Maurice FitzMaurice was a Wethersfield hockey dad with a daughter stuck on a boys team in 1985 when he helped form a girls pee wee squad.

The Connecticut Polar Bears, with no home arena, needed 14 games to qualify for the girls nationals, so FitzMaurice ran a small tournament at the Loomis Chaffee Rink in Windsor: four teams, four games each, one day.

From that thin ice, the Polar Bears grew into an elite girls hockey program. The Polar Bears have produced 10 national championships, seven future U.S. Olympians and now host the largest holiday tournament in the country. The 22nd starts today when 220 teams from the United States and Canada face off at 18 Connecticut rinks from Storrs to Shelton.

Along the way, FitzMaurice, 62, who never played hockey, has watched the women's game evolve from a hockey backwater into an Olympic sport.

FitzMaurice remains involved as a coach and tournament director and still promotes girls hockey.

"The girls are no longer hidden on the boys' teams," he said from his law office in the Gold Building downtown. "If they have a good transcript, they have a chance for some really good college spots. The hockey will go away. All these kids will have to go to work after college."

Of the first 16 Bears, seven attended Ivy League schools, including FitzMaurice's daughter, Marnie, who played at Yale. More than 100 Bears have gone on to play for college teams such as UConn, Vermont, Providence, Boston College, Middlebury and Amherst.

Julie Chu of Fairfield, a senior at Harvard, won four USA Hockey Girls national championships in five years with the Polar Bears. A member of the U.S. national team since 2000, Chu won a silver medal at the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City and a bronze in 2006 in Turin, Italy.

"I owe a lot to Fitz," Chu said. "He helped me develop as a player. He's really good about making sure we all have opportunities beyond the Polar Pears."

The Polar Bears tournament is a recruiting haven for colleges and prep schools with women's hockey programs. Coaches say it attracts more top players from the U.S. and Canada than any event other than the national club championship in April.

Digit Murphy, the women's hockey coach at Brown University, has attended the Polar Bears tournament as a player and a scout. This year her role includes parenting. With help from FitzMaurice, she organized the Rhode Island IXPress (a wordplay on Title IX, the 1972 law that bars sex discrimination in educational programs receiving federal funds).

"The thing about Fitz is, he really gets it," Murphy said. "He understands this whole thing is about giving women opportunities to get to the next level academically and athletically. It's an educational opportunity first and foremost.

"He has always been a proponent of women's hockey, and you don't always get a lot of men who believe in it. He really is in it for the right reasons."

A Waterbury native, FitzMaurice played basketball and baseball at UConn's Waterbury branch in the mid-1960s. He graduated from Notre Dame Law School in 1971 and specializes in business litigation at the Hartford firm Reid and Riege .

Joe Snecinski helped FitzMaurice organize the first Bears team and tournament before going on to coach women's hockey at Yale and Trinity. His daughter Paula played on the first team.

"Right from the beginning, Maurice saw a great need and opportunity for some of the more talented players," said Snecinski, now coaching again with the Bears.

The tournament has grown so big it now gets help from the Greater Hartford Convention and Visitor's Bureau, which this year booked 10,000 room-nights at 54 hotels to accommodate the 3,700 athletes, plus coaches and scouts.

During the tournament, FitzMaurice stays at the Newington Arena from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. to coach and coordinate volunteers who sell tickets and programs and update scores hourly on the Polar Bears website. Teams and coaches need results: The tournament recognizes champions in 14 divisions across 5 age groups.

In 1990-91, the number of registered female players in the country totaled 6,336. Today female membership stands at 54,162 according to USA Hockey, and grew 5.6 percent in 2005-06.

The surge in participation has been driven by the emergence of more high school and college programs, Title IX and the debut of women's hockey at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, where four former Polar Bears won gold medals.

FitzMaurice's daughter marvels at her father's continued involvement.

"I don't know how he does it," said Marnie FitzMaurice, a professor at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. "It was hard when we first started with a small fraction of the teams. We'd just do it in the kitchen, making up little charts."

In the early 1980s, the best girls in Connecticut played on boys' teams, and the college and prep coaches weren't finding them. Now every December in Connecticut, they can't miss them.

"We wanted to get them exposure and I think we've done that," FitzMaurice said.

Contact Tom Puleo at tpuleo@courant.com.