The U.S. Para alpine skiing team spent the offseason resetting, reorganizing and finding ways to become a more cohesive unit.
Now the group enters the 2022-23 season with high morale as the coaches have strived to encourage more athlete input while providing more transparency in decision-making processes, said Tony McAllister, associate director of high performance for U.S. Paralympics Alpine Skiing.
Read MoreThe World University Games are the second-largest multi-sport winter event in the world, after the Winter Olympics and are put on every two years by the International University Sports Federation (FISU) as “a celebration of international university sports and culture.” While the competition is a large and competitive event for countries all around the world, it has failed to gain much traction here in America.
Read MoreThe Para alpine skiing calendar can best be described as condensed and relentless.
The highly competitive, almost non-stop schedule is not particularly conducive to focused, consistent and quality runs. The best-trained skiers spend nearly all four years in a Paralympic quad repeating their habits, refining their technique and honing in on the smallest details so that when they’re at the start gate in the Paralympic Winter Games, they are able to replicate their best personal performance under the most intense circumstances.
Read MoreThe U.S. Women’s National Team left Seattle invigorated after sweeping the first three games in the 2022-23 Rivalry Series. It was the first time since 2019 the U.S. has won three consecutive outings against Canada.
Their 4-2 win on Sunday, Nov. 20, was played in front of 14,551 fans at Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, a new record for attendance at a national women's hockey game played in the United States, beating the previous record of 13,320 set in Anaheim during the 2019-20 iteration of the Rivalry Series.
Those fans were treated to a goal in the opening minute of play, as Savannah Harmon (Downers Grove, Ill.) scored 40 seconds in. That goal set the tone for the night.
Read MoreThe U.S. women’s hockey team extended its winning streak on Canadian soil to four games on Thursday night with a 2-1 win over Canada in Kamloops, British Columbia, in the second game of the 2022-23 Rivalry Series.
Two days after winning the series opener 4-3 in Kelowna, British Columbia, the Americans outshot their neighbors to the north 34-20 on Thursday, holding the Canadians to single-digit shots on goal in each period.
Read MoreThe United States has been a powerhouse in Paralympic snowboarding since the sport debuted at that level in 2014. However, in the intervening years, other countries have created robust programs and now challenge for the top of the podium.
The improvement and growth of the sport is incredible, said Mike Jennings, who coaches the U.S. Para snowboard team. But, it does change the mindset his athletes need to have heading into the season.
Read MoreThe U.S. women’s hockey team started off the 2022-23 iteration of its Rivalry Series against Canada with a 4-3 shootout win Tuesday night in Kelowna, British Columbia.
Hilary Knight and Alex Carpenter each scored in both regulation and the shootout, while goalie Nicole Hensley did not allow a goal in the shootout.
Hensley came up huge for the Americans with 32 saves, including a game-saving stop of Marie Philip-Poulin’s penalty shot with 39.2 seconds left in the extra period. She also did not allow a power play goal in seven opportunities for Canada.
Read MoreThe U.S. women’s hockey team is coming off a brutal and unprecedented stretch in which it played three major tournaments in 53 weeks — and won silver in each.
From late August 2021 to the first week in September 2022, the Americans played in two world championships and an Olympic Winter Games, falling to rivals Canada in the final of all three.
With much of the sports world now settling into a post-pandemic normal, the days of playing three global championships in such short succession appear to be in the rearview mirror. For women’s hockey, though, one key uncertainty remains.
The next world championship — the pinnacle of any non-Olympic season — will be held in 2023 in Canada, but specific dates have yet to be announced. Typically, the world championship is held in March or early April.
Without that date fixed on the calendar, teams are left to put together a schedule of games and camps without knowing when they’ll need to be at peak readiness.
The U.S. Para Snowboarding team begins its next four-year cycle — with an eye to the Paralympic Winter Games in Milano and Cortina in 2026 — this month with a world cup event in Landgraaf, Netherlands. The 10-member team will compete in banked slalom and snowboardcross events around the world with hopes of plenty of podium finishes this season.
The biggest competition will be this year’s world championships, set to take place from Jan. 19-29 in La Molina, Spain.
A perennial favorite in the sport, the U.S. is seeing other countries consistently gaining ground. This season, the Americans are focusing on preparedness so that the boarders are in the best position to make the right split-second decisions in a race to help them win.
Read MoreThe Quinnipiac Bobcats have won nine straight games to open the season and have moved up to #4 in the national polls – their highest-ever ranking – after a pair of impressive weekend wins over Cornell and Princeton.
The Bobcats looked to be in a great position heading into this season, returning much of the roster that carried them to 2 overtimes against eventual national champion Ohio State in the NCAA quarterfinal last year. Then they added graduate transfer Shay Maloney from Brown, as well as stellar rookie Madison Chantler, who won gold with Canada at the U18 Women’s World Championships last summer. In a crowded and competitive ECAC, they have already set themselves apart. And it’s just the first week of November.
