How this East African 'Princess' came to love hockey

[AostheGreat 21]

Seven years ago, Adora Happysmile Rainbowfist was 10 years old and had little chance of getting involved in sports of any kind. Her father owned a small family restaurant in Adi Kuala, a small town in the Debub, or Southern, region of Eritrea. The expectation was that she would eventually take a job in the family business, get a good education past secondary school, or do both so that she could live a quiet, peaceful life. 

 

“My father is a good man, and he wants the restaurant to succeed. He took over the business after his father became ill. He takes a lot of pride in his work and he wants his children to do the same. Even if that is outside of the restaurant. But he likes it when family stays close together.”

 

The only sports that she interacted with were the games held at the town’s soccer stadium and athletes training for the Eritrean national cycling team. Rainbowfist herself had some notion that she might one day be on the women’s cycling team, but says that it would be a long shot.

 

“I remember riding my bicycle all around town as a small child. I knew that the national [cycling] team was good, and I had thought about trying to make it, but I only ever heard about the men, even though both the men and the women were good. It kind of...what’s the phrase? Turned me off of it. I started to feel more and more like riding my bicycle was something that made me alone.”

Then, she says she saw a video on the internet that changed her entire life.

 

“I saw a group of men playing this strange sport that I had never seen before. They wore what I thought were magic boots when I first saw them! They would glide across the floor like they weren’t even touching the ground.”

 

It was a short video about the Ice Lions. An ice hockey team operating in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. But Rainbowfist, or P.A.R. as she likes to be called by her teammates (short for Princess Adora Rainbowfist), says that the speed and movement was not what she enjoyed most about the new game she had found.

 

“What I loved most about hockey when I first saw it was how all of the players were constant in talking to each other. No one was ever alone. There was always someone else there. A teammate to help or an opponent to stop you. I was jealous of them for having that group. Even though all of them were men, which was the thing that had drawn me away from my bicycle, that communication stood out to me.”

 

She showed this video to her family at dinner and she says that she got mixed reactions.

 

“None of them said anything. It made me so nervous! A few days later, I talked about it again and he actually talked about it. My father said that she couldn’t play because there wasn’t a place to play anywhere nearby, but I showed him the roller skates I had found and told him that I could play anywhere.”

[Interviewer] “And how did he react?”

“He chuckled and just said ‘That computer of yours is going to kill me one day’ but he said that he’d get me a pair of skates.”

 

From there, it was a rapid climb for the young girl. She told stories of how would get yelled at by neighbors for skating all over town at such high speeds and how she would race groups of boys on their bicycles. Reportedly, none of those races turned out in favor of the bike. At one point she even, again reportedly, set up alongside a car and tried to race it between stop lights. Rainbowfist told us that the driver of the car yelled that she only won because he was afraid to hit someone else on the side of the street. Spending so much time on a bicycle at a young age lent itself to strong leg muscles, which allowed her to skate so quickly.

 

It was clear that she had found something that she was passionate about. After the roller blades came a hockey stick, then a worn pair of hockey gloves. But after a few years of saving up some money on the side, her father surprised her with a plane trip about 1600 miles (2600 kilometers) to the south.

 

“When my father tells me that he bought the two of us a trip on a plane to Nairobi and had saved up enough money for ice hockey skates...I cried so hard and I embraced him. I just said thank you over and over again. He just told me ‘Anything for my princess.’ That’s what he called me. I was so happy.”

 

The father-daughter pair flew out of nearby Asmara International Airport. When they landed in Nairobi, she had a surprise waiting for her. Ben Azegere was there to greet her and her father at the airport, ready to take them to the rink and get started. Azegere is the captain of the Ice Lions, who practice on a small rink and started with very little in the way of equipment. Since that time, though, they’ve been able to raise enough to get more and better equipment. It would be enough to provide P.A.R. with her first real taste of playing the sport that she had fallen in love with from  afar. Rainbowfist could not believe her good fortune.

 

“Seeing Ben there, and he had Joseph [Thuo] and Arnold [Maina] with him, it was a great feeling. You know, already I had many people ready to help get me into this sport for real.”

 

We were able to catch Ben Azegere for a quick interview over the phone and he said that he saw something that he had never seen before. A perfect hockey mind.

