The coach left everything behind when she fled. She abandoned her home and all her family’s possessions — all the garments in the closet, all the food in the cupboard. Shazia took only the clothes she wore and the burka that kept her face hidden. With no vehicles available, she left town on foot in the crush of others fleeing. Her identity papers were hidden amongst the children running with her.
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Shazia, the coach, left behind the playground at the school where she’d slowly built the ice surface between the white boards, packing down the snow that filled the hillside of the mountains that rose beyond Kabul. Each morning she added more snow, carefully covering the rising surface, smoothing it with her shovel, making sure that it was level. At night, she flooded it with water, so the evening freeze would harden the soft patches and keep the ice from falling apart.
She followed the instructions for building the rink meticulously, just as she did with the videos she watched online of an odd game from a faraway place. Shazia learned alongside the girls she taught — first finding their balance on shoes affixed with blades and practicing movements in the bulky equipment strapped to their shins and shoulders. Together, they learned how to chase the ball that they struck with curved sticks — and how to hit it into the nets at each end of the snowy surface.
The coach, whose name has been changed for this story for her protection, left behind the laughter of each tumble and the joy of each completed stride, the cheers when a student scored a goal or the goalie knocked aside a shot. She remembered the curious looks of the other students on the sidelines through those early weeks of hockey, when they played for an hour each day. She thought of how intrigued they were to join the club — how so many players signed up that she had to add an extra hour-long practice to meet demand. More than 40 girls learned to skate and shoot on the rink she tended on a hillside in Kabul. Enough to make four teams that played each other after their practices. Each day brought progress — more balance, stronger strides, quicker shots. The girls consumed videos to learn new skills and learn about the heroes of their game.
They’d been taught to dream big dreams — and work to achieve them. The ice held future doctors, teachers, scientists and writers. There were lawyers who’d one day dedicate their careers to ensuring that women in their country never faced the pain their mothers had. Some dreamed of, one day, playing hockey for their country — proudly competing on the kind of rink they saw in the videos they watched, against the nations of those faraway heroes.
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As they fled, they left behind each other — each scattering to new villages and towns, hidden and unknown — to escape retribution for learning and for playing.
But the Hockey Girls of Kabul refused to abandon the goals they shared. They’d speak of them each day, through secret messages online, staying connected despite the risk. They’d pursue them in hiding, defying the forbidden with each online lesson taken, every hockey highlight shared.
As Shazia left that day — Aug. 15, 2021 — the coach held on to hope that her players might one day find some way back to the snow-packed rink beneath the mountains and the dreams they found there.
Zarmina Nekzai looked at the field beside the girls’ school in the northern region of Kabul where she grew up and imagined a hockey rink. The space was flat and wide — the perfect spot to lay concrete and build a wall to surround the surface. A nearby well could provide water for the ice.
That day in late 2017, Nekzai imagined hockey being played across Afghanistan — by girls and boys, women and men — a game that she’d witnessed bring so much joy to people in Canada, the country she now called home.
A neighbor in the community in north Toronto where she and her young family settled told her about the sport and helped her register her son, Baktage, who’d been born just a few days after the family first arrived in Canada. Her daughter, Hooria, took up the game too. Nekzai took them to practices several times a week and proudly thumped the drum she brought to the stands during each of their games.
As a young girl in Afghanistan, Nekzai wasn’t allowed to go to school, to shop, or to visit family and friends without a man’s permission. But her father was supportive and encouraged her to study. She finished elementary school and then high school, after several stops and starts through regime changes. As a teenager, she decided to dedicate her life to fighting for women’s rights and pursued a path to becoming a teacher.
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When she was 20 years old, Nezkai was on a bus with 18 others to teach in remote regions of Afghanistan when it was hijacked by Hezb-e Islami terrorists as the teachers left Kabul. The hostages were taken into the mountains. Nekzai was struck by the butt of a gun, cutting open her leg as she fell into rocks. The open wound bled throughout the day into the evening, as each hostage was questioned about their teaching practices. Some were tortured.
Three women — including one mother of three kids — were separated from the others. They were never found and are believed to have been killed. Nekzai lived and taught next to one of the victims in a remote village where they’d been posted together.
