Judy Diduck

I had just finished writing about former NHL defenseman Gerald Diduck when I realized this would be a great time to also remember his sister Judy. She was a heck of a hockey player, too.

Now Judy, born in 1966, did not necessarily have the luxuries a lot of hockey playing girls have nowadays. There were few if any girls teams, and coed teams was not welcomed by a lot of the old guard hockey coaches, administrators and event parents.

So Judy actually grew up excelling at ringette. She was one of the very first players to join ringette when the sport was introduced in her home town of Sherwood Park, Alberta. That was a powerhouse team, capturing 5 consecutive national championships from 1979 to 1983. When a world championship was created in 1990, Judy was a star player on the gold medal winning Team Alberta. All of this has resulted in her being inducted in the Ringette Canada Hall of Fame in 2005.

But was women's hockey grew in popularity in the late 1980s and 1990s, Judy found herself excelling at the game her brother was famous for. She would make the transition easily, joining the Canadian national women's hockey team for most of the 1990s. She was a member of the first four world championship teams. She also participated in the very first Olympic hockey tournament for women's hockey. In those 1998 Winter Olympic Games held in Nagano, Japan, Judy and her Canadian teammates brought home the silver medal.

Judy Diduck more or less disappeared from the national hockey scene after Nagano. She enrolled at the University of Alberta where she also played for the U of A Pandas team. After graduating she has stayed with the team as an assistant coach.

She also had her own business called Just Stuff Enterprises.