The cover of Bea Mullins Takes a Shot by Emily Deibert. Illustration by Isabelle Duffy and design by Jade Rector.
Welcome to Cantastic Authorpalooza, featuring posts by and about great Canadian children’s book creators! Today’s guest: Emily Deibert. Take it away, Emily!
Like many tweens, one of my biggest fears growing up was embarrassing myself. I was so scared of looking silly in front of my classmates that I often didn’t let myself try new things—from learning a new dance or musical instrument to playing a new sport. I’d decided that I was safer sticking to the sidelines and staying far, far out of the spotlight. The way I saw it, never trying anything new meant never even opening myself up to the possibility of embarrassing myself.
Given all that, it will probably come as a surprise to hear that in the 11th grade, I decided to join my school’s girls’ ice hockey team—despite never playing hockey before in my life! To this day, I’m still not entirely sure how I let my friends talk me into it. But the team really needed more players, because there weren’t many girls who played hockey at our school at that time—and I figured that if we were all beginners, I couldn’t embarrass myself too badly, right?
The closer we got to our first game, the more I started to think that maybe joining the team had been a huge mistake. And when we didn’t just lose that game, but got totally crushed by the opposing team, I was certain that I’d been right. The final score? 12-0! For a teen who was terrified of failure and embarrassing herself, that loss came as a pretty harsh blow.
Except when we got back to the locker room after the game ended, I was surprised to see that the rest of my teammates didn’t really mind that we’d lost—in fact, they were just happy that we’d gotten enough girls on the team to be able to play at all! It was then that I first realized that maybe sports don’t always have to be about winning, and that maybe losing a game—even by twelve-nothing—doesn’t have to be the most embarrassing thing in the world.
A photo of my high school girls’ hockey team, the Danforth Red Hawks. Photo courtesy of Emily Deibert.
Like myself when I was a tween, the protagonist in my debut middle grade novel Bea Mullins Takes a Shot is initially very reluctant when it comes to doing anything outside of her comfort zone—least of all joining her school’s first-ever girls’ ice hockey team! Bea hasn’t skated in years, and she’s not even sure she remembers how to stop on ice skates. And while her Dad and older brother may be big-time hockey fans, Bea’s never played a game of hockey in her life—and part of her wants to keep it that way, thank you very much.
But like my high school hockey team, Bea soon comes to find that her fellow players on the Glenwood Geese always have her back—even when she falls during practice and misses passes during their games. It may take her a while, but Bea eventually realizes how cool it is to be a part of her school’s first girls’ hockey team ever. Especially given how traditionally male-dominated ice hockey has been in the past.
Today, women’s ice hockey is more popular than ever. The Professional Women’s Hockey League had a record-breaking inaugural season last year, with three Canadian teams inspiring the next generation of young women athletes. Bea looks up to these players in the book, and I look up to them in real life. And while it may have been a difficult journey for them to get there, I’m sure they knew what Bea eventually learns in the book: you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Bea Mullins Takes a Shot is available now from Random House Books for Young Readers.