[NOTE: I am pleased to share with our goalie audience the following article from Zulia Mitchell, a goalie I met this summer at camp. Zulia, who is from Hong Kong, attends the Taft School. She will contribute to our site on a regular basis. Enjoy! - Joe Bertagna]

Hello, America! And hello fellow ice hockey goalies!

My name is Zulia, Zulia (yes, Julia with a ‘Z’) Hung Mitchell, I am a 16 year old Caucasian/Asian (American/Canadian/Chinese/Portuguese) female left handed ice hockey goalie. I also have a Chinese name Miáo Shì Níng, pronounced as it is spelt which means ‘peace to the world’ because I entered the world at Christmas time. I was born in Hong Kong, China (yes, we have ice hockey rinks, six in fact, all in shopping centers, and yes, we play ice hockey all year round!) of a Caucasian American/Canadian father (who has never played ice hockey and cannot skate either) and a Chinese mother from a Portuguese colony (who also cannot skate, and does not know anything at all about the ice hockey game other than it is too cold in the rinks for her to sit and watch)!

I have been playing goalie in the ice hockey game for some seven years now. My ice hockey journey has taken me from Canada, where I first started to learn to play at age eight, to Hong Kong in China, and now to the United States.

Over the 2009 summer, I travelled through several States in New England and then went to Alberta in Canada to attend several goalie clinics, some for only girls, and some with boys.

At one of these clinics, I had the privilege and honor to train with and coach for Joseph Bertagna, a great ice hockey goalie supporter and coach for the last thirty years who has influenced many, many young goalies. Joe has asked me to write this column on his web site to give you young ice hockey goalies and players an insight into the world of a young teenage girl struggling to identify herself in the sport she passionately loves.

It is my intention to give you a peek into my past adventures to establish myself as an ice hockey goalie, and my trials over these next couple of years to gain entry into university as an ice hockey goalie on a women’s Division I or III ice hockey team.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself.

I was born in Hong Kong, China, where I first started to ice skate at age four on a public ice skating rink in a shopping mall, and then played ice hockey for the first time at age six with my older brother at the YMCA. I then went off to school in Toronto, Ontario, Canada where for the first time ever I played goalie with a boys’ team at my brother’s high school, Upper Canada College. I also played Bantam with the Leaside Ice Hockey Association, a great girls’ ice hockey club. The most important person at that stage in my early goalie career was Rick Wilson, a former NHL goalie and coach who taught me the sound principles of basic techniques and mechanical movements which are the fundamentals to my playing style, and which have remained with me ever since. I am most thankful to Rick for his rigorous, repetitive and deliberate training. During this time I attended clinics at the Canadian Hockey Academy and the World Hockey Academy, both in Ontario, Canada.

After three years, my family returned to Hong Kong, where I joined the Women’s Ice Hockey Organization (WIHO) and played on a mixed men’s and women’s team. I got my feet wet at a very early age with fast playing and hard shots. I also joined the Typhoons Ice Hockey Club with whom I played on a boys’ only Midget Team in the Men’s Senior League. We were quite good, and ‘took it to the men,’ winning our division for the last two years. In the same league, I also played on a men’s only team. And, I was also playing in a three-on-three league with adult men. Now that was tough, because I saw up to forty to fifty really hard shots over an hour long session from some great former premier Canadian, American and European ice hockey players. I still have a dent on my face mask grill where a really fast, and hard hitting puck left its indelible mark forever.

I also started coaching young, new ice hockey goalies (some forty or so aged eight all the way up to fourteen years) for the Typhoons, and with the Hong Kong Ice Hockey Academy, established by Thomas Wu who had hired Barry Beck, the former captain of the NHL New York Rangers. So I got to rub shoulders with (and learn some life skills from) a really great player. Actually Barry looks tougher than he really is, and he loves teaching the little kids, although none of them understand him as he can’t speak Cantonese, and they can’t understand English, but somehow because of Barry’s wonderful personality, it works! I will always remember him telling me “It is not what you do when people are watching, rather it is what you do when no one is watching.”

During the 2008 summer, I got serious and went off to the Okanagan Ice Hockey School in British Columbia, Canada where I trained for three two hour sessions, three times a day nonstop for seven days a week for four weeks. It was a killer, really intense, but well worth it. I loved it, and want to go back some day.

