One late night in the newsroom, Sandy Smith answered a call at the sports desk. Hearing a female voice on the line, the man asked her what she knew about sports.
As it turned out, she knew a lot.
“He started quizzing me about Major League Baseball and all different sports,” Smith said. “I gave him all the answers, and he said, ‘I guess you do know what you’re talking about.’ ”
As far as she knows, Smith was the first and only female sports editor at a newspaper in New Hampshire. Before stepping away from daily journalism, she spent 28 years covering sports for the Monitor, on the New Hampshire stage and at the Olympics in Nagano, Japan, and Salt Lake City, Utah. Now she’s being inducted into the New Hampshire Legends Hockey Hall of Fame this November.
“Sandy had a knack for telling a story — telling it with passion, and keeping everything very personable,” said Tara Mounsey, a two-time Olympian and Concord native whose career was inextricably tied with Smith’s own.
Always a sports junkie, Smith began her career playing Little League baseball as a child in Concord. She juggled three sports in high school but was recruited as a catcher for the Keene State College softball team, where she studied journalism and Spanish.
“I always wanted to do something in sports, but I thought, ‘Well, phys ed teachers don’t make any money, so I’ll write,’ ” she said, “not realizing that journalists don’t make any money, either.”
It was at Keene State where she first encountered ice hockey, the sport central to her career.
As a player on the girls’ club team, she got a sense for the rules of the game. But when she joined the Monitor’s staff in 1988, she plunged headfirst into the Concord boys’ hockey team’s gameplay. Of course, she also covered everything from NASCAR to softball.
But even now, she has a certain reverence for Crimson Tide hockey.
“Concord boys’ hockey is one of the best programs in the state, year in, year out, forever,” she said.
When the team won the state championship in 1992, she reveled in how the whole city came together to celebrate. It was the first “momentous” event she covered, she said. It was just the beginning.
The following year, Mounsey came on the scene, the newest defenseman — well, defensewoman — on the Concord boys’ hockey team.
“It was unheard of for a girl to play on the boys’ hockey team, but we kind of knew of her coming up, because she played on the Babe Ruth baseball team and she was one of the best players there,” Smith said. “So we knew, well, this girl is a stud.”
To end her senior season, Mounsey and the team brought home another championship ring in 1996. From there, Mounsey finally found female teammates on the ice at Brown University, where she was recruited to play women’s hockey.
But Smith and Mounsey’s paths would cross again. Mounsey joined Team USA for women’s hockey’s first appearance in the Olympic Games. Flanked by two other New Hampshire natives, Katie King and Trisha Dunn, the women would take to the ice in Nagano, Japan, in 1998.
“It was really special to have the consistency of one person,” Mounsey said. “Sandy really was the primary person covering my career.”
Smith first met with Team USA head coach Ben Smith (no relation) in the rafters of the Olympic Center in Lake Placid, N.Y., at a summer training camp. The two overlooked dozens of players practicing for their Olympic debut — but first came the pre-Olympic tour that would soon kick off in Everett Arena.
“He said, ‘We’re starting in Concord in large part because of your coverage,’ ” she said. “It really makes you feel good.”
So when the Olympic team came to town, Smith packed into the arena with 1,000 other Granite Staters.
“They saved Tara for the end, and when they announced her, I thought the roof was gonna blow off the building,” she said. “The roar, I still get shivers thinking about it. It was such an amazing atmosphere.”
The Monitor and other New England newspapers pitched in to send Smith to Japan to cover the three N.H. hockey players, in addition to any Granite Staters competing in other events. Smith also sent home columns about her experiences overseas, like a frightening taxi cab ride and a mysterious dough ball she ate downtown.
“It was the hardest I’ve ever worked, but the most fun I’ve ever had working,” she said.
Her time in Japan culminated in the women’s hockey gold-medal final, the United States vs. Canada. As the final seconds ticked away, the United States leading 3-1, Smith sat spellbound in the press row, alongside reporters from other American outlets.
“We were hitting each other, like, ‘They’re gonna win, they’re gonna win,’ ” she said. “All of us had tears in our eyes when they won. You’re supposed to be impartial, but that was such an amazing memory, seeing them win, seeing their joy.”
After a victory lap with the “New Hampshire girls” skating arm-in-arm, the players faced the media. Mounsey found Smith in the crowd, a familiar face after her years of coverage in Concord.
As they spoke, Mounsey noticed Smith’s eyes drifting toward the gold medal around her neck.