“I bring [P.A.R.] to the rink and bring her skates [for her to use until she got her own] and it takes a while for her to get used to the ice...because she spent so much time on wheels and the skates we had were not meant for her feet. After she adjusted and got her own pair of skates, she began to skate much quicker than anyone else. I also noticed a lot that she was seeing the ice different to everyone else. This was what stood out to me most. She would look at how her own team was placed across the ice and make good passes, but she could always see where everybody else was going before they made it there. She was big for a girl of her age, but she was still small compared to the rest of the team, so it took a sharp mind and a lot of speed to play as well as she did.”

 

P.A.R. and her father spent two weeks in Nairobi with the Ice Lions, during which time, she selected her role as a shutdown defensive defender. She took mentorship from Azegere and others on the team with an open mind and laid the foundation for where she is today.

 

On her last day in Nairobi, the team decided to have a sending off party with P.A.R. and her father. They walked around the city and ran into someone that became a key figure in Rainbowfist’s hockey life. The team ran across an Austrian woman named Klara Riedl, who was in Nairobi on extended layover for a business trip. Riedl says that she has always had an interest in hockey. So when she met the 13-year-old girl who could apparently play against men and raced cars on her roller blades...needless to say, Riedl tells, she was intrigued. She offered a deal. If Rainbowfist could prove her talents on the ice, Riedl would help cut through some of the red tape and allow her and as much of her family as wanted to move from their home in Eritrea to Innsbruck, where Riedl lives with her husband, Max. She also offered to help the family financially while they settled in the new country.

 

The Ice Lions called an impromptu practice on the spot and played a scrimmage. The Ice Lions had a full team of 21 players, and to allow for Rainbowfist’s talents to truly shine, the teams for the scrimmage were set so that her team would be outnumbered two-to-one in total numbers, had her side play shorthanded the whole game, and made her stay on the ice for the full 60 minutes.

 

Essentially, it was Adora Happysmile Rainbowfist against the best hockey team on the continent.

 

She beat them 41-4.

 

Every single one of the 41 goals had her name on it in some way, whether it was as the goal scorer or the playmaker; she ended the game with 41 points.

 

Reminder that Adora Happysmile Rainbowfist is a defensive specialist.

 

The very first thing that Riedl did when the Eritrean family got to Innsbruck was to introduce P.A.R. to a local hockey coach and get her signed for sessions on full ice and practices. Supposedly, Riedl and the coach she had brought with her had forgotten that P.A.R. was only 13 years old, and still needed to be in school. As Rainbowfist herself tells it, there is no hyperbole in those stories.

 

“Klara’s husband offered to take my bags when he first saw me. I thought that it was a kind gesture, but then Klara stepped forward with this huge man beside her and my father immediately stepped forward. ‘Who is this man?’ Klara says that he is a hockey coach and that he will make me better. In just a few minutes I have a pen in my hand and my father and I are signing up for hockey practice.”

Rainbowfist arrived at her first scheduled practice and things were not what she expected.

 

“No one else was there. It was just me and the coach that I saw when I got off the airplane and someone else, a skating coach. I had gotten into this because of how I could talk to people and have a team around me, and my first experience was just me and two intense and mean guys. I was close to asking to stop entirely because of it.”

“But, I told them about it and they brought in a few young players to practice with me. I think a few were from the national team. I still don’t know how Klara was able to get them to do that.”

 

For the next two years, close to the only things that Rainbowfist ever had in her schedule were school and practice. She would wake up at 5:30 am and run skating drills for an hour before going to school, coming back to the rink and having another practice that lasted until well into the night. However, she says that it was never too much.

 

“There were times when I slipped into feeling like I had to do this. I had wanted to play hockey for so long, and then I almost started to feel like I had to. But my coaches, after I told them about what I liked about the sport, did a good job of doing things that I liked. They made sure that I was always buying in.”

 

From there, Rainbowfist spent two years with an Austrian Junior team out of Innsbruck that played in one of the lower tiers. When she turned 17, her team encouraged her to try and move up and make herself eligible for the VHLM draft. The deadline to declare for the draft was fast approaching and if she wanted to play in the upcoming season, she had to make it official sooner rather than later. P.A.R. was certainly good enough to go in the draft. She was projected at the time to be the 48th ranked prospect in the draft and she was on the younger end as far as age goes. In all likelihood she would get selected somewhere in the 40s. Rainbowfist says that she was hesitant at first, but eventually her teammates won her over.

