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Tracy Hobbs
While Tracy's tenure with the Eagles/Spiders was brief, she was a founding member, and leaves behind the enduring legacy of having brought several other founding and long-time Spiders to the team.
Tracy had long been fond of hockey, even sharing Penguins season tickets with her father, but some of her earliest inclinations to consider playing the sport were piqued by listening to Michael ramble on and on about the exploits of the Angry Armadillos, the team he, Kenny, and John played on in the late 80's and early 90's, while she and Michael worked together as student pages in the library system at the University of Pittsburgh.
Tracy received her batchelor's degree in political science summa cum laude from Pitt in 1992, and then followed up on her library work experience by earning a master's degree in library science, also from Pitt. From there, however, her life took a different path. She decided to move to North Carolina, and spent the next several years in different pursuits in and around the NC area. But the hockey spark didn't die, and in fact it was in the South that she took up rollerblading.
Finally the time came, and during an extended sojourn home to Pittsburgh beginning in late 1996, she bought ice skates, learned to skate at public sessions at Southpointe, then joined an adult learn to play hockey clinic, and finally realized her ambition by playing actual games in the Southpointe adult league in the summer of 1997.
But alas, she again heard the call of different paths, and returned to North Carolina in August of '97 after only the briefest handful of games with the Eagles (but not before scoring her first goal in only her second game, a 13-1 loss to Skip's Auto on August 4, 1997). Upon her return to Raleigh she joined two different teams, a co-ed team adult league team and the women's-only North Carolina Trailblazers.
On Friday, May 7, 1999, at approximately 11:50pm, on the AA Highway just outside of Ashland, Ky., Tracy was en route to a hockey tournament in Ohio with two of her teammates from the Trailblazers when a tractor-trailer truck traveling in the opposite direction crossed the center line of the road and struck the car in which Tracy was riding. Tracy and one of her teammates were pronounced dead at the scene...
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August 5, 1970 - May 7, 1999 |