When the Santa Clarita Flyers 12-and-under girls’ hockey team arrived at The Cube Wednesday night – their home rink – many rituals honoring their return awaited.
There were the fellow hockey players flanking their entrance with raised sticks, the phone call in the locker room from Rep. George Whitesides, D-Agua Dulce, the teddy bears distributed to each player, and in a final on-the-rink ceremony, speeches from City Council members and state Rep. Suzette Martinez Valladares, R-Acton.
Fresh off of winning the Western Girls Hockey League 12U title on Sunday, taking home a 1-0 score in overtime, the girls had a lot to be proud of, but in the overwhelming environment of being shepherded from room to room for their accolades, it was sometimes hard to tell what the young Flyers were thinking.
But in the moments when the tragic van crash that’d drawn national attention last week was directly acknowledged, that the team had lost the father of a player, 38-year-old Manuel Alejandro Lorenzana Villegas, those feelings were suddenly written on their faces.
As the girls milled around the locker room, slowly getting their full set of gear on for what some of them had just realized wasn’t even a practice, Whitesides made a call to 12AA girls head coach Todd Stelnick.
After Whitesides congratulated the Flyers on the strength that they had demonstrated to the Santa Clarita Valley, he offered his support to player Brody Lorenzana and her family however he could.
“The loss of Manny – a loving father from Chatsworth – is so heartbreaking, and I know that his absence is felt deeply by you and your families,” Whitesides said, referencing the hockey dad who was killed in the crash when a snowplow veered off course in their path on Interstate 70 in Colorado. “I just want you to know that you have the whole community to support you, including myself and anything we can do from my team.”
In that moment – not all at once, or even as if others were copying the motion, but in an organic stream – the girls put their hands on Lorenzana, a tiny girl in a pink sweater and pink-and-blue shoelaces.
The energy the girls carried with them when they were around each other was hard to bottle at times. It felt reflexive to let them burst into “California Girls” at will, or attempt, sort of, to sing the national anthem when the idea was floating around for one of them to sing it on the rink.
When they got on the ice – the 12-and-unders lining up behind the home side of the rink’s blue line, the 14-year-old Lady Flyers across from them – they were all impressive poise. At a carpeted island in the middle of the rink, various council members stood with Valladares to deliver their addresses.
When Valladares spoke, she said her intention was to speak from the perspective of a mother, who knew that the emotional fallout from the last two weeks was destined to be contradictory and intense.
“It’s OK to feel proud and to feel heartbroken at the same time,” Valladares said. “It’s OK to celebrate and grieve. Both can exist together. You are champions, not just because of what you achieved on the ice, but because of who you are in the face of adversity. Tonight, we cheer for you. Tonight, we hold you close, and tonight we remind you and your families … that you are not alone.”
