What a setting for Hockey Day Minnesota, even if it made actually playing the game a bit more difficult.

“You don’t pick this,” said Kevin Gorg, who filled in as coach for Team Minnesota. “You don’t pick the snow, you don’t pick kind of climate we had tonight.

“But I will tell you that most of these kids grew up playing at some point outside when they were young.”

Liv Halvorson, Nina Rodgers and Chelsey Brodt-Rosenthal of Team Minneapolis smile at what Mother Nature delivered on Friday night. (MHM Photo / Jonny Watkins)

Indeed, Taylor Williamson played at an outdoor rink at Walnut Ridge Park near her house in Edina. Playing there until the lights went out is something she points to and credits for all the skill and creativity in her game. And one of her teammates Friday, Warroad’s Gigi Marvin, certainly is no stranger to playing in extreme-weather conditions.

“I’m used to it,” Marvin said. “I’ve done that hundreds of times up north. And actually we have way more wind up there. So it was nice not having a wind.”

Marvin and Williamson took care of the scoring for Team Minnesota as they defeated Team Minneapolis 4-3 during the exhibition game that consisted of three 15-minute, running-time periods. Sadie Lundquist gave Team Minneapolis a 2-0 lead in the first before Team Minnesota got on the board with two goals apiece from Marvin and Williamson.

Scheduled two-minute intermissions were extended a bit as crews hit the ice with shovels and snow blowers to try and clear the playing surface off as best as they could. The snow was so steady that it was tough to make out the downtown skyline view that serves as the backdrop for Hockey Day Minnesota.

“It’s definitely tough, but it’s the fun part about being a part of Hockey Day Minnesota and playing outside,” Williamson said. “So it was super fun.”

Despite the blizzard-like conditions that might have kept some hockey fans away, there were a few pockets of cheering sections for the women’s game. Williamson, a former Gophers player and current Wayzata girls’ high school hockey coach, held practice with her team earlier in the day before it was off to Parade Stadium.

“My assistant coach Blair (Parent) was on the other team,” Williamson said. “So they wanted to come and watch us play, which was awesome.”

They had plenty to cheer about with Williamson’s goals. On a night when clouds of snow shot up from the ice as the puck moved along, it was all about “just doing what you’ve got to do to get the puck to the net, for sure,” Williamson said.

The Bloomington Jefferson high school girls’ team also showed up to support two of their assistant coaches, Kelly Pannek and Kelsey Cline. They were on different teams, too, with Cline skating on the winning Team Minnesota. Some of the girls held up signs to show their support as well, with one reading: “We just hope both teams have fun.”

The teams were made up of a bunch of current Minnesota Whitecaps players, plus former Gophers women’s hockey players and plenty of Minnesota ties. Whitecaps assistant coach Laura Slominski coached Team Minneapolis. Former Park Center and Gophers standout Krissy Wendell was slated to coach the other team but was home was a sick child, so Gorg stepped in.

Marvin was bummed Wendall couldn’t be there but enjoyed her replacement, too.

“He’s hilarious,” Marvin said, of Gorg. “He had some good one-liners.”

Coach Kevin Gorg delivers and inspirational speech to his Team Minnesota players. (MHM Photo / Jonny Watkins)

Any expert coaching advice? Nah, Gorg said he just tried to stay out of the way. He was behind the bench coaching a lot of players he’s known since they were in high school, like goaltender Julie Friend and Erica McKenzie. Coaching as part of Hockey Day Minnesota was “a bonus” for Gorg, a report and hockey analyst with Fox Sports North.

“All year long we look forward to Hockey Day,” Gorg said. “Nights like tonight are really special.”

According to @HockeyDayMN on Twitter, the women’s game included 26 native Minnesotans, 17 NCAA championships, 12 Isobel Cup winners, six Ms. Hockey winners and four Minnesota state high school championships.

For the Whitecaps (10-4-2) players, they will head back indoors this weekend, taking on the Connecticut Whale (1-13-2) for a pair of afternoon games Saturday and Sunday at their home TRIA Rink in downtown St. Paul.

