Linda Sinrod still playing hockey, even at age 83 -

The steady drumbeat of rain was the loudest sound in the building.

It was a quiet night in August, in the lingering wake of summer thunderstorms, and there was just one game left at MedStar Capitals Iceplex, the practice facility for the Washington Capitals. Earlier, at the other end of the building, two teams played for the championship of a men’s league, which meant there was a cheering section in the stands and there were raucous celebrations for the winning team. But the rink was just about empty now, with janitorial staffers outnumbering spectators.

It was the first round of the playoffs for the Capitals Women’s Hockey League. As the two teams, one in green and the other in gold, took the ice, they settled into the circuit of warmup laps. At first glance, there was nothing unusual about the scene. Nothing except for one player: Linda Sinrod.

Most octogenarians start to slow down from their sporting pursuits as they cross into their ninth decade of life. At an age when most of her peers are walking carefully and hoping to avoid the dreaded broken hip, the 83-year-old Sinrod chooses to step on the ice and compete each week. There isn’t body-checking in this league, but the risks for a player of Sinrod’s age aren’t hidden. She has loved this game for more than half her life now, though. She has no plans to stop anytime soon.

‘Why not?’

Even when Sinrod first started playing hockey nearly 50 years ago in 1975, she was often the oldest member of her team. At 35, she was skating on the pond at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale when she was approached by Marilyn Schnibbe, one of the founders of the Washington Redcoats. The Redcoats, now known as the Wolves, were the first women’s hockey team in the D.C. area, and Schnibbe needed more players.

“Why not?” Sinrod thought.

“It sounded great,” she recalls now. “And that’s how it started.”

As a former collegiate figure skater — she was attempting leaps when Schnibbe approached her — Sinrod had to borrow hockey skates for her first practice. Despite her inexperience, Sinrod welcomed the challenge of learning the new sport — once she figured out how to stop on the new-to-her skates.

“It took a little while,” Sinrod said, chuckling. “Plus my wind wasn’t so great, either. My heartbeat was really racing when I got home. Stayed that way for a while.”

Sinrod’s son, Peter Baker, was 8 years old when his mother started playing hockey. It didn’t occur to him until later that not every mom was gearing up and hitting the ice late Sunday nights.

“If your mother always does something, it doesn’t strike you as being unusual or rare until you realize that it is,” said Baker, who is the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times. “She just always did that, so of course that’s what moms do, except not a lot of moms, it turns out. … She was often the oldest one on the team, even way back then, before our current situation. But even then, she just was always as competitive as all of them.”

The Redcoats spent their first three seasons getting their bearings, practicing once a week and playing occasional games against local competition. By 1978, they were a full-fledged member of the Mid-Atlantic Women’s Hockey League and traveled up the East Coast on the weekends for games against teams based in Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

Nancy Smalley, a member of the CWHL alongside Sinrod who also played with her on the Redcoats in the 1980s, remembers those road trips fondly.

“Oh, we have so many stories from the road,” Smalley said. “Just piling in cars. We weren’t going in buses or anything. We were just all piling in cars and driving up the Jersey turnpike. Back then, doing it on the cheap because we were all fresh out of college and didn’t have a lot of money. … We were just so supportive of one another and continue [to be]. These are some of my best friends still to this day.”

The Redcoats became the Wolves in 1994, but by then, Sinrod had temporarily hung up her skates. In 1985, at 45, she decided to return to school and complete a computer science degree at the University of Maryland, with the promise to herself that she’d be back on the ice when she was 50.

Life, as it often does, got in the way of that plan. And suddenly it had been two decades, rather than five years. In 2006, 21 years after stepping away from the Redcoats and 16 years after her planned return, Sinrod came back to hockey — and she hasn’t left since.

“I was looking up some of my old teammates, and I happened to see that the Prince William Wildcats were being coached by someone named Rosemary Warren, who was on the very first Redcoats,” Sinrod said. “I called her up, talked to her, and I said I was interested in coming back and playing.”

Still wearing the plastic Micron skates she purchased in 1979, Sinrod quickly got back up to speed and returned to the MAWHL for another nine seasons. Self-admittedly, Sinrod was never the fastest skater, and at 75, time had slowed her to the point that she couldn’t keep up in the higher-paced league.

That’s when she joined the CWHL, which began in the mid-2000s and has been supported by the Capitals since 2021.

‘Strong both physically as well as mentally’

To stay in shape for hockey, now that she plays in a league without practices, Sinrod cycles in her neighborhood or rides a stationary bike at least twice a week — she raises it to three times when the CWHL isn’t playing — and lifts weights twice a week.

“I should be worried about her, because let’s face it, it’s probably not the safest thing in the world for an 82-year-old mom to do,” said Baker, who spoke before his mother’s 83rd birthday this year. “But I don’t really worry about her because I think she’s strong both physically as well as mentally, and she knows her limits and her capacities. I’ve always been very proud of her.”

Sinrod has already been certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest female hockey player. And she has planned to break her own record. But that day won’t be until she’s ready to hang up her skates, this time for good.

“I could do it right now if I wanted to, because when I got my original record it was two years ago,” Sinrod said. “But I think I’ll wait awhile.”

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