When Excellence Vanishes: The Preston Rivulettes and the Architecture of Erasure

An Intriguing Mystery Hiding in Plain Sight

I recently had the pleasure of seeing the play Glory at our local theatre. It tells a story that should be impossible—yet it's true!

Between 1933 and 1940, four women from Preston, Ontario dominated Canadian hockey with a record so extraordinary it seems almost fictional: 348 victories, 2 losses. Captain Hilda Ranscombe—later called "the Wayne Gretzky of women's hockey"—and Jewish sisters Marm and Helen Schmuck became national celebrities, drawing thousands to arenas across the country.

Then the league folded at the outbreak of WWII, and something remarkable happened: they disappeared. Not just from the ice, but from memory itself.

For nearly fifty years, women's hockey essentially ceased to exist in Canada. Glory resurrects this dynasty through fierce choreography and music that bridges their era with ours, asking a question that haunts every marginalized community: What happens when excellence itself becomes inconvenient to remember?

Human Dignity Themes & Lessons

This play embodies several principles central to human dignity work:

• Stories as Infrastructure Institutional memory matters because without it, each generation fights the same battles, unaware they're walking on ground others walked before. History shapes possibility—when we lose our stories, we lose proof that what seems impossible has already been done.

• Erasure as Violence The Rivulettes' disappearance reveals that forgetting is never neutral. To erase an achievement—especially one by women or minorities—is to declare it undeserving of memory. Silence becomes its own form of discrimination.

• Women's Rights: Progress Isn't Permanent Fifty years of women's hockey—organizational knowledge, coaching expertise, institutional support—simply disappeared. Rights and recognition gained can be taken away. The Rivulettes weren't pioneers in some primitive era; they were celebrities with radio broadcasts and corporate sponsors. Then they were systematically erased.

• Confronting Antisemitism Through Intersectionality The Schmuck sisters' story unfolds against a backdrop of rising 1930s antisemitism—Toronto's Christie Pits riot (1933), Canada's refusal of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany (1939), and systemic exclusion from clubs, universities, and public spaces. As Jewish women athletes, their perseverance exposed how layered identities create both vulnerability and strength. Their excellence wasn't just athletic—it was defiance against forces telling them they didn't belong.

• Arts Transform Erasure Into Understanding Theatre doesn't just tell us the Rivulettes were forgotten—it makes us feel that absence, that theft, that deliberate silencing. The arts can transform the abstract wound of erasure into visceral understanding and, through remembrance, into repair.

• Reclamation as Justice Telling this story now—as the PWHL establishes professional women's hockey—isn't nostalgia. It's correcting the record, honouring those who paved the way, and ensuring today's players know they stand on shoulders, not break new ground alone.

• Belonging Through Defiance The Rivulettes never asked permission to exist. They claimed space through talent, courage, and love of the game. Their dignity came not from tolerance granted, but from space they demanded and took.

Every story we recover is a foundation stone for those who follow. The Rivulettes played 350 games before history tried to forget them—but history failed. Glory proves that true excellence leaves traces no erasure can fully destroy.

For The Human Dignity Project, this story is a living lesson: the arts can transform the abstract wound of erasure into a visceral understanding of exclusion—and, through remembrance, into repair.

When we name those who were forgotten, we do more than honour the past—we build the architecture of belonging, ensuring that what was built before becomes the ground from which justice rises again.