Marvin, who previously played in for the Boston Pride in the NWHL and is now part of the PWHPA, said the experience Friday was just a cool one all around, especially being able to reconnect with friends/teammates she hadn’t seen in a while.  

“Of course it makes all the sense in the world to not only have a men’s pro all-star game but have a women’s (all-star game),” Marvin said. “Because there’s that much talent here. There’s that much skill. 

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“New” team enters league with long history, familiar faces

There’s nothing else like it in the U.S. The National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), now in its fourth season of operations, has brought professional women’s hockey to the States. Players are finally getting paid. (Though, there’s room for growth.) Fans can finally watch top talent play post-collegiate hockey outside of annual international tournaments. And Minnesota is finally getting a team.

The league’s first three seasons featured four east coast teams, loads of Olympic talent, passionate fans, and lots of Minnesotans wondering when the State of Hockey would get a team. But, now, the Whitecaps have arrived in the NWHL Minnesotans have taken up the cause in droves. On the team’s season-opening shutout of the Metropolitan Riveters on October 6, the team was met by a rowdy sell-out crowd carrying signs and lining up to don Whitecaps sweatshirts and shirseys.

While the team is new to the NWHL, it’s far from a new organization. However, the team isn’t exactly new. The Whitecaps have been an outstanding training ground for Midwestern players since 2004, playing for years in the now-defunct Wester Women’s Hockey League (WWHL) and against Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) teams. But the team has been without a league since 2011. Though it has carried National Team talent like Hannah Brandt, Stephanie Anderson, and the Lamoureux twins, its seasons have been limited to practices and scattered exhibition games against high school, collegiate and, occasionally, NWHL teams.

Now, the team joins the NWHL with a refurbished roster, salaries, and a boatload of reasons for fans to head to St. Paul’s Tria Rink throughout the 16-game season. Though the season is young, people have already been showing up. The Whitecaps sold out the first two games and shocked the NWHL’s reigning champions with 4-0 and 3-1 wins.

THE TEAM

While some may predict the Whitecaps to sit outside the championship game in the team’s inaugural NWHL season, Minnesota is not a team to sleep on.

Logistically, the team will face challenges. They only play back-to-backs because of the travel involved in being the only team not on the east coast. Moreover, every back-to-back has them playing in different rinks each night. That could make for tough games on the back-end since most of the roster is holding down a full-time job during the week. (NWHL salaries are part-time salaries.)

There are also schedule oddities other teams aren’t dealing with, like not playing a single league game from January 20 through March 2, when the Whitecaps start their season-closing series on the road. That could be a real disadvantage heading into the playoffs.

On the ice, the biggest question the Whitecaps face is how their depth will measure-up against the league’s established teams. Each of the other four rosters faces turnover year-to-year because all NWHL contracts are for one year. Nonetheless, teams frequently retain some core players and coaches.

That’s not to say the Whitecaps enter the season without any chemistry. There are 16 players who have been with the Whitecaps before, and many of the players skated together in college. The roster features 19 Minnesotans and 17 former WCHA players. Though, only one skater has previously played in the NWHL.

MN Whitecap’s Kendall Coyne-Schofield by Rick Olson

The team is headlined by Olympic stars Lee Stecklein, Kendall Coyne Schofield, and Brandt. However, what might slip under the radar is the kind of talent the team will get from top collegiate skaters who haven’t been in the spotlight of the National Team or the NWHL yet. Those forwards include former Gopher Kate Schipper, former Bulldog Katie McGovern, former North Dakota standout Amy Menke, and veteran speedster Allie Thunstrom.

The lines are far from set in stone, but the Whitecaps opened the season with a top line featuring Brandt at center, flanked by Coyne Schofield and Schipper. It’s a fast line that has already shown great chemistry. It’s not hard to see this being one of the toughest lines to play against in the league, especially when Stecklein and Amanda Boulier are paired up behind them.

