WINSLOW — Seven days before their first scheduled practice, the Winslow High School girls ice hockey players found out they will in fact have a team this winter.

At its meeting Monday evening at the Winslow Junior High School library, the Winslow School Board voted 5-1 to fund the team this season.

Several of the Winslow players attended the meeting and were in tears in the hallway afterward.

“There’s been a lot of rumors about how they were definitely going to cut it,” said junior Paige Veilleux. “It was just really nerve-wracking, because I had no idea what I would do without it. I’ve been playing since fifth grade. It was really scary.”

The board said at a meeting in April that it would vote to adjust the budget to add the team if it could prove there was enough players interested. During Monday’s meeting, Winslow athletic director Jason Briggs said 17 players wrote down their names at the most recent sign-up on Friday, and two parents of potential players have contacted him since that time.

Briggs said Winslow explored fielding a cooperative program with another school, such as Lawrence and Skowhegan do for boys ice hockey.

“There was zero interest amongst the surrounding schools,” Briggs said. “That goes 30 miles south, southwest. There might be some community members that want it but administration is not willing to support it.”

Eric Haley, the superintendent of AOS 92, asked Winslow girls ice hockey coach Chris Downing about the team’s history with injuries.

“Last year, we played with 11 when we started and we finished with all 11,” Downing said. “The year before, we had 14 and we finished with 13.”

Haley outlined the costs of running the program last season: $9,162.75 for coaches’ stipends, $5,211 for travel and $10,930.16 for things like supplies, officials fees and ice time.

That total comes to $25,303.91, and since that is not in the budget Haley was asked where the money to fund the program would come from.

“You folks are my bosses,” Haley said. “If you tell me you want that program it’s my job to go find that money. I don’t know. At this point I’ve got some ideas, but I guess I didn’t want to put my time into trying to manipulate that budget until I found out what the (vote) of the board was.”

Gary Libby, the vice president of the Winslow girls ice hockey boosters, thanked people for their support after the vote and in an interview later Veilleux did the same, singling out board member John Ferry.

“It means so much,” Veilleux said, “especially with Mr. Ferry — someone who’s been coaching basketball for so long — stepping up to say, ‘hey, girls hockey is something that we should support.’ It means so much that all these people are taking the time and effort to support us.”

The Black Raiders will return only four players from last season’s team, and Downing admitted many of this season’s players have never played hockey before.

“That’s where you coach them,” Downing said. “Sometimes that can be good. They don’t come with any predetermined ideas and you teach them the sport for what it’s made. We did last year. We had six girls that had never played before. By the end of the season they were skating forward and backwards, they knew how to do defensive zone coverage (and) they understood the terminology. That’s our job.”

Winslow finished 2-16 last winter and has only one senior on the team this season. It’s obviously a building year, but for someone like Veilleux a building year is better than no year at all.

“I want a lot of new friends and people that are going to be able to make memories off of this,” Veilleux said. “It’s going to be a rough season. Last year was rough. We had a lot of new girls and the people that had skated previously had to slow down their game. But I think that this year will be a lot of memory-making, especially where we’re only losing one girl. We’ll have the experience next year, and I think we’ll be able to move forward and have a really good season in 2015-16.”

Matt DiFilippo — 861-9243

mdifilippo@centralmaine.com

Twitter: @Matt_DiFilippo

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