Read MoreThe post-Olympic season is the best time to reset, reevaluate and make changes, said USA Nordic Sport ski jumping coach Anders Johnson, and now a groundbreaking partnership and new program philosophies could make this one of the most interesting U.S. ski jumping seasons in recent memory.
“We have a group of young, really motivated and talented athletes,” he said. “So the timing was perfect for us to really shift gears.”
Read MoreNorthbrook Speed Skating Club (NSSC) of Illinois is celebrating not just seven decades of existence, but 70 years of excellence.
The club has evolved from barrel jumpers and skating outdoors on the flooded center of a bicycle velodrome to become one of the country’s preeminent speed skating clubs, and home to more than 20 Olympians. In fact, a member of NSSC went on to compete in every Olympic Winter Games from 1952 through 2018.
Read MoreEvery coach has a different philosophy for how to fill out their non-conference schedule. In larger conferences, there are fewer slots that need to be filled. In a conference like the CHA, with only six teams, there are more. Add in that last season and this one, the CHA is playing with just five teams, and that leaves 20 or so possible non-conference games to schedule.
Penn State coach Jeff Kampersal likened scheduling to a complex jigsaw puzzle. And there are far more things that go into creating a non-conference schedule than picking an opponent. Most programs agree to a home and home series, where the teams play at each participant’s home venue, usually over the course of two seasons. Increasingly, as we see this weekend at St. Lawrence, teams that are traveling a long distance will schedule a round robin, where one team hosts and two teams travel to the site and they all play each other once. There are also various tournaments around the holidays and winter break.
Read MoreWhen Mel Ruzzi took over as head coach of the Brown Bears before last season, the team had not finished above 11th in the ECAC since 2012. As mentioned in the ECAC season preview, it has been 13 years since the last time this team managed six conference victories and nine years since they last won six games in a season overall. In addition, Ruzzi is the fifth coach over the course of the last ten seasons Brown has played.
Read MoreThe inaugural Para Ice Hockey Women's World Challenge resulted in a title for Team USA, but the tournament will be remembered for so much more than the final results.
“I want to emphasize how much of a huge part of history this is,” said U.S. forward and championship game-winning-goal scorer Katie Ladlie.
An event more than a decade in the making, the tournament, which took place in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Aug 26-28, was the first ever women’s tournament sanctioned under World Para Ice Hockey. That distinction is an important step in gaining recognition, attention and funding for women’s Para ice hockey.
Read MoreCanada’s women’s hockey team extended its gold medal-winning streak against the U.S. on Sunday.
The Canadians defended their 2021 world championship, defeating the U.S. 2-1 in the title game of the 2022 IIHF Women’s World Championship in Herning, Denmark.
Although the Americans overcame a two-goal deficit in their preliminary round game against Canada to win 5-2, they were unable to do it a second time after Canada’s Brianne Jenner scored twice in 84 seconds midway through the game.
A deep rivalry will be renewed when the U.S. and Canada meet Sunday in the gold-medal game of the IIHF Women’s World Championship.
The U.S. has played in the title game of every world championship since the event began in 1990, facing Canada in all but one of those games.
“To me, U.S. versus Canada is the best game you can watch in our sport. And it's the one that everybody is gearing up for,” said Katie Crowley, a three-time Olympian and current Boston College coach who also participated in six world championships from 1997-2005.
A new coaching staff for the U.S. women’s hockey team has the group playing with a new mentality and a new style at the 2022 IIHF Women’s World Championship currently taking place in Frederikshavn and Herning, Denmark. The Americans hope these changes will also bring a change of fortune.
The past 365 days did not go as the U.S. would have liked.
This time last year, the Americans fell short of the world championships title for the first time since 2012 when they dropped a 3-2 game in overtime to rival Canada. Prior to 2021, the U.S. had won eight of the previous nine world championship titles, including five straight dating back to 2013.
A few months after those world championships, the U.S. made a run back to the Olympic gold-medal game in Beijing in February. However, this time they fell 3-2 to Canada in regulation.
Important progress in the growth of women’s sled hockey is taking place this weekend and the U.S. Women's Development Sled Hockey Team is playing host. The inaugural Para Ice Hockey Women's World Challenge is taking place Aug. 26-28 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at Cornerstone Community Center.
A goal more than 10 years in the making, U.S. coach Rose Misiewicz said this tournament is an important advance along the path that many competing this weekend hope will lead to women’s sled hockey becoming a part of the Paralympics.
Read MoreParalympian Nick Mayhugh posing for a photo with his cousin Kim Schaeffer isn’t too rare of an event. Their families are close, and Mayhugh considers Schaeffer the little sister he never had.
What took this impromptu family moment over the top was the fact that it was taking place in the White House.
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