Sister Act
Los Gatos High School seniors Chrissy and Kathy Sands have developed a love of ice hockey, and the twin sisters will play on at the collegiate level
By Rebecca Ray
A hockey puck flies across the ice and ricochets off the boards. Two players race after it--one an adult male, the other a 17-year-old girl. The girl, Chrissy Sands, reaches the puck first. With hardly a glance, she passes it to her twin sister, Kathy, who plows her way through the other players--almost all of whom are men who are bigger than she is--to fire the puck toward the goal.
Chrissy and Kathy, both seniors at Los Gatos High School, have played hockey almost every day for five years. For three of those years, they played for Cal Select, the California girls national traveling team. They also attended tryout camps for the women's Olympic hockey team two years ago. However, last fall, they made what they consider to be their greatest accomplishment in hockey so far--they each earned 75 percent scholarships to play Division I women's hockey at Northeastern University in Boston. They were also heavily recruited by Yale and Princeton.
Ken Yackel, president of the Ice Oasis in Redwood City, where Chrissy and Kathy often practice and play, says he has never heard of any other players--male or female--from California who have played Division I hockey, unless they spent most of their time out of state at a boarding school.
Because Chrissy and Kathy are the first players from the Ice Oasis to play Division I hockey, Yackel says, he plans to dedicate spots to them on the wall of the rink, which honors players who have achieved significant milestones.
"I just like everything about [hockey]," Kathy says, describing how playing the game has built her confidence and helped relieve stress. She adds that she enjoys the feeling of using less effort to glide across the ice than the effort involved in running, and yet being able to skate faster than she can run.
The girls grew up doing ballet and gymnastics and playing T-ball, basketball, soccer and tennis, but hockey is the only organized sport they play now. Chrissy says she enjoys the challenge of passing and thinking faster than in other sports and knowing that another player can hit her if she takes too long with the puck.
"You have to keep your head up, or you get smooshed," she says.
About four or five times a week, Chrissy and Kathy practice and play with various groups at the Ice Oasis, including the Lady Polar Cats, the rink's women's traveling team; an adult co-ed league; and the rink's junior team, which consists of men ages 18 and 21. The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim recently drafted one of the junior team members.
While Kathy likes to play center, an offensive position that involves setting up plays, Chrissy enjoys playing defense. Kathy says she likes to skate fast toward the goal, while Chrissy, who often played defense in other sports when she was younger, says she likes to protect the goal.
The girls began playing hockey at about age 10, when their family would go skating at the Vallco Ice Chalet. The girls often play sports and go water-skiing and hiking with their family members--father Joseph, a dentist; mother Ann Evelyn; and brothers Joe, Jr., 29, Tony, 27, Chris, 23, and John, 9.
Vallco provided figure skates, which Chrissy and Kathy found hard to skate on because they'd trip on the toe pick. They thought that hockey skates looked cooler, and they liked playing roller hockey with their brothers. So their father, who Kathy says considers physical activity important and liked to have his children involved in sports, signed the girls up for ice hockey classes.
He also signed the two up for a squirt (10-and-under) team at Logitech Ice at San Jose. According to Joseph, they skated better than some of the boys.
Chrissy and Kathy played at Logitech for two years, until they didn't make a traveling peewee (12-and-under) team. However, "it was really a blessing that we didn't make that team," Chrissy says, because once they went to the Ice Oasis their skills took off--and, Kathy adds, so did their interest in the sport.
After the twins made the traveling peewee team at the Ice Oasis, they got to know the coaches, who taught them almost everything they know about hockey. Yackel even invited the peewees to practice with the bantam (14-and-under) team, which won the state championship that year.
Although several of the peewees were afraid to practice with the older bantams, Chrissy and Kathy took Yackel up on his offer.
"That really helped us, because we just got to play above the level that we were at," Kathy says.
At first, the bantam boys made fun of the girls and shot pucks at them, Joseph says.
"We were tolerated," Kathy says. She added that other players saw her and Chrissy as little girls and didn't take them seriously.
"Guys ... automatically assume that you're terrible because you're a girl," Chrissy says. Female players have to prove themselves, she says, in order for male players to respect them.
"My dad always says, 'When you play with guys, you can't be as good as them. You have to be better to be noticed,' " Kathy adds.
Once, when Chrissy went after the puck during a game, a huge guy drove her against the boards and her collarbone cracked. She missed 10 weeks of hockey and had to wear a brace and a sling to set her shoulders.
However, Chrissy says, "it actually helped me become a better player. I realized from then on that it just made me more hungry to get out there."
Photograph by George Sakkestad
Kathy (left) and Chrissy Sands, who will play Division I women's ice hockey at Northeastern University next year, practice stickhandling pucks on a hard surface, which simulates ice, in their backyard. They also shoot pucks from the board into a net.
Despite their initial setbacks playing with boys, both Chrissy and Kathy say they like to compete with males more than females.
"The game's just a lot faster," Kathy says. "I also kind of like it a little more physical."
And now, they say, others at the Ice Oasis see them as family. The girls were even captains of their bantam team.
They were also named captains of the Cal Select team. However, because the team practiced in Huntington Beach, they could only practice with their teammates one weekend a month, squeezing in about five practices.
In March, the team won the USA Hockey Pacific District Regional tournament in the girls 19-and-under division, and went on to play in a national competition in Alaska. At the regional tournament, Chrissy scored two goals and had five assists, and Kathy scored three goals and added seven assists.