In net, the Whitecaps landed a pair of former NWHL goaltenders, including former two-time NCAA National Champion with the Gophers and 2018 NWHL Goaltender of the Year Amanda Leveille. Likely to share time with her is Sydney Rossman, who skated with the Connecticut Whale last year and is just one year removed from an impressive career at Quinnipiac. Last season, Rossman posted an .885 save percentage in 16 starts, but she was backstopping a team that struggled throughout the season en route to a 3-11-2 record. Former St. Cloud netminder Julie Friend is also on the roster.

THE COMPETITION

Boston Pride: The Pride has outstanding goaltending between former NWHL Goaltender of the Year Brittany Ott and Boston College standout Katie Burt. The blueline is led by Warroad’s Gigi Marvin. Up front, Boston has dangerous forward threats like Haley Skarupa, Amanda Pelkey, and Jillian Dempsey. The team should be better than its 4-8-4 record last season, in no small part because of Burt. The team struggled to keep pucks out of the net when Ott wasn’t between the pipes.

Buffalo Beauts: The big get for the Beauts — owned by Pegula Sports, which also owns the Sabres, Bills, and Rochester Americans — may be U.S. National Team goaltender Nicole Hensley and legendary Canadian netminder Shannon Szabados. They’re also carrying plenty of offensive in Julianna Iafallo, Kelly Babstock, and former Gopher Dani Cameranesi. However, the big threat in Buffalo is a deep blueline, led by Emily Pfalzer with Lisa Chesson, Jordyn Burns, and the underrated Blake Bolden.

Connecticut Whale: The only of the original four teams without an Isobel Cup looks like one of the weaker teams again this year. Yet, there’s plenty of talent and faces Minnesotans will recognize, like former Bulldogs forwards Michelle Löwenhielm and Katerina Mrázová. It’ll still be tough sledding for the Whale this year.

Metropolitan Riveters: Their partnership with the New Jersey Devils may serve as a blueprint for the partnership between the Wild and Whitecaps. (Both NWHL teams play in the practice facility of their NHL partner.) It’s served the Riveters well. They enter the season as the reigning Isobel Cup champions. The Rivs return players from last year’s squad, as well as Olympian Amanda Kessel, who played with the Riveters the season prior.

The team also carries a loaded blueline with Kelsey Koelzer, Michelle Picard, Kiira Dosdall, and former Badger Jenny Ryan. But there’s plenty of offense in long-time Riveter Madison Packer, Erika Lawler, Rebecca Russo, Miye D’Oench and others. Along with the Beauts, the Riveters are the team to beat.

The post Meet the Whitecaps appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.

Goals by Katie McGovern, Hannah Brandt, Kate Schipper and Kendall Coyne Schofield lead Minnesota over Amanda Kessel and the Metro Riveters while goaltender Amanda Leveille sparkles in the shutout win.

Click on image for full-size viewing

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Minnesota gets its first professional women’s team

ST. PAUL — The Minnesota Whitecaps are joining the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), the league announced at a press conference featuring Governor Mark Dayton on Tuesday. Expansion has been teased previously, but this is the first expansion team to enter the league since it was founded in 2015.

“Make no mistake, when the league was formed in 2015, we would have loved to start with a team in Minnesota,” Commissioner and league founder Dani Rylan said. “This is the State of Hockey, and all the data shows this is where a lot of the talent exists.”

The NWHL is the US’s first paid professional league for women, but the pay doesn’t yet rise to the level of a full-time job so it’s bringing a team to the players. The Whitecaps, founded in 2004, has been purchased by the NWHL, which owns four of its five teams. The Buffalo Beauts were purchased by Terry Pegula, owner of the Buffalo Sabres and Buffalo Bills, in December 2017. The league declined to discuss the financial terms of the purchase.

The Whitecaps will begin NWHL play in the 2018-19 season at an as yet unannounced home rink. When the 2018 NWHL All-Star came to St. Paul, with the assistance of the Whitecaps and the Minnesota Wild, the game was played at the Tria Rink, the Wild’s new practice facility.