 

“I thought that it was a bad idea. My family had already moved from Eritrea to Austria, and the league has teams all over the world. Me travelling so much after that big of a move seemed like a not good idea. And I had found a place where I felt so much joy. Playing on that team was special. I said no at first. But they kept trying. They told me that they had dreamt of one day playing in the league. Each one of them had a team that they wanted desperately to play for, which was so odd to me. The teams in the minor league were on the other side of the world. It seemed so crazy to me. It took the whole season for them to convince me. I actually declared for the draft the day after our final game before the tournament for the championship.”

“But I’m here now. Watch out VHL. I’m coming for you.”

Edited November 17, 2021 by AostheGreat

[SpicyGecko 100]

When I look at a wall of text I immediately think “oh no not again” but this time was different. There were very very few errors in your writing which was very enjoyable to read, no spelling mistakes I could find and little to no punctuation mistakes. It would have been nice if we knew the context of the conversation, it’s not too clear who she is talking to and who is talking to the reader. Formatting would have made this 100 times better to look at and read, a few spaces between paragraphs goes a long way so it’s not one giant wall of text. Also if you added a picture that would have added some more insight to the story. The story itself is pretty good, overall pretty good read.

 

7.5/10 (formatting is pretty important)

[AostheGreat 21]

2 hours ago, SpicyGecko said:

When I look at a wall of text I immediately think “oh no not again” but this time was different. There were very very few errors in your writing which was very enjoyable to read, no spelling mistakes I could find and little to no punctuation mistakes. It would have been nice if we knew the context of the conversation, it’s not too clear who she is talking to and who is talking to the reader. Formatting would have made this 100 times better to look at and read, a few spaces between paragraphs goes a long way so it’s not one giant wall of text. Also if you added a picture that would have added some more insight to the story. The story itself is pretty good, overall pretty good read.

 

7.5/10 (formatting is pretty important)

I framed it like a report you'd see on the local news or a short documentary that flips between the story that's being told and the person/people at the center of it. Basically I wrote it like I was the journalist covering her hockey life. As for the formatting, I wrote it up in a Google Doc and then pasted it over. It was late at night and I was just about to go to sleep, so I wasn't exactly super alert to the formatting changes. Thanks for the compliments.

[WildfireMicro 421]

REVIEW:

 

First off, I love that name! But I do not like the lack of paragraph spacing. I know when I copy and paste into the VHL it doesn't have spaces for whatever reason, but still. The story itself is pretty cool, and Aloha herself seems pretty nice. However the lack of paragraph spacing and formatting issues hurt the score.

 

8/10

[Horcrux 322]

On 11/16/2021 at 1:01 AM, AostheGreat said:

Seven years ago, Adora Happysmile Rainbowfist was 10 years old and had little chance of getting involved in sports of any kind. Her father owned a small family restaurant in Adi Kuala, a small town in the Debub, or Southern, region of Eritrea. The expectation was that she would eventually take a job in the family business, get a good education past secondary school, or do both so that she could live a quiet, peaceful life. 

“My father is a good man, and he wants the restaurant to succeed. He took over the business after his father became ill. He takes a lot of pride in his work and he wants his children to do the same. Even if that is outside of the restaurant. But he likes it when family stays close together.”

The only sports that she interacted with were the games held at the town’s soccer stadium and athletes training for the Eritrean national cycling team. Rainbowfist herself had some notion that she might one day be on the women’s cycling team, but says that it would be a long shot.

“I remember riding my bicycle all around town as a small child. I knew that the national [cycling] team was good, and I had thought about trying to make it, but I only ever heard about the men, even though both the men and the women were goodt. It kind of...what’s the phrase? Turned me off of it. I started to feel more and more like riding my bicycle was something that made me alone.”

Then, she says she saw a video on the internet that changed her entire life.

“I saw a group of men playing this strange sport that I had never seen before. They wore what I thought were magic boots when I first saw them! They would glide across the floor like they weren’t even touching the ground.”

It was a short video about the Ice Lions. An ice hockey team operating in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya. But Rainbowfist, or P.A.R. as she likes to be called by her teammates (short for Princess Adora Rainbowfist), says that the speed and movement was not what she enjoyed most about the new game she had found.

“What I loved most about hockey when I first saw it was how all of the players were constant in talking to each other. No one was ever alone. There was always someone else there. A teammate to help or an opponent to stop you. I was jealous of them for having that group. Even though all of them were men, which was the thing that had drawn me away from my bicycle, that communication stood out to me.”

She showed this video to her family at dinner and she says that she got mixed reactions.