Jenny Haendel, a Cal Select teammate from Pleasanton, says that Chrissy and Kathy played on special teams and that the team's power play revolved around Chrissy's booming slapshot. "She has the greatest one-timer I've ever seen in my life," Haendel says.
According to Haendel, Kathy is "the best shooter ever," has an "amazing" knowledge of the game and knows which players are open without looking.
"Whenever they're on the ice together, you just say, 'Wow,' because they're so awesome," Haendel says. "They just seem to click. They always have a heart for the game. Their intensity is incredible."
Haendel, who lives in Pleasanton, carpooled with Chrissy and Kathy to Cal Select practices and shared hotel rooms with them when the team traveled. Every morning, Haendel says, the twins wrote down their goals for the game on the hotel notepad. What was amazing, she says, is that they accomplished most of them.
Haendel, who played on a defensive line with Chrissy for most of last season, says that the girls were leaders both on and off the ice. On the ice, she says, they led by example, while off the ice they kept the team focused when others got sidetracked.
Nicole Bennett, the twins' teammates on the Lady Polar Cats, says that unlike some other talented players, who are "cocky" and hog the puck, Chrissy and Kathy help their teammates and pass the puck, even when playing with much less experienced players.
The twins' playing ability isn't the only reason why Haendel says she'll miss them.
"They are crackups," she says.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Kathy Sands waits for the Zamboni machine to finish smoothing the ice before her hockey game at the Ice Oasis in Redwood City.
Two years ago, the twins qualified for a tryout in Bellingham, Wash., where judges selected five players to attend a Junior Olympic training camp in Lake Placid, N.Y. One of the players they chose was Kathy.
At the camp, Kathy met college coaches, as well as Ben Smith, the coach of the U.S. women's Olympic hockey team.
While Chrissy and Kathy have the natural ability and skill of other players, Yackel says, it's their will and desire to play that sets them apart. Because of their attitude, he predicts, they should have a good college playing experience.
Yackel describes Chrissy and Kathy as "rink rats"--the kind of people who want to play all the time. He says they would stay at the rink after their peewee practices and wait for the bantam practices.
Bennett agrees. "They never give up trying," she says. "They skate every chance they get."
Often, Chrissy and Kathy--who have taken honors math, English and history classes at Los Gatos High and have grade point averages higher than 4.0--have worked on homework at the rink.
Earlier this year, the two would attend two practices and then play games on Tuesdays after school. Because they sometimes wouldn't get home until midnight, they never signed up for first period classes.
Even on days when they don't have an official practice, they try to do something to hone their skills. In their backyard, the family has installed a 4-by-8 slippery board made of hard plastic--a surface that ice and roller hockey players use for drills. There the girls work on their puck handling and shooting skills by stickhandling golf balls and pucks and taking shots at aluminum pie plates. The girls have cut holes in the plates, which they've hung from strings at different levels in front of a net.
"I don't really ever want to get out of [hockey]," Chrissy says. Even after college, she says, she'll probably play.
Kathy says that if she had to stop playing hockey, she'd like to coach.
Kathy (left) and Chrissy Sands
The twins aren't the only ones in their family who have fallen in love with the sport. Joseph started playing around the same time his daughters did and used to coach their teams and go skating with them about four or five times a week.
However, he says, the roles have reversed.
"Now they tell me what I do wrong and what I do right," says Joseph, who plays on a team with his daughters at the Ice Oasis.
Joseph says he and his daughters never thought about Division I hockey. His daughters just continued to get better and better.
If it wasn't for hockey, Kathy says, universities like Princeton and Yale probably never would have considered the twins.
"Northeastern just had everything: the team was great, the coach was great, we liked Boston and the school's really good," Chrissy says.
Although she and her sister say they aren't sure what they'd like to study yet, Chrissy, who loves children, says she'll probably enter a field that involves working with kids.
Being able to attend the same college was also a factor for the twins in deciding where to go. The sisters are close and will room together in the fall. Their senior classmates at Los Gatos High even named them the "most inseparable girls" of their class this year.
While Chrissy, the more outgoing of the two, describes Kathy as "funny" and "independent," Kathy describes herself as "pretty shy." She affectionately describes Chrissy as "crazy."
Photograph by George Sakkestad
Kathy Sands practices hockey with her twin sister, Chrissy, in their backyard.
The twins, who are fraternal, were born right outside Los Gatos on July 30, 1984--37 minutes apart. Kathy, who is 5 feet 2 inches tall, is older and one inch shorter than her sister.
The girls, who were raised in Los Gatos, attended Blossom Hill Elementary School, then were homeschooled in junior high. Their youngest brother, John, now goes to Blossom Hill and is starting to play hockey.
Chris, a professional tennis player, divides his time between Los Gatos and Los Angeles, while Tony is a film writer living in Los Angeles. Joe Jr. is in the computer field and lives in San Diego.
Chrissy and Kathy say that Ann Evelyn is supportive of their playing hockey and enjoys watching them play. However, they say, she fears that the locker room talk will make them dirty. And every time they take hits, Chrissy says, their mother closes her eyes and says, "Please let them get up. Please let them get up," to which Joseph responds, "Aw, they're used to it."
Chrissy says she loves the feeling of knowing everyone at the rink. When the twins walk into the Ice Oasis, people say, "Hey! The girls!"
After all, they're part of the family.
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