“I think it’s a huge thing for our state,” said Whitecaps captain Winny Brodt-Brown. “We have probably the most girls playing, and I think that’s just going to continue to grow. Because the girls that are playing youth hockey want to play high school. The high school players want to play collegiate. The collegiate players want to play professionally or on the national team. Players shouldn’t have to end their career at 22.”

With teams in Newark (formerly New York), Boston, Buffalo, and Hartford, teams were able to travel to weekend games by bus previously. Adding a team in Minnesota will change the complexion of the schedule and add expenses, but Rylan notes that another team and more league games will increase revenue potential. “We have a handful of investors in the league and then we have grown our revenue streams throughout the last three seasons going into our fourth season now. We’re ready to expand,” she said.

The league experienced financial hardships in the past. It cut player salaries in the middle of the second season. However, Rylan says the expansion won’t impact player salaries for the coming season, with players expected to once again make between $5,00 and $7,000 on one-year contracts. That was down from the start of the second season when former Gopher Amanda Kessel was the league’s highest-paid player at $26,000. Last year, the contract had skaters playing two preseason games, two practices per week, 16 regular season games, and up to two postseason games.

The Whitecaps may play more than other teams, as it already has four exhibitions scheduled against WCHA opponents.

Though the Wild and Vikings Women helped with the 2018 NWHL All-Star Game in St. Paul, there is no deal currently in place for the Wild to aid the Whitecaps. Rylan said the Wild have been “great friends and advisors” so far and she hopes the relationship will continue to grow. If the Wild got involved, it wouldn’t be the first NHL team partnering with an NWHL club. The league has a “strategic alliance” between the Metropolitan Riveters and the New Jersey Devils, in addition to having the Pegulas own one of the teams. “[The Pegulas] are building the blueprint for us as to what it means for an NHL club to own an NWHL club,” Rylan said. “That knowledge and that blueprint is going to be extremely valuable as we continue our conversations with the Wild or continue conversations with new markets.”

Rylan compared the Whitecaps’ potential for immediate success to that of the Las Vegas Golden Knights. The Whitecaps aren’t starting from scratch, but the team could immediately compete for the Isobel Cup with the wealth of talent available in Minnesota and surrounding areas. To boot, there’s no competition for local players who want to stay in the area and have the opportunity to play high-level competition. The state has five Division 1 women’s hockey programs and the Badgers aren’t far away. The US Olympic team featured six Minnesotans, 14 players from the WCHA, and five players who came to the national team from the Whitecaps, only one of which was originally from Minnesota. Rylan even noted there are Minnesotans in the league’s original four teams that have expressed interest in returning to the State of Hockey to continue their NWHL career.

Brodt-Brown has high hopes for what joining the NWHL can do for the Whitecaps and girl’s hockey in Minnesota. “We had a pretty good presence, but when you’re always playing for something it means a lot more,” she said. “Even when you’re playing U10 and playing for a championship, something’s on the line.”

The post Whitecaps Join NWHL appeared first on Minnesota Hockey Magazine.

NWHL’s second season off to rocky start

It has been a tumultuous couple years for professional women’s hockey, full of highs and, recently, lows.

Yet, lost in the deluge of financial woes for the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL) is that players are skating with a strong belief in the league’s role in the future of women’s professional hockey. Additionally, the on-ice product remains entertaining and accessible. The latter of which has traditionally been an obstacle to the growth of women’s hockey.

“You have the opportunity to watch the best players in the entire world at your fingertips,” said former Gopher defenseman and Warroad native Gigi Marvin. “Whether it’s on your phone or on YouTube, you have NWHL highlights of Hilary Knight, Brianna Decker, Kacey Bellamy, Meghan Duggan, the list goes on and on.”

