PENTICTON, BC—If we were discussing a top player at the Penticton Young Stars tournament and their resume included a historic season in the WHL, a solid showing in an AHL cup of coffee and a standout performance at the Olympics all in the previous campaign, that player would be considered an elite prospect.
There’s a prospect matching that description at this year’s Young Stars tournament, but they won’t be wearing a Vancouver Canucks uniform, or an Edmonton Oilers jersey, or a Winnipeg Jets sweater or Calgary Flames colors.
No, this weekend, NHL prospect Alexandra Clarke is wearing black and white stripes.
Along with BCHL referee Grace Barlow, who is also officiating at the tournament, this is the first time that women have served as on-ice officials in the brief history of the Penticton prospect tournament.
“This tournament wasn’t even on my radar, but going into the NHL Exposure Combine back in August in Buffalo, I was pulled aside and asked if I was interested in coming and if I was available,” Clarke told The Athletic this week.
“So they’d seen me on the ice a couple of times before, I’d gotten myself there to the Combine and showed interest in my own development. And I think that shows them that I want to invest in myself, I’m interested and I want to continue growing as an official. So I’m grateful, because it wasn’t an opportunity that was on my radar, or that I would’ve thought was even within reach this season.”
Clarke is no stranger to making history. After seven years paying her dues and gradually moving up the ranks from the local, to the provincial, to the national and then to the international levels as an on-ice official, she became the first woman to serve as an on-ice official in Western Hockey League competition last season, where she worked as a linesperson — an unfamiliar turn of phrase that hockey fans are going to start hearing more frequently.
Cole Perfetti, Jakob Pelletier, Linus Karlsson, Dylan Holloway and 6 other players to keep an eye on at the Penticton Young Stars tournament this weekend.
(Note for fans interested: the games will be live streamed and available to watch at team websites): https://t.co/ZGkz2oscgt
— Thomas Drance (@ThomasDrance) September 16, 2022
She went on to work the Beijing Olympics on the women’s hockey side last winter and finished the year working two American Hockey League games in Abbotsford, joining a cohort of 10 women who worked AHL games for the first time during the 2021-22 league year.
Clarke, whose professional development as an on-ice official is clearly on the fast track, will be working two games in Penticton as a referee and a third game as a linesperson during the Young Stars tournament, which kicked off on Friday and runs through to Monday, Sept. 19.
Clarke, Barlow and Kirsten Welsh — the first woman to serve as an on-ice official in the OHL — are among the women officiating at NHL prospect tournaments this weekend (Clarke will be working the tournament in Raleigh, NC). Women officials have previously worked various prospect tournaments in 2019 and 2021.
Just as several players representing prospect teams for the four Western Canadian NHL clubs will be impact performers down the line, so too will some of the on-ice officials — both the referees and the linespeople — working this event.
It’s perhaps one of the under-the-radar legacies of the prospect development tournaments that are now ubiquitous across North America — that a significant number of the NHL’s younger on-ice officials were first assigned to work a prospect tournament, like the one in Penticton. .
NHL linesman Ryan Gibbons, for example, who has worked over 500 NHL games between the regular season and the playoffs since breaking into the league in 2015, was given an opportunity to work at Penticton as a young referee back in 2011.
“I was nervous,” Gibbons recalled The Athletic of receiving the assignment in 2011. “And really grateful for the opportunity to go out there and skate around with guys with NHL crests on their jerseys.”
Gibbons, who hails from Vancouver, was working three games a week at the Harry Jerome Community Recreation Center and had just received his first WHL assignment when the NHL recommended him to Canucks executives, who had begun hosting the tournament the previous season.
He was so nervous that when he made plans to drive up from Vancouver with some more experienced officials, and they agreed that they’d meet at the 200th Street Exit, just off of the Trans-Canada Highway, Gibbons instead went to Exit 200 — located over 100 kilometers further down the road. To give you a sense of how significantly Gibbons overshot the meeting place, the 200th Street Exit is numbered 58.
“I was just waiting by the side of the road up past Hope, BC,” Gibbons laughed. “I was very green, I hadn’t even worked a WHL game yet. I was just so excited for the tournament.”
