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© 2021 Bénédicte Desrus
Frida Cárdenas Castro (R), 21, one of the forwards of the Selección femenil de México de hockey sobre hielo, talks with her mother Nancy Castro Guevara (L), 49 on their way to a match at the Winter Sports Center Metepec in Metepec, State of Mexico, Mexico on February 15, 2019. The team played against the Buffalos Metepec in the “Midget” Hockey League, the score was 3-3. Frida lives with her family in Doctores, a working class neighborhood in Mexico City. She is in her second year of marketing at the Mexico Anáhuac University, where she has a high performance athlete scholarship. She started roller in-line hockey at age 6 and transitioned to ice hockey at age 14. Her family is also athletic and supportive of her hockey-related endeavors, her younger sister Ivana is on the under 18 of the Selección femenil de México de hockey sobre hielo. “For me, going to university and training is really hard because in comparison with other countries, they have rinks, loads of rinks, and for us, we’re asking ourselves ‘where are we going to train’?,” she says. Founded in 2012, the Selección femenil de México de hockey sobre hielo is the first and only women’s national ice hockey team in Mexico, a country where ice rinks are expensive and rare. In the 2017 IIHF Women's World Championship Division II in Iceland, the team defied expectations; They won Group B, securing their promotion to Group A, and became the only Mexican ice hockey team to have achieved such a feat. This year, they are competing in the 2019 IIHF Women's World Championship Division II in Scotland. Having become the first Mexican team to advance to the second round of the Winter Olympics qualifiers in 2016, the now self-financed team are training for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, hoping to be the first Latin American team to compete in ice hockey. (Photo by Bénédicte Desrus)