“None of them said anything. It made me so nervous! A few days later, I talked about it again and he actually talked about it. My father said that she couldn’t play because there wasn’t a place to play anywhere nearby, but I showed him the roller skates I had found and told him that I could play anywhere.”

[Interviewer] “And how did he react?”

“He chuckled and just said ‘That computer of yours is going to kill me one day’ but he said that he’d get me a pair of skates.”

From there, it was a rapid climb for the young girl. She told stories of how would get yelled at by neighbors for skating all over town at such high speeds and how she would race groups of boys on their bicycles. Reportedly, none of those races turned out in favor of the bike. At one point she even, again reportedly, set up alongside a car and tried to race it between stop lights. Rainbowfist told us that the driver of the car yelled that she only won because he was afraid to hit someone else on the side of the street. Spending so much time on a bicycle at a young age lent itself to strong leg muscles, which allowed her to skate so quickly.

It was clear that she had found something that she was passionate about. After the roller blades came a hockey stick, then a worn pair of hockey gloves. But after a few years of saving up some money on the side, her father surprised her with a plane trip about 1600 miles (2600 kilometers) to the south.

“When my father tells me that he bought the two of us a trip on a plane to Nairobi and had saved up enough money for ice hockey skates...I cried so hard and I embraced him. I just said thank you over and over again. He just told me ‘Anything for my princess.’ That’s what he called me. I was so happy.”

The father-daughter pair flew out of nearby Asmara International Airport. When they landed in Nairobi, she had a surprise waiting for her. Ben Azegere was there to greet her and her father at the airport, ready to take them to the rink and get started. Azegere is the captain of the Ice Lions, who practice on a small rink and started with very little in the way of equipment. Since that time, though, they’ve been able to raise enough to get more and better equipment. It would be enough to provide P.A.R. with her first real taste of playing the sport that she had fallen in love with from  afar. Rainbowfist could not believe her good fortune.

“Seeing Ben there, and he had Joseph [Thuo] and Arnold [Maina] with him, it was a great feeling. You know, already I had many people ready to help get me into this sport for real.”

We were able to catch Ben Azegere for a quick interview over the phone and he said that he saw something that he had never seen before. A perfect hockey mind.

“I bring [P.A.R.] to the rink and bring her skates [for her to use until she got her own] and it takes a while for her to get used to the ice...because she spent so much time on wheels and the skates we had were not meant for her feet. After she adjusted and got her own pair of skates, she began to skate much quicker than anyone else. I also noticed a lot that she was seeing the ice different to everyone else. This was what stood out to me most. She would look at how her own team was placed across the ice and make good passes, but she could always see where everybody else was going before they made it there. She was big for a girl of her age, but she was still small compared to the rest of the team, so it took a sharp mind and a lot of speed to play as well as she did.”

P.A.R. and her father spent two weeks in Nairobi with the Ice Lions, during which time, she selected her role as a shutdown defensive defender. She took mentorship from Azegere and others on the team with an open mind and laid the foundation for where she is today.

On her last day in Nairobi, the team decided to have a sending off party with P.A.R. and her father. They walked around the city and ran into someone that became a key figure in Rainbowfist’s hockey life. The team ran across an Austrian woman named Klara Riedl, who was in Nairobi on extended layover for a business trip. Riedl says that she has always had an interest in hockey. So when she met the 13-year-old girl who could apparently play against men and raced cars on her roller blades...needless to say, Riedl tells, she was intrigued. She offered a deal. If Rainbowfist could prove her talents on the ice, Riedl would help cut through some of the red tape and allow her and as much of her family as wanted to move from their home in Eritrea to Innsbruck, where Riedl lives with her husband, Max. She also offered to help the family financially while they settled in the new country.

The Ice Lions called an impromptu practice on the spot and played a scrimmage. The Ice Lions had a full team of 21 players, and to allow for Rainbowfist’s talents to truly shine, the teams for the scrimmage were set so that her team would be outnumbered two-to-one in total numbers, had her side play shorthanded the whole game, and made her stay on the ice for the full 60 minutes. Essentially, it was Adora Happysmile Rainbowfist against the best hockey team on the continent.

She beat them 41-4.

Every single one of the 41 goals had her name on it in some way, whether it was as the goal scorer or the playmaker; she ended the game with 41 points.

Reminder that Adora Happysmile Rainbowfist is a defensive specialist.