The launch of the NWHL in 2015 was a milestone. They framed it with a fitting tagline: “History Begins.” It was the first professional women’s league in North America that paid athletes. Now, just seven weeks into the second season, the league dropped a bombshell on players: The finances are no longer in place to pay athletes their full salary.

“We believe in the product on the ice. We have a great game to display here. The athletes are amazing. It’s something that definitely needs to be in the public eye and we are really proud of what this league has accomplished.” – Gigi Marvin

To read more of this article, and many other great stories like it, click HERE to view the January, 2017 issue of our digital magazine and subscribe to have future issues delivered directly to your email inbox. 

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Gigi Marvin reflects on the NWHL’s first season

By Dustin Nelson – Special to MHM

Minutes after her Boston Pride won the first-ever Isobel Cup, the top prize of the National Women’s Hockey League (NWHL), Gigi Marvin’s humility and down-to-Earth demeanor is instantly noticeable.

“I’m just blessed,” said the former University of Minnesota star on March 13, while still standing on the ice at the New Jersey Devils Hockey House in Newark, New Jersey.

(Troy Parla / NWHL)

She deflects credit to her teammates and talks about the successes of the league, while 50 feet away fans stand with signs cheering on the Pride, like one sporting a drawing of Star Wars’ Yoda saying “Gigi Marvin – Yoda Best!”

“They’re my friends from Boston. We go to the same church,” she says. “They came down for the weekend to cheer me on. They don’t know much about hockey, but they sure have fun.”

It was a year of successes for the Warroad, Minn. native. She had previously played for the Boston Blades in the longer-running rival to the NWHL, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL). But in the spring of 2015, Marvin and her U.S. National Team teammates were faced with an opportunity.

A new league was forming and it was going to pay players.

The National Team players had to decide if they were going to risk it and throw in with a league attempting to forge something new in women’s hockey. They decided if they were going to do it, they were going to do it together, as a unit.

(Troy Parla / NWHL)

“There were potential risks involved,” Marvin said, reflecting on the season in late April. “Will the season continue? Will it stop halfway through? Will X, Y, and Z happen? Those are the kind of questions anyone has at the start of a league

“After determining the pros and cons and debating it, we chose to move forward.”

It wasn’t just the National Team moving to the NWHL, but a very large percentage of her teammates from the Boston Blades in the CWHL.

It was a team loaded with talent, including star forwards Hilary Knight and Brianna Decker, NWHL Goaltender of the Year Brittany Ott and Marvin’s defensive partner and National Team teammate Kacey Bellamy.

“It was a just a great opportunity to be a forerunner (in professional women’s hockey), if you will,” she said. “It was special. It was an amazing year where we were able to get paid for our job of playing hockey, a game that we love.”

It also presented the opportunity to play under Head Coach Bobby Jay, who coached the 2014 Olympic Team. “I was really excited to be able to play for him again,” she said.

Marvin was more than another player taking a chance with a burgeoning league that had a big idea. She was thriving on the league’s best team.

(Troy Parla / NWHL)

The Pride not only won the Isobel Cup, but dominated the regular season. They lost just three games on their way to being the number one seed in the postseason and sweeping through the playoffs without dropping a contest.

Marvin had a solid regular season, contributing five goals and 14 points in 16 games, enough to get her into the NWHL All-Star Game, but she really turned it on in the postseason. She played key minutes for the Pride, including being a part of a first unit penalty kill that could go even up on shots with opponents.

When the Cup was hoisted, she had posted two goals and seven points in four games.

That strong playoff performance was certainly a part of her being named the NWHL’s first Defenseman of the Year.

Yet, in the face of it all, she seems forever calm and collected.

“There’s no pressure because it’s a game and we made it here and we’re just going to play it out,” she said in March, talking about the pressure of a championship game.

“As with anything on the first go around, there’s always a lot to improve,” she said. “Overall though, [the NWHL] didn’t exist last year and here we are today. That’s amazing. It says a lot about what’s going on (in women’s hockey). I’m excited for the future, because there’s a lot to build on.”

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