It’s a Pride Month baby for Canadian Olympic gold medalist and Boston Fleet forward Jamie Lee Rattray and her spouse Whitney, who welcomed their first child on June 7.
“Welcome to the world Cooper David Rattray,” posted the moms on Instagram today, along with several black-and-white photos of their new arrival in the hospital, at home, and with the family dog, Fletcher.
In addition to her Olympic gold, Jamie Lee has three World Championship gold medals with Team Canada, along with numerous accolades in two now-defunct women’s hockey leagues, the CWHL and the PWHPA. In college, she won the DI national championship with Clarkson and was awarded the 2014 Patty Kazmaier Award for the best collegiate women’s hockey player. Now, she’s an alternate captain for the Boston Fleet, who were championship runners up last year and narrowly missed the playoffs this year (to my deep disappointment).
She and Whitney met at a hockey game, Whitney recalled in a recent Instagram video. Whitney was there with a friend, and met Jamie Lee, but both were in other relationships at the time and didn’t think they’d see each other again. After they both became single, however, Whitney messaged Jamie Lee on Instagram and “we kind of became inseparable ever since,” she said. Jamie Lee proposed in October 2023 and they married in August of 2024.
Whitney also spoke about the importance of sharing their story to help build community and to be a model for other families. The couple talked more about their journey to parenthood in another video (below), where they revealed that they had actually started reciprocal IVF earlier in 2024. (Always nice to see another RIVF couple, like my spouse and me.) Jamie had had her eggs harvested in July, during the hockey off-season, and Whitney found out in September that she was pregnant.
Jamie Lee has been a visible queer player since the start of the PWHL in 2023, always putting rainbow-hued Pride Tape on her stick because Pride “doesn’t just have to be a night, it can be all the time,” as she told The Athletic last year. Her mother is Métis from Saskatchewan, and Jamie Lee also works to introduce kids in various Indigenous communities to hockey, in partnership with nonprofit First Assist, noted the publication.
Jamie Lee joins other queer moms in the PWHL, including Fleet teammate Amanda Pelkey; Ottawa Charge Captain Brianne Jenner; Emerance Maschmeyer, formerly of the Charge, but recently traded to the new Vancouver team (and who has an awesome Charge mask featuring her family as superheroes); and retired New York Sirens player Madison Packer (who has a great podcast). Many congratulations to the Rattrays as they become part of the queer parent community both within the PWHL and beyond!