The army swept in later that evening, freeing the hostages that remained. Nezkai had nearly bled to death by the time she was given medical attention. A wide scar across her leg reminds her of that day.
Nekzai left Afghanistan three years later, in 1984 — along with her husband and three-month-old daughter — after a rocket struck her family’s home, killing her father and severely injuring her mother and three of her siblings. They fled to Pakistan, where they lived until the family was sponsored by an aunt living in Canada, allowing her, her husband and daughter to immigrate in 1988.
In 2010, Nekzai returned to her homeland to help develop a program for women to learn how to create handmade items that could be sold to provide an income and build a better life for themselves and their families. Though she’d built a new life in Canada and a career as a teacher, she’d vowed to never forget about Afghanistan and the women who lived there. In the years that followed, Nekzai made several trips back to Kabul and other regions.
In December 2016, Nekzai returned to work with a group of volunteers at a school that helped prepare clothes for newborns at the hospital in the region where she’d grown up.
During recess one day at Mir Bacha Kot Girls High School, Nekzai gave a few students some balls that she had brought from Canada for them to play with. She watched as the girls kicked the balls around the yard, delighted in the chaos of a makeshift game. The scene reminded Nekzai of hockey. She wondered what it would be like for the Afghan girls to learn that sport, too. The seasons in the region mirrored those of Canada, with the winter bringing temperatures cold enough for an outdoor rink.
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The field beside the school marked the perfect spot.
Back in Canada, Nekzai researched how to build an outdoor rink and consulted with experts in the art of ice-making. She secured funding through the local Rotary Club in North York, Ontario, where she and her husband, Khalil, now lived. Along with the work of their now adult children, Hooria and Baktage, the Nekzai family raised enough money to pay for the materials and labor. They secured enough skates, helmets, sticks and pads for dozens of girls to play.
In October 2017, Khalil went to Kabul to oversee the construction of the rink. He worked from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day alongside a hired crew — leveling the ground, laying concrete, building a wall, installing drainage and piping from a nearby well to flood the ice. The rink was about 30 meters long and 20 meters wide. Nekzai organized the shipment of 50 boxes of hockey gear from Canada on a cargo plane.
As winter fell in early 2018, they started to build the ice. They worked slowly, as they’d learned how to do from the many backyard rink experts back in Canada, flooding it so a thin layer of ice would freeze each night. The ice would melt to mush each day, but they added more water, slowly building the substance and strength of the surface until it sat a full foot deep.
Nekzai asked one of the local teachers to oversee the ice and the new hockey program. The new coach learned the intricacies of caring for the ice and the peculiarities of a frozen game through the videos Nekzai downloaded for her.
Shazia smoothed the slush with her shovel and continued flooding the surface each night.
Fatima had never seen equipment like this before. The odd shoes with blades affixed to the bottom, the bulky plastic knee pads, the rigid gloves, the round helmet with a clear shield — and a long stick with a hook at the end.
It was a funny game, she thought. But it was exciting. And on top of all that, they were expected to glide on ice?
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She couldn’t wait to learn how.
The girls first practiced skating on rollerblades, just as the instructional videos Shazia showed them suggested. They learned the rules in classrooms, studying like they did math and science. They practiced holding the sticks and passing the balls back and forth. They watched videos of how faraway experts played the sport, mimicking their moves and taking small strides toward the same.
Fatima found the new sport exhilarating. As a student, she loved English and mathematics — but the hour of school dedicated to sports each day was always her favorite. They played soccer, volleyball and basketball. But nothing captured her imagination like the game that would let her glide on ice.
“When we started playing hockey, I couldn’t fall asleep at night because I was so excited to go to school and play,” Fatima says in Dari, through a translator.
She’d grown up in the community, about 40 kilometers from the heart of Kabul. At 15 years old, Fatima had always been able to attend school. She’d been encouraged to dream of becoming whatever she hoped to be.
She dreams of being a lawyer, she says: “A defender of women’s rights.”
“And a great hockey player,” Fatima adds. (Her name has also been changed for this story.)
A goalie, to be specific. That was the position she loved most. Fatima loved to prevent her friends from scoring.