Back in those days, Canucks executives engaged with WHL officials like Kevin Muench and NHL officials like Bob Hall and Al Kimmel to solicit recommendations for young referees to work the tournament. Vancouver’s Western scouts were even polled for their opinions about which officials were the best they’d seen at the WHL or BCHL, or even peewee and bantam levels.
The process was informal, but over the years a number of future mainstay NHL referees and linesmen came through the tournament, including Gibbons, Kiel Murchison, Brett Iverson, Trevor Hanson, Bevan Mills, Trent Knorr and Reid Anderson, according to local tournament organizers.
“All of the regional tournaments — prior to the start of the NHL Exposure Combine in 2014 — basically used local man power, local officials from their jurisdiction to participate,” Kimmel recalled in a conversation with The Athletic this week.
“Hall was the initial person that got us involved in Penticton, but we started using some of our prospects, but also utilizing some of the local WHL officials,” Kimmel continued. “It was a great process to combine and integrate two groups of officials into the tournament.”
Over time, however, the NHL began to take a more formal role and adopt a more top-down approach to assigning some of their top officiating and lining prospects to the various North American prospect tournaments.
“In 2014 we started the NHL exposure combine and we were able to identify upcoming officials that we wanted to get experience… and we reached out to the participating NHL teams, whoever was hosting, and they granted us permission to place officials in the tournaments, Kimmel explains.
The stakes of this process are high for the league. The NHL has been forecasting a shortage of on-ice officials for the better part of a decade, which is why NHL Vice President and Director of Officiating Stephen Walkom initiated the NHL exposure combine in the first place eight years ago.
There are signs at lower levels that the pandemic may have exacerbated the coming shortage.
“There’s a depletion in the number of people that want to get involved in officiating,” Kimmel says. “Some of the people we’ve placed into these tournaments have zero officiating experience and we understand that. We understand that there’s going to be mistakes. The teams understand that too, it’s just like their players are going to make mistakes. So it’s a collaborative process really between the teams and the NHL officiating department.”
Staffing the officials for these tournaments isn’t too much different for NHL hockey operations than it is for the teams that compete at them. They’re looking to give younger officials a shot for the purpose of evaluating their hockey IQ and athletic ability in an NHL sanctioned but lower-stakes environment.
“It’s eye-opening to see how willing the NHL is to give officials an opportunity to showcase their skills,” Clarke says. “They’re not bringing their most qualified officials from an American League standpoint, they’re bringing in officials that they’re seeing potential in and giving them a shot to show that. It’s a cool way to approach this tournament.”
It’s also a valuable teaching opportunity for younger officials who can feel comfortable that they’re on the same level as the competing prospects.
“If I’d been thrown into an American League exhibition game instead, those guys would’ve been more established,” Gibbons recalled. “Most guys would’ve played in the NHL at that level, for at least a game or two. In Penticton, at a prospect tournament, you can take some comfort in knowing that the players are sort of at the same level as you. Everyone is out there just trying to make an impression.”
Considering the growing number of women who have become viable competitors for NHL assignments — nearly 40 women have come through the NHL’s Exposure Combine since 2014 — and the growing need for officials at the professional ranks, it’s inevitable that a woman will soon break into the ranks. of on-ice officials that call the 1,312 NHL regular season games every year.
“It’s a natural next step, I think,” suggested Gibbons. “There’s nothing about the job that can’t be done by a woman… Coming up through the WHL and the BCHL and the junior B leagues, I know there’s a lot of quality linespeople coming through. I don’t think it’s too far away that we’ll have some female colleagues.”
“The female officials and competitors are getting closer and closer every year,” Kimmel agreed. “They compete physically on and off the ice with their male competitors. I do believe at some point we’ll see female officials in the NHL.”
As for Clarke, who has accelerated her career significantly over the past 12 months, her ambition is to officiate games at the NHL level in time, but her focus for now is just continuing to excel in the opportunities she’s provided.
“I’m focusing on the opportunities that I am getting and doing really well on them,” she says.
“I’m just excited that we’re getting these opportunities,” Clarke added when asked if she thinks about the prospect of being the first woman to call an NHL game. “Whether it’s myself or other women.
“Even if they’re my competition in some avenues, they’re also my colleagues. When I got hired in the WHL last season I said that as cool as it was to be the first, I would be just as happy to be the second, because it would mean somebody came before me.”
(Photo of Andrea Clarke: Joshua Bessex / NHLI via Getty Images)
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