Jan 16, 2003

Courtesy Ukraine’s Public Radio

15-Year Old Ukrainian Girl Hockey Player Makes Bid for Guinness Book of Records

Liza Ryabkina Managers of the Kharkiv-based ice hockey school "Druzhba'78" have officially applied to the editors of the Guinness Book of World Records to register the achievement by Liza Ryabkina, 15, during a hockey match in Ukraine.

They believe Liza has set a world record for ice hockey players by scoring against the "Kyiv" team. According to her coach, Ivan Pravikov, never has a goal been scored in national championships by so young a player. Captain of "Druzhba'78" hockey team Liza Ryabkina was born in 1987. She began to play hockey in 1995. A well-known coach, Ivan Pravilov, decided to make an exception and invite a girl to play for the boys’ team – to test his concept that girls can also learn to play ice hockey well. Liza is not the only girl who plays for Ivan Pravilov’s team. He says that building up a women national team is among his top priorities. "The idea came to me after a spell coaching children in America and Mexico. Very often parents would enroll girls, and they made so hard-working students. On coming back to Ukraine I decided to start training girls," the coach says. As an experiment, I invited four girls to play for the team that I was then shaping up. Three of them were later dropped but Liza, who had the most potential, won a place on the team. Now she plays level with the boys. Some day she will play for the national team," Pravilov claims. In the official letter to Guinness editors "Druzhba'78" club officials point to another likely record, the appearance of Viktoria Mikolenko, 13, in the "Druzhba'78" match against another hockey team, Barvinok, on Dec. 15, 2002. Yet, not all in Ukraine are supportive of women playing ice hockey. One of them is Anatoly Naida, former captain of the Kyiv-based "Sokil" team and now vice president of the Ukrainian Ice Hockey Federation. "I am against women playing hockey, boxing or lifting weights – not because I fear competition from women. They were not created for the job. I disagree with Ivan Pravilov here," he maintains. Meanwhile, Liza Ryabkina says she wants to play better to qualify for Ukraine’s national team and go to world championships and the Olympics.