As a 1998 gold medalist in women’s hockey, one of the NCAA’s top scholar-athletes during the 2003-2004 school year and the first female nongoalie to play in a men’s professional hockey league in 2005 with the Tulsa Oilers, Ruggiero is in an excellent position to comment on the current state of women’s hockey. While she touches on some of the bigger gender-based problems facing women in the predominantly male sport, this is basically a straightforward account of her life from her introduction to hockey at age seven in not-so-hockey-friendly California through her experiences as a scholarship winner and top athlete at Connecticut’s Choate Rosemary Hall prep school and later at Harvard to her post-Olympic pursuit of a professional career playing hockey.
The best sections are those concerning Ruggiero’s pre-prep school career, where she vividly describes proving herself “in a boy’s world,” including inadvertently breaking a boy’s collarbone with a clean hit. Ruggiero’s insider look at life in the Olympics is interesting, but the narrative is heavy with clichés. However, her honesty and her ability to capture how her teenage self had to persevere makes this a perfect gift book for preteen and teen female athletes.
