81 years young, trailblazing Duluth hockey player Bonnie Shea is still skating strong

More than 70 years before the Professional Women’s Hockey League was founded in 2023; nearly a half century before the U.S. won the inaugural gold medal in women’s hockey at the 1998 Olympics; and 44 years before the first girls hockey state championship in Minnesota in 1995, Bonnie Shea first laced up her hockey skates for her neighborhood team in Duluth. 

The year was 1951. At the time, Shea was the only girl playing organized hockey in the city. She was just 7 years old. 

She's 81 now. And while she doesn’t move as fast as she once did when she skated circles around the boys on Duluth’s rinks, she’s still playing. She recently competed in the final tournament of her women's team’s season. 

“My jersey number is 44 because I was born in 1944,” she said before her team, the Northern Gales, faced off against the Chix with Sticks from Ely. 

Shea is likely quadruple the age of some the other players on the ice. She plays center. When she faces off against an opponent, she looks across and sometimes thinks, “Honey, you know what, I’m Grandma to you.” 

But when the puck drops, “we’re all equal,” she said. After all these years of playing, she still has a competitive edge. The team from Ely is fast, and skates to an early lead. 

“They’re making fools of us,” she says after the first period. “I love the way they play though.” 

Shea is less aggressive than she used to be, she said. She skates slower, cautious so she isn’t getting knocked off balance. 

“But I don't want to not play hard either, because then I shouldn't play,” she says. “It's a little frightening because it's gotten so aggressive. But if I fall, I fall. That's just the way it's going to be.”

Determined to play 

Women and girls played hockey for decades in Duluth in the early 20th century. A girls’ grade school league was founded in Duluth in 1916. Five years later a girls’ industrial hockey league was formed and continued until World War II, as detailed in a recent Dakota County Historical Society exhibit chronicling 125 years of women’s hockey history in the state.

But by the time Shea started playing hockey in the 1940s and 50s at the Congdon neighborhood outdoor rink, across the street from where she grew up, she was the only girl playing.

“I happened to live in a neighborhood where there weren't any girls,” she recalled. “My best friends were boys, and that's what they did.”

But her parents did not want her to play. 

“They were afraid that I was going to get hurt,” she said. “We had no equipment. I didn't have a face mask, I didn't have a helmet.” 

Shea rummages through a box of old newspaper clippings and photos. She finds a black and white picture of her neighborhood team from the early 1950s. The boys are wearing padded hockey pants called breezers. She’s wearing Levi’s, rolled up above her skates. 

She’s wearing her dad’s old hockey gloves she found in a basement box. When she first started playing she used old magazines for shin pads. She eventually got a paper route and mowed neighbors’ lawns to pay for her equipment. 

“I was determined!” Shea said. “I still am,” she adds with a laugh. 

She wore a stocking cap when she played, “so no team knew I was a girl until I started scoring a lot.” She’s uncomfortable boasting, but admits she was a very good player. “I was a top scorer, and I had lots of articles written. My name was in the paper.” 

That's when other teams started targeting her. They called her names, and tried to check her into the boards. That just made her more determined.

“I can just remember they tried to board me, and I'd make a quick turn, and they'd go crashing into the boards,” Shea recalls. “It just made me skate harder and play smarter.”

She was a rink rat. She played seven days a week. She remembers practicing on the ice early in the morning, before anyone else arrived. 

But when Shea turned 15, she had to go to another rink to continue playing. “And when I went up there, the coaches there said, ‘Oh, heavens, no girls here.’”

Then, when she got to high school, the hockey coach invited her to try out for the team. 

“I was so excited. But I went the next day, and he said, ‘Our principal said absolutely no girls playing on our hockey team.’”

She was devastated. “I mean, that was my life. My parents would never think to challenge it. So my career ended at 15."

Instead, Bonnie Shea became a cheerleader.

“I guess in those days, women, girls just adapted to what they were told to do,” she said. “Not so much anymore.”

‘It’s in my blood’

Shea graduated and attended the University of Minnesota Duluth. She became an elementary school teacher, got married and had kids. She horsed around on the rink now and then. But she figured her days as a hockey player were long over. 

Then, after she turned 40, UMD started a women's club hockey team. And Shea joined. At first they played against men's teams. Then they joined the Women’s Hockey Association of Minnesota, or WHAM. And she hasn't stopped playing since. 

"I don't know. I can't explain it. It's just in my blood. I just love the game. My friends say, ‘Oh, how can you do this?’ And I don't know how I can do it, but I just want to," Shea told MPR News.

She's never seen herself as a trailblazer. Shea wasn’t trying to prove a point. She plays simply because she loves the game. And she passed on that love to her granddaughters, who, unlike her, were able to play in high school. 

"I'm happy for them, but on the other hand, I'm very sad that I didn't have that opportunity," Shea admits. Because she can't help but wonder. What if she had?

"What if? I mean, maybe I would never have gone far. But I didn't have the opportunity. Born too early!” Shea says with a rueful laugh. 

Back at the Hermantown ice arena, Shea walks off the ice after her team was soundly beaten. She’s tired, but feels invigorated, she says. She achieved her main goal, which was to not get hurt. 

“Because they're big, they're strong,” she says. She worries she could inadvertently get knocked over. “I'm just not willing to risk that now. It takes longer to heal than it used to when I was 40.”

In the past couple years, Shea has started to get more recognition for her role in helping to crack hockey’s glass ceiling. She's been invited to Minnesota Frost and Wild games. Her name is on a high school girls hockey trophy. She’s an inspiration to the women with whom she competes. 

“She’s such a great role model,” says her teammate Karen Bastianelli, 61. “I keep telling my friends I can't quit until she does. So many women get ignored for their contributions. It's nice to see her getting the recognition she's due.”

The buzzer has sounded on this season, but Shea is already planning for next year. In fact she's looking forward to buying a badly needed pair of new skates. 

"When people say, ‘How long are you gonna play?’ I say until I can't," she says.

Bonnie Shea has had the game she loves taken away from her once before. She's not about to let it happen again. 

Correction (March 23, 2026): This story has been updated to clarify when girls started playing hockey in Duluth.

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