Given the members of our group consist of three Dartmouth women’s ice hockey players, we thought it would be very interesting to learn about how folklore is both similar and different amongst our main competitors, other Ivy League women’s ice hockey teams. Dartmouth in particular has many rituals and superstitions that occur before games. These traditions have developed over time and continue on each year, as they have been passed down from past players to current players. As we took a closer look into each 2021-22 Ivy League hockey teams and the individual players on them, we analyzed their superstitions to see if there were common tendencies with their game day routines. 

For this collection project we interviewed 12 women (at least one from each Ivy League Women’s Hockey team). We interviewed them over FaceTime to create an open and casual environment so each informant would be comfortable sharing their individual and team superstitions. These informants ranged from freshman-seniors in college. From these 12 informants, we were able to gather 18 different items of folklore.

We tried to get a range of perspectives from each hockey team, and each person we talked to provided a new view on the way we look at superstitions and how we interpret them – specifically amongst the women’s ivy league ice hockey teams.