MacInnis-Moore compiling history of women’s hockey on island

December 22, 2025

Having grown up in Port Hood playing girls’ hockey, Jennifer MacInnis-Moore says she’s excited and honoured to be tasked with compiling the history of women’s hockey in Cape Breton.

Despite having attended Dalhousie University in the early 2000s, where she played women’s hockey, she never completed her degree. But her decision a few years ago to go back to school has opened doors she never anticipated would be open to her.

“I’m married now with four boys, and living in Sydney,” she says. “When my youngest boy started primary in 2023 – with the encouragement of my family of course – I thought I’d go back to school.”

Currently enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts Community Studies program at Cape Breton University (CBU), majoring in communications, her life changed when she met Dr. Bettina Callary, a professor at CBU and the director of the Institute of Community Sport and Health at the school.

“With my hockey background, I became the lead research assistant for Bettina, and we’ve worked on multiple projects since 2023, all with a focus on female hockey,” MacInnis-Moore says.

The first project involved the new Kehoe Forum on the CBU campus, which was kick-started when Sydney won the Kraft Hockeyville competition in 2022.

“After the new arena opened, they wanted to do a legacy wall and decorate the inside with pictures of female hockey players,” she recalls. “Then Bettina discovered, with Jane Arnold (archivist at the Beaton Institute), that there was no collection of women’s hockey history on Cape Breton Island at all.”

“There was plenty on men’s hockey, but nothing on women’s,” she adds. “So, then the next project was ‘let’s create a history collection for women’s hockey on Cape Breton Island.’”

That’s when she fully realized that her childhood had prepared her for this opportunity.

“Having grown up in Port Hood in the 90s, we had an incredible female hockey league thriving at that point,” she says. “Mabou had a team, Inverness had a team, Port Hood had a team. We would travel to Antigonish and New Glasgow. It really was pretty incredible. That gave me this huge network of hockey players, and it took off from there.”

“All this research work is nothing I ever would have expected. I was thinking about my family life and wanting to get back into the working world. But this has just taken on a life of its own, and I love it and realize the importance of it.”

As part of her project, MacInnis-Moore organized a panel discussion this past summer at the Chestico Museum in Port Hood. Emceed by lifelong friend Sandy Batherson, the panel included Melissa Cummings, Ambrah MacNeil, Chantelle (Hawley) MacLellan and Leanne MacDonald, who all shared their experiences playing hockey.

That event in part celebrated the first ever female provincial hockey tournament which was held in Mabou during the 1991-92 season, which was won by a team from Cape Breton County. As this edition of The Participaper went to press, MacInnis-Moore was preparing for a second panel discussion in Sydney and many of the participants in that event played on that championship team in Mabou more than 20 years ago.

MacInnis-Moore says the Kehoe Forum is home to the CBU women’s hockey team, as well as the Cape Breton Blizzard girl’s hockey organization, which has more than 500 girls playing there.

“It’s not that boys don’t play there,” she explains. “But the prime ice time, which has always been a barrier for female hockey around here, is for the girls.”

That was a barrier, she is quick to point out, that she and her friends didn’t experience growing up.

“When I get asked about that in the CBRM (Cape Breton Regional Municipality), ‘how could all these little communities have this female hockey league thriving,’ I think the answer is that we all had our own rinks and we were all given prime ice time at a time when that wasn’t a common thing.”

She also gives a lot of credit to their coaches for being an integral part of growing the girls’ game in Inverness County.

“There were so many great coaches in our small communities that didn’t have the mindset that girls couldn’t play hockey,” she remembers. “So, my whole childhood was on the ice. We had a fantastic league, and we had prime ice time.”

MacInnis-Moore says she doesn’t consider herself a pioneer, especially since she’s began her research project.

“We are collecting an immense amount of memorabilia,” she says. “I can’t even speak to how impressed I am at the amount of stuff people have held onto. We’re going to have an incredible collection.”

“I just met a woman whose grandmother played in the 1920s and there was a women’s league here in the CBRM, when women at the time were told not to be physical, and not to play, but they played anyway,” she adds.

She says the emergence of the Professional Women’s Hockey League is the single biggest game changer in the evolution of women’s hockey.

“The idea of playing hockey for a living and getting paid for it as a female is something that was never an option,” she adds.

“I see it all the time at the new rink. These girls now have an option to go that route. It’s just unbelievable. I just really hope it continues to develop, and we see someone from this area someday playing pro hockey.”