Catherine Dubois’s road to a standard player contract happened one day at a time. Dubois and the rest of her PWHL Montreal teammates returned from Toronto on Saturday, and the 28-year-old Quebec City native didn’t know what was next.
Friday night’s game in Toronto was the last game on her second 10-day contract. The PWHL Collective Bargaining Agreement allows a player to sign a maximum of two 10-day contracts per season before a player must sign a standard contract to play games. Dubois started the season on the team’s reserve roster but played seven of the team’s first 10 games, scoring one goal.
On Saturday night, she received a call from Montreal general manager Danièle Sauvageau telling her that she would be signed to a full contract and playing in Sunday’s game. The team opened up a roster spot because defender Dominika Lásková was being placed on long-term injured reserve.
“It’s a childhood dream,” Dubois said after the game. “I’m very happy, I’m very relieved. There was a lot of stress not knowing what was going to happen. It ate at me.”
Her first call after getting the news from Sauvageau was to her parents, and the weight of the past few months made that call full of emotion.
“I cried,” Dubois said. “As soon as Danièle told me I was on a full contract that I had my chance to play [Sunday] I just cried. It was all the emotions bottled up. I called my parents first […] It was an emotional moment. We all cried together. I come from an emotional family, a family of workers, we had nothing come easy in life and we succeed despite everything and I think this was the result of our efforts. I say result but I’m not finished working. It’s the culmination of years of work and I wouldn’t be here without my parents so the first thing I did was thank them for all their support.”
Dubois has had a roller coaster in her hockey career. She represented Canada at the Under-18 Worlds in 2012 and 2013 before attending the Université de Montréal. Kidney issues forced her to miss part of the 2016-17 and put her hockey career in jeopardy. She ended up playing two years in the PWHPA before playing 24 games in the PHF with the Montreal Force last season. She had two goals and four assists. She went undrafted in the PWHL draft but earned a training camp invite to Montreal. She made an impression in Utica during the pre-season evaluation camp and the team kept her on the reserve roster before injuries gave her an opportunity to get into regular season games.
She is listed at 5’10, and 174 pounds and says that the increased physicality in the PWHL has helped her use her talents to their fullest.
“I’m big and strong and people think when you’re big and strong that it’s easy for me but it’s the opposite,” she said. “I need to make sure that I’m the strongest and the fastest and it takes a lot of work to be strong in hockey. I’m lucky that I have the shape I do and now with the physicality of the PWHL I can take advantage of it. In the past I couldn’t use my body fully because I was often penalized for that. I needed to change who I was, how I played and now I can use it.”
While practicing on the reserve roster and trying to stake a claim to a regular spot, it could be easy to try and change your game but Dubois focused on what got her to where she was.
“I didn’t change anything in my game,” Dubois said. “I’m a girl who works hard, who never gives up and I kept things single and did what I did best. The main difference now is that I am confident in myself and before I wasn’t. I think what really helped was the love from the fans and the people around me, my family, everyone in the organization and I really feel the love and that they want me to succeed so that’s really what has motivated me.”
Even with the increased confidence, she wasn’t sure if the contract would ever come.
“Every day I thought that I wouldn’t have the chance to play on a full contract,” she said. “You doubt yourself, you wonder what else can I do, what did I do wrong, but at the end of the day, I play hockey because I love it and I couldn’t stop working. I couldn’t stop thinking that one day I’ll make it. I had to listen to myself and go through it and thank God it happened.”
On top of playing with the first unit on the power play, she took a regular shift with Marie-Philip Poulin on Sunday along with Claire Dalton.
“She’s very predictable and predictable in a good way,” said Montreal head coach Kori Cheverie. “We know what we’re going to get, she’s going to go hard, she’s going to get pucks out of the corner and she’s going to create a lot of 50-50 pucks. With Dalton and Dubois, they take that opportunity and run with it. They’re not scared to make mistakes they just want to do what’s right.”
“When you say Marie-Philip Poulin, usually that’s the first line,” Dubois said. “In a game, everything can happen. Kori can change things. You need to be ready for anything. I need to play the same style of game that I play when I play with Poulin or anyone else. It’s fun to play with her, she’s just so good but also you have to make life easier for her. Sometimes you think she can do everything because she’s so good but you need to help her a bit more.”
With seven games under her belt before Sunday, it’s not out of the question that she was drawing the attention of the other five PWHL teams. She has been playing on Montreal’s top power play unit (and scored the team’s first, and prior to Sunday only, power play goal), and other teams knowing that Montreal was limited with what they could offer her may have made an approach. In the end, the fact that this opportunity comes in Montreal is the cherry on top.
“It means everything to play in front of those fans,” she said. “Montreal, our fans are just the best. My grandmother saw me play and she hasn’t seen me play in 15 years so it was just amazing to play in front of them. I had nephews coming and I called them last night at 9 p.m. and I was ‘hey I’m playing’ so they were like ‘we’re all coming’ and we managed to make it happen. The Montreal fans… I’m so lucky. The love I get from them is unbelievable. Sometimes I talk to my friends and I’m like how is it possible that I get so much love. People are so kind to me and to all of us. It’s amazing.”
