When Katelyn Dooley ’06, stepped onto the ice last fall as a member of the inaugural Saint Anselm College women’s hockey team, little did she know she was about to carve herself a niche in college athletic history.

Women’s hockey is new this year to the college, but men’s hockey dates back to the mid 1960s when the first club team was organized. Katelyn’s father, Jim Dooley ’70, was a member of that club team making the Dooleys the college’s first father/daughter hockey duo.

“We were fortunate to have Frank Harrington as our coach,” says Jim Dooley of the man who coached the final two seasons of club hockey and continued for four years as varsity coach. He worked hard to build the program, and “he was a great mentor.”

Fr. Placidus Riley, O.S.B., who was president at the time, loved hockey, and “pushed to have a hockey team,” says Jim. Fr. Placidus was even given the puck from the team’s first game.

“It is much easier now with the arena on campus,” says Jim. The men’s team was a club sport for four years before becoming varsity.

Jim Dooley was a member of the committee that helped move hockey to an intercollegiate sport and luckily for him, those efforts were successful and he was able to play varsity hockey before he graduated.

Jim has continued his involvement in hockey, as a coach for the past 25 years, and in a number of start-up hockey programs. He organized the youth hockey program in his home town of Geneva, N.Y., in 1978, and he negotiated an agreement between the local Catholic and public high schools to offer a combined boys’ high school hockey team. Not surprisingly, he also became the team’s first coach.

Dooley passed on his love for the sport and his enthusiasm for start-up programs to his daughter Katelyn, a sophomore at Saint Anselm College. Although she began playing hockey in second grade, she didn’t get serious until junior high school and went on to play in high school on still another team organized and coached by her dad.

The prospect of playing hockey on the college’s inaugural women’s hockey team in a sparkling new arena on campus made her decision to attend Saint Anselm considerably easier.

“It is definitely exciting to be part of this first women’s team,” says Katelyn. “Just from this first year I see good things happening for women’s hockey in the future.”

They share the distinction as the only father and daughter pair to have played on Saint Anselm’s inaugural men’s and women’s hockey teams, but the real connection says Jim, “is the quality of the coaching. Frank Harrington was a great coach and mentor, and Dave Flint is continuing that tradition with the women’s program.”