Hockey

Just as Steve Yzerman will for the next week or so, Melody Davidson, head coach of Canada's women's Olympic hockey team, agonized for months over the final cuts to her 21-player roster.

The talent pool is so deep on the women's side, the gap between the last few choices so narrow, that Davidson waited until the final weekend before Christmas before making her decisions.

Ultimately, Davidson went to a mostly tried-and-true group. With one exception - Cherie Piper in, Gillian Ferrari out - Davidson went with the team that represented Canada at the 2009 world championship, the one that lost in the final to the United States for the second year in a row.

It looks as if Canada has made demonstrable gains since then, having won all four exhibition games between the two teams by a combined score of 18-7.

Most recently, Canada knocked off the U.S. by a lopsided 6-2 count in a game last Tuesday in Calgary. With two more exhibitions to go, the Canadian team is coming together nicely, according to team captain Hayley Wickenheiser.

"I look at our performance from last year in the world championship until now, and it's night and day, the difference," Wickenheiser said.

"Just the way we play as a team - puck movement, confidence, our younger players stepping up and feeling more confident that they can contribute - we have improved quite a bit.

"What the U.S. is doing or not doing isn't really as important because we all know it comes down to one game anyway, if you get there, and you've got to get there.They're still a good team. Some of those games could have gone either way, but I like the way we're playing now and how our group is coming together."

Even though the guard is slowly changing, many of the names unveiled yesterday were familiar ones: Wickenheiser, Jennifer Botterill, Jayna Hefford and Becky Kellar will all be back for their fourth Winter Olympics (Wickenheiser also competed for Canada in a Summer Games in softball).

Yesterday, Davidson needed to drop two players who'd been training with the team since August in order to get down to the 21-player roster - Ferrari and 20-year-old Jennifer Wakefield from the University of New Hampshire, who went to the worlds as an alternate last year and has recently missed time with a broken hand.

Wakefield is an up-and-comer who will probably figure in the mix for 2014 in Sochi. Ferrari, on the other hand, is a 29-year-old from Thornhill, Ont., who was on the 2006 team that won the gold medal in Turin and was extremely popular with her teammates.

Ferrari plays club hockey alongside about a quarter of the national team on the Calgary Oval X-Treme of the Western Women's Hockey League.

"It was tough, really difficult," Davidson said of the decision to drop Ferrari.

"Gillian has a lot of connections to the team, so it was tough for the team as well. It was close, we had the seven [defencemen]. In the end, we felt the D we kept were a little more mobile, that was really it."

Unlike the men's team, which has a 23-player roster, the women were restricted to 18 position players plus three goaltenders. If there are any injuries between now and the opening of the Vancouver Games, they have until Feb. 12 to make a roster switch.

Prior to yesterday's announcement, three other players who'd been centralized with the team since August - Delaney Collins, Brianne Jenner and Jocelyne Larocque - had also been cut.

Meaghan Mikkelson, who played forward at the worlds last year, shifts to defence for 2010 and Piper rounds out the complement up front.

"It's the toughest cut I've been through because it was so close and it could have gone either way," Wickenheiser said. "Gillian keeps things light. She brought the team along - and together - off the ice, but at the same time, they had to pick the team that they think is going to win.

"You mourn the loss and then you have to accept that this is the team that we have, and this team can be successful."

Wickenheiser, who recently scored her 300th point internationally for Canada, will have Hefford and Caroline Ouellette as assistant captains. Gillian Apps, grand-daughter of Hall of Famer Syl Apps Sr., also made the team and is Canada's tallest player at six feet. Defenceman Carla MacLeod is the shortest at 5 foot 4.

"It's an interesting mix," Wickenheiser said. "We have all those veterans, plus seven new Olympians who have never played before that will be counted on to play a bigger role than younger players have been in the past.

"So I think it's the old Scotty Bowman thing. You've got the ones who've won and the ones who haven't and you need a good mix of both, and that's this team."