The most successful team in the history of Canadian sports never had a professional league, a national broadcast contract, or a single player who could make a living at her game. It had a rink on Lowther Street in Preston, Ontario, a set of hand-me-down sweaters, and a group of young women who were very, very good at hockey. Between 1931 and 1940 the Preston Rivulettes won ten Ontario championships and four Dominion championships, and they did it at a clip of better than 95 per cent — a winning percentage that, eight decades on, still has not been matched in women's hockey.
That record is the engine of Glory, Tracey Power's play about the Rivulettes, which comes to Prairie Theatre Exchange on the third floor of Portage Place in downtown Winnipeg on October 20, 2026, for a 7:30 p.m. performance. The play is not a documentary with a scoreboard. It is a piece of theatre built on the collision of two 1930s obsessions: hockey and swing. Power, a BC-born playwright and choreographer who has won a Sterling Award, staged the hockey sequences as dance, set to swing music with a modern edge, so that a body check and a Lindy Hop share the same vocabulary. The result is a show that treats a slap shot as choreography and a line change as a musical transition.
The story begins, as the real one did, in the summer of 1930. Two pairs of sisters — Hilda and Nellie Ranscombe, and Marm and Helen Schmuck — were playing softball together on a team called the Preston Rivulettes. When the weather turned, they wanted a winter sport. They wrote to Alexandrine Gibb, one of the most prominent sports journalists in the country, for help, and in January 1931 the team held its first practice with ten players. Nellie Ranscombe went in goal. Hilda Ranscombe and Helen and Marm Schmuck played forward. Grace Webb and Margaret Gabbitas anchored the defence, with Myrtle Parr, Pat Marriott, W. Makcrow and S. Leahy as alternates.
Herb Fach, who managed the Lowther Street Arena, coached the team, with Roy Osgood as manager. Molly Hanlon and Beatrice Collard served as chaperones — a detail that says as much about the era as any statute. In 1932 Marvin Dykeman came aboard as secretary-manager and Olive Dykeman as chaperone. Most of the original players stayed for the duration, which is part of why the team got so good: they were not assembled and reassembled each season, but grew together.
Hilda Ranscombe became the face of it. She was fast and naturally gifted enough that contemporary observers compared her to players in the National Hockey League. She was twice a finalist for the Lou Marsh Trophy, awarded to Canada's outstanding athlete of the year. The team was inducted into the Cambridge Sports Hall of Fame in 1998 as part of its inaugural class, and in 2022 the Rivulettes received the Order of Sport, marking their induction into Canada's Sports Hall of Fame.
What Power's play does with that history is insist on its context. The Rivulettes played through the Depression, when the argument that women should not occupy a rink — or a job — carried extra force. And they played as fascism was rising across the ocean, a fact the production's own description foregrounds, alongside racism within Canada's own borders. The play frames the team as a group of Canadian women determined to break barriers and follow their dreams, and it treats that determination as a political act as much as an athletic one. The title is doing double duty: glory as triumph, and glory as the thing you are told you are not entitled to.
Theatre NorthWest, which mounted the play in Prince George, British Columbia, in February 2022, described it as the true story of four women who dared to form their own powerhouse team, and noted that the record they set remains unmatched in the history of women's hockey. That production was directed by James MacDonald with Power herself choreographing, and it framed the Rivulettes explicitly as the forerunners of Cassie Campbell, Jayna Hefford and Hayley Wickenheiser — the lineage that runs from a Depression-era arena in Preston to Olympic podiums.
For a Winnipeg audience, the resonance is not abstract. Manitoba has its own deep history of women's hockey, and the city has spent years arguing about what it owes its downtown and its public spaces. Prairie Theatre Exchange, on the third floor of Portage Place at 393 Portage Avenue, has been one of the anchors of that argument. A play about a team that was told the game was not for them, staged in a downtown theatre, is not a neutral booking.
The show runs from 7:30 to 10:00 p.m. on October 20, 2026, and it is open to anyone who buys a ticket. What they will see is a company of actors doing something theatre rarely asks of them: playing a sport at speed, in period costume, in rhythm. Power's conceit is that the two forms — the swing dance and the hockey shift — are both about timing, partnership and the willingness to be exactly where someone else expects you to be. The Rivulettes, who won almost everything for a decade and are still barely known, are a good argument for the comparison.
They were not professionals. They were not famous the way the men's teams of their era were famous. They were four sisters and their friends, coached by the man who ran the local arena, chaperoned on the road, and they won at a rate no one has since equalled. Glory is what happens when someone finally decides that is a story worth putting on a stage.