NOVI, MI - Fox Run retirement community resident Diane Pieknik is getting ready for the hockey playoff season. She suits up with her helmet, mouth guard, neck protector, chest protector, elbow pads, gloves, pelvic protector, pants, shin guards, and stockings.

She laces her skates, grabs her hockey stick and heads to Suburban Ice in Farmington Hills where she is a Left Winger for a team in Novi’s Women’s Beginners Adult Developmental Hockey League.

Pieknik, who is 65 years young, is determined to score as many goals as she can – it is a dream come true for her. “I always wanted to play hockey, but the sport is not considered one for women,” she said. “I was given my sister’s figure skates when I was a little girl. I didn’t like them, so I decided to do something about it by playing hockey one day.”

Pieknik plays in hockey games each Sunday night. She has been doing it for the past four years. She attends skills and concepts sessions one-a-week where she learns puck handling techniques, how to use the edges on her skates, how to defend, and how to make tight turns on the ice.

“When I first started playing hockey I stayed as close to the boards as I could,” said Pieknik, a former nuclear medicine technologist at St. Mercy Hospital in Livonia who now who works at Providence Hospital in Novi as a file clerk in the Diagnostics Imaging. “My game blossomed from there.”

Pieknik has great memories of the first goal she scored in a game in which she also had an assist. “It took me a few years to score my first goal. The team gave me the puck,” she said. “My teammates jokingly told me I would have to drop my gloves and start a fight on the ice. I didn’t do that.”

A lifelong Detroit Red Wings fan, Pieknik also plays softball in a Novi women’s league. She has done white water rafting in Tennessee.

And she has buzzed down a zip line. She moved to Fox Run last summer from her home in Farmington.

What’s next for her?

“I want to sky dive. That’s on my bucket list,” she said.