UBC Sports Hall of Fame
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After earning a degree in Journalism at Boston’s Northeastern University and playing three seasons of NCAA division one hockey, Laura Bennion enrolled in UBC’s Faculty of Science. In the spring of 1994 she made an appointment to see UBC Athletic Director Bob Philip to ask for $10,000 so she could start a women’s hockey team.
Six months later, with Bennion as coach, a determined group of students hit the ice for the inaugural season. As she had predicted, the team soon moved up to increasingly more competitive levels of play, prompting her to surrender the coaching role so that she could join the team as its first-line centre.
The year after she graduated, the modern coast-to-coast CIS women’s hockey league became a reality, with seven Canada West teams competing in a 16-game schedule leading up to playoffs and the national championship.
20 years later, UBC’s women’s hockey team became a well-entrenched fixture in the UBC varsity portfolio and one of the most competitive teams in the country, winning its first-ever Canada West Championship in 2013.
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