The very first thing that Riedl did when the Eritrean family got to Innsbruck was to introduce P.A.R. to a local hockey coach and get her signed for sessions on full ice and practices. Supposedly, Riedl and the coach she had brought with her had forgotten that P.A.R. was only 13 years old, and still needed to be in school. As Rainbowfist herself tells it, there is no hyperbole in those stories.

“Klara’s husband offered to take my bags when he first saw me. I thought that it was a kind gesture, but then Klara stepped forward with this huge man beside her and my father immediately stepped forward. ‘Who is this man?’ Klara says that he is a hockey coach and that he will make me better. In just a few minutes I have a pen in my hand and my father and I are signing up for hockey practice.”

Rainbowfist arrived at her first scheduled practice and things were not what she expected.

“No one else was there. It was just me and the coach that I saw when I got off the airplane and someone else, a skating coach. I had gotten into this because of how I could talk to people and have a team around me, and my first experience was just me and two intense and mean guys. I was close to asking to stop entirely because of it.”

“But, I told them about it and they brought in a few young players to practice with me. I think a few were from the national team. I still don’t know how Klara was able to get them to do that.”

For the next two years, close to the only things that Rainbowfist ever had in her schedule were school and practice. She would wake up at 5:30 am and run skating drills for an hour before going to school, coming back to the rink and having another practice that lasted until well into the night. However, she says that it was never too much.

“There were times when I slipped into feeling like I had to do this. I had wanted to play hockey for so long, and then I almost started to feel like I had to. But my coaches, after I told them about what I liked about the sport, did a good job of doing things that I liked. They made sure that I was always buying in.”

From there, Rainbowfist spent two years with an Austrian Junior team out of Innsbruck that played in one of the lower tiers. When she turned 17, her team encouraged her to try and move up and make herself eligible for the VHLM draft. The deadline to declare for the draft was fast approaching and if she wanted to play in the upcoming season, she had to make it official sooner rather than later. P.A.R. was certainly good enough to go in the draft. She was projected at the time to be the 48th ranked prospect in the draft and she was on the younger end as far as age goes. In all likelihood she would get selected somewhere in the 40s. Rainbowfist says that she was hesitant at first, but eventually her teammates won her over.

“I thought that it was a bad idea. My family had already moved from Eritrea to Austria, and the league has teams all over the world. Me travelling so much after that big of a move seemed like a not good idea. And I had found a place where I felt so much joy. Playing on that team was special. I said no at first. But they kept trying. They told me that they had dreamt of one day playing in the league. Each one of them had a team that they wanted desperately to play for, which was so odd to me. The teams in the minor league were on the other side of the world. It seemed so crazy to me. It took the whole season for them to convince me. I actually declared for the draft the day after our final game before the tournament for the championship.”

“But I’m here now. Watch out VHL. I’m coming for you.”

was a fantastic read. love her name. Welcome to the league

[Vice 408]

Great work, Aos! Love the article! Glad to see you're getting the hang of things!!

[Alex 3,244]

Amazing job! It's always good to see new players doing Media spots! Keep up the good work!

[diamond_ace 3,112]

I used to have teams in another league from Africa (Abidjan Elephants were the main team, Nairobi Rhinos were the farm, and yes I know they're complete opposite sides of the continent) so I'm especially happy to see someone else embracing the idea of African hockey. Great article, hope to play alongside you in the future

[AostheGreat 21]

I hope this works.

[Vice 408]

1 hour ago, AostheGreat said:

I hope this works.

I think it worked...

[Thunfish 72]

On 11/20/2021 at 2:34 AM, diamond_ace said:

I used to have teams in another league from Africa (Abidjan Elephants were the main team, Nairobi Rhinos were the farm, and yes I know they're complete opposite sides of the continent) so I'm especially happy to see someone else embracing the idea of African hockey. Great article, hope to play alongside you in the future

Ah, hey, I remember that! Think I have their logo somewhere in my notebook still.

 

Oh, I also liked the article, pretty nice.

Edited November 21, 2021 by Thunfish

[diamond_ace 3,112]

10 minutes ago, Thunfish said:

Ah, hey, I remember that! Think I have their logo somewhere in my notebook still.

 

Oh, I also liked the article, pretty nice.

If you don't, it's not hard to recreate. Just look up the logo for the Ivory Coast national soccer team, and turn the soccer ball into a puck. 

[AostheGreat 21]

Here I go again...

[AostheGreat 21]

Last time.