For three years, she worked toward that dream. Step by step, they learned the skills they need to play the game. Then slowly learned the flow and rhythm needed to take the game to the ice. They moved past the practices to playing matches against each other — to feel the rush of a goal, and the thrill of stopping one.
But even as the game became less foreign, as it became part of who they were and what they did, to Fatima the best feeling came in the early days. The progression from wheels to blades — from wobbling on the “hockey shoes,” as she calls them, to those first brief glides, like floating.
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It was hard. Frustrating, at times. But that’s the part she loved the most. Not the glide itself, but all the tumbles that came before. It was seeing the younger girls peeking over the boards, watching the older ones learn to move on ice.
“When others were watching us playing hockey, they were kind of simultaneously learning something from that sport. We were falling down and were standing up, to get to where we planned to,” Fatima says. “So many people give up when they fall down. But you shouldn’t give up on something that you want to achieve.”
When Fatima is able to sleep at night, she dreams about hockey. She dreams about being able to tie up her skates again and step back onto the ice on the small rink next to the school by the mountains in the region she once called home.
But she is somewhere else now. She can’t say where. Her family fled that day in August as the Taliban neared. They didn’t expect the government to fall so fast, or for the Taliban to move in so quickly.
“But that was our reality. That happened,” says Fatima, now 19. “At that time, we left our community, our home — we tried to cover ourselves with a scarf or a burka, to not be identified by anyone in our community because the Taliban was on the verge of entering our community.”
They fled because they knew that was all they could do to survive. They knew the Western sport was forbidden, especially for girls, and the families of anyone who played it could be in danger for letting them. The men in her family would be punished first, she says. But her life was at risk, too.
“That was a difficult and saddening day for me and my family members,” she says of the day they left. “That was all because of me. And I feel very sad about that.”
All of the students left. The coach and all the other teachers. Some tried to make it to the airport as the last Western planes departed. Others fled for the borders. Some made it to Pakistan. Others to India. But most remained, hidden and afraid of the rules and retribution to come.
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The public executions were well known and documented — with videos circulating through social media and messaging apps, ensuring that those who failed to fall in line knew what would follow. But it was the disappearing that haunted most. It was the movement at night. Retribution in the dark, where people vanished and were never seen again.
That threat was constant. Had someone identified them when they went out to buy food? Had they been noticed as a stranger in a new city? The fear was as unyielding as the hope that an outside government might offer a way for them to leave that place.
Shazia, the coach, remains in hiding too. She feels responsible for the girls she taught and learned the game with — but knows there is little she can do for them now. Everyone back in the community they came from knows that she was the teacher who cared for the ice and taught the girls to play. She’d become known as the hockey coach — and for that alone, she could be killed.
But she speaks to the players still, connecting with each as they hide and hope.
The Hockey Girls of Kabul — as they became known, as Nekzai told their stories — remained together, despite the unknown distance between them. They spoke through messaging apps, even though the Taliban had found ways to infiltrate and expose dissenting groups. They shared memories of the game they learned to play together. They shared updates of their lives in hiding and hopes for where they might end up.
And as they remained connected through the messages they shared in secret, they continued to learn together too.
Fatima still plans to be a lawyer. Others plan to be journalists, scientists, politicians and doctors. Shazia will continue to teach and will always be their coach. They learn in secret, hidden but unwilling to let the threats keep them from that pursuit.
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They study through the online school Nekzai has built in Canada – the Parry Sound International School — named for the Ontario lakeside community where she now lives. She continues to lobby the Canadian government to find a place for the players in Canada, while paying for rent and food for those whose families made it to Islamabad.
The rink they built sits empty now, a pad of grey concrete surrounded by a brick half-wall painted white. A sign marking its official opening back in 2018 was ripped down after the Taliban returned. The skates, helmets, sticks, pads and jerseys that the players wore are now hidden away, locked and quietly protected.
A dream preserved — if not for this generation, maybe for future daughters — a hope that however distant, one cold morning near the mountains the Hockey Girls of Kabul will glide again.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic. Photos: Courtesy Zarmina Nekzai. Unsplash.)
