Dagmar Havlova's road to the VHL, Quik overview

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So why is a 66 year old woman playing professional hockey in the VHL, and how exactly has she earned a spot on one of the two new expansion teams? It's a long story, and we'll get into the long story at another time, but for right now we'll start just a few years back. A charity hockey tournament was held between four teams comprised of celebrities, politicians and well known figures from four countries: Czech Republic, Russia, Sweden, and Finland. At that time, Dagmar Havlova was the wife of Czech president Vaclav Havel, prior to his death, and was invited to play for the team as mostly a publicity stunt. Starting as a projected third liner, Havlova climbed her way up the lines as the tournament went on, ultimately ending up as the leading scorer of the tournament.

A few scouts took notice of this, and invited her to play in the Extraliga, where again she started off near the bottom of the roster. Despite taking a season off when her husband died (a major loss nationally as well, so the league had a lot of themed matches and pre-match fanfare to honor Havel's life, much of which Havlova was a part of despite taking the season off of playing) she still managed to become one of the major stars of the league. At this point, she's been in the Extraliga for a while, and hasn't really stopped impressing, so a few VHL scouts started to look her way. Vaclav Hrdina, former VHLer, currently the coach of the CDL team the Plzen Brew, fed a few pieces of information to his mentor, Clark Marcellin, who had only recently found out his old GM was about to make a return. Marcellin passed it forward to the man he'd worked so closely with for so long, former VHL GM Jason Glasser, who ended up deciding to sign Havlova as his designated player.

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