Yard perseveres on path from hockey Olympian to prominent role in NHL

As part of the NHL's celebration of Gender Equality Month, NHL.com will be featuring women in hockey throughout March. Today, Chie Chie Yard, who played for Japan in the 1998 Nagano Olympics and is a vice president in the NHL's Events Department.

The road Chie Chie Yard traveled through hockey to a prominent place in the NHL has been a long and winding one, but one that has perfectly positioned her to find success.

A vice president in the NHL's events department, Yard is one of the linchpins of the group that stages each of the League's tent-pole events, including the Stanley Cup Final, NHL All-Star Game, the Global Series European games and, most recently, NHL Outdoors at Lake Tahoe.

The 49-year-old started as an intern at the NHL in the events department in 1998 and has steadily risen through the ranks. Her hockey journey started almost 20 years before her arrival at the NHL with an introduction to the sport as a 4-year-old.

Yard's parents had emigrated from Japan and settled in Houston. A family friend who was into hockey asked to take Yard's older brother, Teppei, to the rink to learn to skate.

"My brother got hooked on hockey," she said. "Of course, because I'm five years younger than him, I wanted to do everything that he wanted to do. If he's going to play hockey. then I'm going to play hockey. I was terrible. My dad was like you should quit and that made me not want to quit, try harder."

That stick-to-it attitude has proven to be the template for Yard's many successes.

Like most players at the forefront of the women's hockey movement, Yard played on boys' teams in the Houston area through high school. Girls' teams were a rarity.

"At the time, I didn't even think that I would play hockey beyond high school," Yard said.

But her network of contacts stepped in. The father of one of her teammates was a graduate of Brown University and one day he mentioned the women's hockey program at the Rhode Island-based school.

Soon the coach, Digit Murphy, was on the phone.

"She called and said, 'Hey, I hear you play boys' hockey. I'm not going to come down to Houston to recruit you but send me a videotape,'" Yard said. "Suddenly, I'm being recruited to play college hockey."

She was a defenseman at Brown from 1990 to 1994, while earning dual degrees in anthropology and business management. While there, fate and her network stepped in again.

When she was a pee wee, her dad, Hajime Sakuma, was coaching the team and had made contacts with the ice hockey federation in Japan. Those contacts, and some sponsorship deals, allowed Yard's team to go to Japan on a barnstorming tour.

One of the contacts made through that trip reached out to the father asking if his daughter would be interested in playing for the women's national team, which would be the host for the first Olympic women's hockey tournament at the 1998 Nagano Olympics.

The initial call came when Yard was a sophomore at Brown with the opportunity to move to Japan and train with the fledgling national team. Her father said she had to finish college. Upon graduation, Yard faced a decision.

"We talked again after graduation, and you know, I didn't know what to do," Yard said. "Did you know what to do after you graduated college? Because I didn't."

She played four years for the national team and for the Iwakura Peregine, a team in the women's professional league in Japan. She worked as a translator for the trucking company that sponsored her professional team. She ended her time in Japan with an appearance in the 1998 Olympics as an alternate captain and playing in each of Japan's five games.

There, she was an occasional a translator for Dave King, the former NHL coach who was doing some advisory work with the men's national team. King would pave the way for Yard into the NHL by recommending her to Lori Boesch, a director in the events department at the NHL. Yard was hired as an intern in October 1998 and was full time by December.

At the time, it was an entry point into the workforce upon her return to the United States, a way to stay involved with hockey.

Instead, it proved to be a calling, the first in a litany of decisions and steps that have delivered Yard to her current position as one of the power brokers who decides and executes the NHL's vision. Her fingerprints are on each of the League's marquee events.

Bill Miller, a vice president of planning in the NHL's events department, was hired into the department two years before Yard's arrival. He has intently watched her journey from unsure intern to confident executive.

"I've always admired her for her ability to walk into a situation, evaluate it and then execute it in the way it needs to be done," Miller said. "She is the friendliest person I know, while at the same time being one of the most knowledgeable people I've ever worked with. I wish everyone was a little bit more like Chie Chie."

For Yard, her success is rooted in her passion for the sport and in a commitment to bring the game to as many people as possible. It is a testament to the contacts she has made in the hockey community along the way and the effort she has put into meeting the responsibilities that have increased along her journey.

"I know this is a Gender Equity Month, but to me I've never really thought about I'm a woman trying to do this," said Yard, who was named by Sports Business Journal to its 2018 class of Game Changers. "Maybe that's a product of me growing up with a brother and playing boys' hockey, being around boys all the time.

"I don't think of it as a breaking the glass ceiling or a woman thing. To me, this is the job that I like doing and I'm going to keep doing it."