During this past year, I also helped to establish Hong Kong’s first women’s only ice hockey league of some forty or so females, aged from fourteen all the way up to forty five years. I played with Kirsten Rendell who was once a goalie on Digit Murphy’s Brown University Division I ice hockey team. My team won the championships, and I was named best goalie. It is our intention to someday enter a Hong Kong women’s representative ice hockey team into an International Hockey Federation (IHF) world tournament.

But it was at Christmas 2008 that things really started to heat up, and the ice started to melt! I told my parents I wanted to play ice hockey at university in the United States. We also talked about university in England where there is a women’s league in London, and Canadian universities which also have a long and successful history of women’s ice hockey. But I wanted to go to the United States, so we started a very long and arduous process investigating American universities, the NCAA, women’s Divisions I and III leagues, the application and qualification process, and even PG years at school in the United States. It was difficult, to say the least, especially from Hong Kong. I eventually came up with the crazy idea of attending a prep boarding school and repeating Grade 11, and then completing Grade 12, so I could prepare myself over two years for playing goalie on a university Division I or III women’s ice hockey team. Wow!

And so it went with this past 2009 summer attending clinics. I practiced with Digit Murphy in Chicago, Illinois, Vincent Riendeau at the North American Hockey Academy (NAHA) in Stowe, Vermont, Joe Bertagna in Massachusetts, and Jamie McCaig, the China National Olympic 2010 women’s ice hockey team’s goalie coach in Alberta, Canada. It was quite a summer!

During this six week period, I also visited six universities and six prep schools including Middlesex, St. Mark’s, Loomis-Chaffie, St. George’s, Lawrenceville, Taft and Culver. They are all really great schools, and they all invited me to attend as they needed a goalie for their varsity girls’ ice hockey teams. In the end, I settled on Taft, and I am so happy I did. It is a fabulous school, and perfect for me. And I am one of the two goalies, both Juniors for Taft’s Varsity Girls’ Ice Hockey Team. I love it here. It is truly a wonderful place to be. The teachers are the greatest. It was well worth the hard work to get here.

In the meantime, I have also joined the Polar Bears Under 19 Girl’s Prep National Team as one of two goalies.

So you can see, I have my plate full with school, ice hockey at school and with the Polar Bears.

And, to top it all off, Joe and I are starting a mentoring program for young female goalies. Joe is going to be my mentor to start, and then we are going to invite other experienced female goalies who play at the university, national, world and Olympic levels to mentor promising young female goalies. It is Joe’s idea to actively monitor and proactively assist goalies’ progress over longer periods, rather than just work with them during the summers. If you are interested in participating as a mentor or as a mentee, please e mail me,

Zulia at zulia-goalieicehockey@live.hk

or

Joe at jbertagna@comcast.net and jbertagna@hockeyeastonline.com.

All in all, it promises to be an exciting and fruitful period in my life prior to going off to university, and I invite you to travel with me on this journey. I intend to talk about attending high school, playing ice hockey at high school, preparing for university and playing for a varsity women’s ice hockey team.

But most importantly, I want to guide you through the experience of being a female goalie in the world of ice hockey, and give you some hints, ideas, suggestions and recommendations as a result of my trials and tribulations along this rocky and perilous, but mostly exciting way.

Specifically, I am going to tell you about the drills, movements and techniques a goalie needs to succeed on and off the ice, and, the mental and emotional preparation strategies necessary for before, during and after the game. I am going to talk to you about being a team player, and a leader, but at the same time explain to you your position as unique, one of a kind and individual. I am going to give you hints on dieting, exercising, cross training and playing other sports.

In the meantime, if you want to know more about me, please go to

www.facebook.com/zuliahungmitchell and www.youtube.com/zuliahungmitchell

where you will see several videos I have produced over these past couple of years about my journey as a goalie in the world of ice hockey. Check regularly too, as I am always putting up new videos.

Sometime soon, I will send you a link for my articles in the South China Morning Post Young Post in Hong Kong, China, a newspaper for young kids where I will be also writing about attending boarding school in the United States.

And, please feel free to send me comments and questions, which I will post on Joe’s website with my responses and answers.

Thanks for reading.

See you again real soon.

Zulia