“She said, ‘You want to hold it?’ and I was like, ‘Oh my god, yes,’ ” Smith said. “That thing was so heavy.”
After she churned out a brand-new centerpiece for the next day’s paper, 13 hours ahead of Concord, she attended a no-press-allowed celebration with the USA players, coaches and families. The only condition for her presence: She couldn’t bring her notebook.
“It was neat to be in that atmosphere, to see the parents beaming with pride,” she said.
To this day, Smith runs into Mounsey’s parents and brother around Concord.
“Hockey people are like family. You get to bond with them quite a bit,” she said.
Smith returned to Concord and continued her coverage of local sports for the Monitor. Simultaneously, she wrote women’s hockey features for USA Hockey Magazine at the request of editor Harry Thompson.
When the 2002 Winter Olympics rolled around and the three Granite State women announced their return, Smith seized the opportunity to continue her coverage.
“The Olympics are the Olympics. I would do that any day, every day,” she said. “How often do you get to cover luge or bobsled or figure skating?”
So the Monitor sent her to Salt Lake City, where the U.S. women’s hockey team won a silver medal. In 2006, Dunn and King went on to win bronze in Turin, Italy, but Mounsey stayed behind, and so did Smith.
After her international reporting stint, Smith returned to her routine in Concord. In her time at the Monitor, she became a well-established fixture of the local sports scene. She covered Concord boys’ hockey for more than 20 years and forged a friendship with long-time coach Dunc Walsh. She also noticed some eerily familiar faces on the ice.
“I started seeing the sons of guys that I had covered when I first started, them playing,” she said. “It was crazy.”
Apart from the occasional high school reporter or part-timer, Smith remained the only woman on the sports desk. Regardless of what made her different from her colleagues, the newsroom camaraderie was undeniable. It still is, in fact.
Every year, Smith and her fellow sports reporters watched the Kentucky Derby together in the newsroom. They’d pick a horse at random and see who won.
“So when the Kentucky Derby comes around, here comes the text: ‘Who you picking this time?’ ” she said. “It was a family, we were all really tight. Beyond the job and the career, it was a great, great newsroom to be in.”
She credits Mike Pride for “making a family out of the Monitor,” but he also made her a better reporter.
“An amazing journalist, in his own right. We were all a little intimidated by him when we first started working for him,” she said.
So when a colleague urged her to ask Pride for advice on one of her stories, she anxiously consulted his corner office.
“But wow, what great advice. Mike would go through whatever you wrote and mark it up like crazy, but you’d learn so much from him. To be concise, to write what you see rather than just fact, fact, fact,” she said. “Just such a great mentor.”
It’s impossible to ignore the parallels between Smith and Mounsey: two women pioneering male-dominated fields, often surrounded by exclusively men. But Smith isn’t sure if that made much of a difference to Mounsey, or to any of the other Olympic women that she covered.
“They were thinking about what their job was, not so much about who’s writing about it,” she said. “They just wanted it to be out there, whether it’s me, whether it’s a Martian.”
Mounsey admitted that at the time, she never thought about the significance of being covered by a female reporter.
“What made a difference was that Sandy was a female athlete. She had a great softball career herself,” Mounsey said. “As an athlete, knowing there’s someone that understood sport as well as Sandy did really made a difference.”
Nowadays, Smith works as an appointment coordinator at Grappone Honda and an assistant coach for Concord High School’s softball team.
Apart from watching sports — she’s disgruntled by the outcome of the Stanley Cup Final, although she didn’t really want either team to win — she’s taken up genealogy. She traced her ancestry back several generations and figured out the exact port that her maternal ancestors sailed into from England and Scotland.
When she retires, she looks forward to visiting some ancestors’ burial sites in Scotland and potentially returning to sports journalism.
“Covering a game every couple of weeks, or whatever,” she said. “The fun part of it, going to games and interacting with players and coaches and parents.”
Her induction into the Hall of Fame will take place on Nov. 1.
“I’m hoping there’ll be a lot of hockey people that I’ve known throughout the years that are there,” she said. “I know a lot of people who have been inducted previously.”
One such person is Jim Rivers, inducted in 2012 for his contribution to hockey radio broadcasting. Smith occasionally joined Rivers between periods of a hockey game on his station, WKXL. Earlier this year, Rivers nominated her to the NH Legends, and in May she received her official acceptance over the phone.
“For someone to remember me from then and feel enough about what I did to nominate me was really humbling,” she said. “I was surprised. Grateful.”
