PICTOU – It began when Barry Wisener’s daughter started playing hockey a dozen years ago.
“I got hooked on female hockey. Over the years, you had to work to find a way to build up the numbers. I was never shy about promoting, whatever I was involved in. When I see a bare wall, I say ‘let’s put a picture up’,” says Wisener, who grew up in Pictou and now lives in Cole Harbour.
He still has family and friends in Pictou and spends parts of his summer here.
Wisener recently received the Female Hockey Breakthrough Award at the Hockey Canada Spring Congress in Regina. The national award recognizes an individual for outstanding leadership and contribution to the advancement of female hockey.
“When something like that comes along, it’s not taken lightly – it’s nice. It was pretty awesome, really,” he says.
Wisener is a former member of the Hockey Nova Scotia Female Council, a former president of the Nova Scotia Female Midget Hockey League (NSFMHL), and a longtime coach and volunteer.
It was the fall of 2006, and Abbie Wisener wanted to play hockey. Her dad stepped up to coach her Novice team that first season, recruiting enough girls to play with her.
“We had to find girls, convince girls to come and play in minor hockey programs. Get them on the ice, find their friends and scrape together a hockey team.”
In 2011, he joined Hockey Nova Scotia’s Female Council in a developmental role that allowed him to provide skill development across the entire province.
“I have the utmost respect for Barry, and everything he’s done for female hockey,” says Troy Reid, who has been with the Pictou County Female Hockey Association (PCFHA) since it started, and coached the Northern Subway Selects to an Atlantic midget AAA title this past season.
“His intentions are always for the right reasons.”
Wisener was instrumental in creating the province’s Bantam female league and, with it, introducing tiered competitive female hockey in Nova Scotia. He then was president of the Nova Scotia Female Midget Hockey League for two seasons.
Wisener spends a fair amount of time in Pictou County for work purposes and has observed the tremendous growth of female hockey in the area in the past 10 years.
“It’s probably the envy of anyplace in the Maritimes,” he says. “There’s little pockets of success everywhere, but that’s a pretty big pocket (in Pictou County).”
Note:
• Wisener’s brother David, a former pro hockey player, started the Highland Hockey School and Barry Wisener, along with Kevin Cameron, ran the Hector Hockey School for close to a decade, starting around the mid-1990s. It ended because, in his words, “it got too big. One summer, we had 350 kids through the program.”