{"id":902945,"date":"2026-11-02T06:34:11","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T06:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/902945\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T06:34:11","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T06:34:11","slug":"curley-had-major-impact-on-womens-hockey-en-route-to-hall-of-fame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/902945\/","title":{"rendered":"Curley had major impact on women’s hockey en route to Hall of Fame"},"content":{"rendered":"

“It was coed and you developed all the bad habits of just scoring, no\u00a0backchecking,” she said. “Among the boys, they were studying whose stick was whose. Of course, my first role model was (retired Bruins defenseman and Hockey Hall of Famer) Bobby Orr<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“That tells you more about how old I am,” Curley said with a laugh.<\/p>\n

Those lake hockey sessions eventually led Curley to Providence, where she had two 60-plus point seasons, finishing with 63 points (28 goals, 35 assists) in 1981-82 and 62 points (33 goals, 29 assists) in 1984-85.<\/p>\n

“She was without question one of the top players and we had an excellent women’s program at Providence,” said former NHL general manager Lou Lamoriello, who was men’s hockey coach (1968-83) and athletic director (1983-87) during Curley’s time at Providence.<\/p>\n

“I took pride in the women’s program there. If you look back, they won a lot of championships there, they have a lot of famous names that played there and Cindy was the driving force. She was the player. When you talk to her teammates, you’ll get the same thing. Her commitment, she wanted to be good, and she was good with humility.”<\/p>\n

Two years after graduating from Providence, Curley represented the U.S. in the 1987 World Women’s Hockey Tournament, the first albeit unofficial tournament to feature women in international competition.<\/p>\n

“She had all the skill and her hands were fantastic, which meant she was a great passer and shooter as well and she had other good players around her, so she made them better,” Halldorson said. “She was crafty and she was a great skater. She didn’t have this imposing stature physically. She wasn’t a real big player, but she moved really well. She knew what to do with the puck and she put it in the net many, many times.”<\/p>\n

In 1990, the IIHF held its inaugural women’s world championship. Curley made the most of it, finishing with 23 points (11 goals, 12 assists), a record for the most points and assists by a woman in one championship. She’s tied for the most goals in a single championship with former Canadian star Angela James, who also had 11 in 1990.<\/p>\n

Curley, captain of the 1990 team, also holds the IIHF women’s record for most points in a game (nine) and goals (five), each coming in a 17-0 win against Norway on March 21, 1990.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It was coed and you developed all the bad habits of just scoring, no\u00a0backchecking,” she said. “Among the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":902946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-902945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/902946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}