Fire in her Heart and Ice in her Veins.

Chapter 2

A few months later. 

Present day. 

 July 15, 1979.  

New York University (NYU)

Last hockey season was incredible. 

For the past year, I've been fighting so hard for to get a strong competitive women's hockey team and fighting for equal rights on school grounds. Fighting against dumb dress codes, sports rules...hell everything! My goal was to win Nationals and we did that. 

Now, Shelby and I are moved back into NYU and I'm not going to lie that my energy from last year is not the same for this year. School doesn't start for another month and a bit, but we've already been here for a few weeks training for this years season. Only athletes are on campus and some students too, but it's mostly just us athletes. 

Last year, I made friends with a lot of senior players on our team. This year, they are all gone. A few of the junior girls from last year, who are now seniors this year didn't stick around. There's only four seniors this year, three juniors and the rest are all either freshmen or sophomores. New this year too is we got a new coaching staff. 

We lost coach Bev to retirement and our assistant coach, Jim, because he got offered a head coach job in Buffalo. I already miss them both because they were just such good coaches. They would push everyone to do their best and when things didn't go right...they never made us feel bad about it. 

This years head coach is Sarah Wilson's father. I have never gotten along with Sarah and she's always been jealous of me because of the attention I get. I'm not attention seeking, I just work hard and push myself and when I do that people like it. Anyways, long story short, this girl makes my life hell. 

Another cool thing about my hockey career at NYU is that I'm captain and have been since I started. I thought it was nuts when I was voted captain because I was a freshman, but when the votings came around everyone was happy with the pick...even the seniors which I didn't think would fly at all. 

Every year starts fresh and new captains and assistant captains are chosen, but a lot of girls already look to me as their "leader". Everyone but Sarah and Coach Wilson. 

Coach doesn't like that I'm confident in my plays and how I do things. Like he tries to change all kinds of plays and always centeres me out and picks on me for doing something I know was done correctly. 

Like yesterday, we had our team workout at 7:00 am and he would make my drills 100x harder than everyone else's. I would try to keep up, but because I was putting more work in than everyone else it didn't take long before I was on the ground panting. He would get down and yell at me and everyone else would just stand there, giving me pitiful looks. 

Sometimes I wonder if all my hard work was really worth it from last year. My team last year pretty much NYU's name out there, especially for women's hockey. It's slowly becoming more common to see more girls play hockey, although it's still not common at all. 

Another thing about Coach Wilson that I do not like is he doesn't push anymore, he constantly makes sexist remarks and he's just all around super negative. 

I also don't think I want to go to University anymore. My team was my backbone that year on top of school and this year that backbone is gone. The NYU doesn't push me anymore. I did one year of nursing school and it was really hard and I just made it by last year with my grade. I don't know if I can do it anymore. 

I've been having these thoughts for so long, but I'm too nervous to tell anyone. Shelby will think I'm being dumb and so will my family. 

" Chelse, do you think I should hook up with that Bobby guy? He's cute right?" Shelby said randomly, making me look at her funnily.