with the Blades takes place today and she will have two more next week. The Blades recently traded their starting goalie, so the position is wide open, although the team did draft two goalies this year (including Fontaine), and signed three others as undrafted free agents.
And so Fontaine will make the trip east from her current home in South Hadley three times to try out. If she makes the team, she will have to continue working other jobs, since her professional hockey career does not come with a salary as of yet. She would like to get into coaching, and has some job possibilities, but nothing is finalized as of yet.
Fontaine has been working at The Ledges Golf Club in South Hadley as the course’s assistant superintendent for the past five years. Like many other professional hockey players, Fontaine has a passion for golf and is also very good at the sport.
“When I was in middle school at Pioneer, I played for the high school team as a seventh- grade girl and I played No. 3 on the team,” she said. “I play just about every day.”
The first exhibition game for the CWHL is Oct. 1 and the season stretches all the way into March.
If all goes well for Fontaine, she will be playing for the Blades during that time. Not bad for someone who’s decision to don the pads all those years ago came on a whim, but could end with her playing professionally.
Cecelia Berger will be one of the many officials you will see out on the high school and junior high school soccer fields this fall and she comes into the season with some extra hardware from the summer soccer season.
Berger became the first-ever woman to win the Dennis LaVersa Referee of the Tournament Award at the Massachusetts Tournament of Champions, which is an end-of-season tournament for all town-based leagues that is held in June in Lancaster and is the largest youth tournament in the state. The tournament, which features numerous age groups and divisions for both boys and girls, uses over 400 officials over the weekend, and of those, 80 are selected to come back on Sunday to work the championship games.
Berger officiates for a number of the leagues that play in the tournament, including the Pioneer Valley Junior Soccer League, Massachusetts Premiere League and New England Premiereship. She has been chosen to officiate in the MTOC for the past four years, and each year she has been invited back for Sunday.
It is not known exactly how long the award has been handed out, but it is named after LaVersa, a long time referee in the state.
Berger lives in Belchertown but works at Artspace Community Art Center in Greenfield, where she has been for 17 years. Berger began working at the art center as a teacher in 2000, and in 2008 she started the Strings for Kids program, which offers free violin and cello lessons for kids in grades 3 through 12. The lessons take place for one hour, once a week at public schools in Greenfield for 30 weeks. Berger also became executive director at Artspace in November 2015.
She has been officiating soccer for eight years, working at various levels in the spring, summer and fall. Her first high school game of the season will be Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. at Greenfield Community College where she will officiate a Four Rivers Charter School game.
Congrats on an award for someone who does a job that is rarely recognized.
Jason Butynski is a Greenfield native and Recorder sportswriter. His email address is jbutynski@recorder.com. Like him on Facebook and leave your feedback at www.facebook.com/jaybutynski.