HAMDEN, Conn. – The No. 1 Wisconsin women’s hockey team won its fifth national championship Sunday with a 2-0 win over No. 2 Minnesota.
Wisconsin finished 33-4-2 after having spent nearly the whole season as the top-ranked team in the country. This was the Badgers' sixth straight trip to the Frozen Four, but their first NCAA title since 2011.
Minnesota’s Brad Frost is one of the most successful coaches in college women’s hockey. This is his 12th season, and his team has made the NCAA tournament every year he has been at the helm. This is the program’s ninth Frozen Four under his direction, and on Sunday the Gophers will be in their sixth title game in eight years.
Minnesota has won four of the past seven national championships and will face rival Wisconsin for an opportunity to win Frost’s fifth and the program’s eighth title.
There’s no arguing that Minnesota is one of the premier programs in the nation.
That’s why it’s so jarring, on the day before the title game, to hear Frost tell a room of reporters one of his coaching principles.
Read MoreHAMDEN, Conn. — The University of Minnesota women’s hockey team advanced to the program’s ninth NCAA championship game with a 2-0 Frozen Four semifinal victory over on Cornell on Friday at Quinnipiac University.
The winning goal came from senior Nicole Schammel on a power play midway through the second period; it was her 16th goal of the season. Sophomore Olivia Knowles took a shot from the point that went through traffic and was redirected by freshman Emily Oden. The deflection went to the right of the goal, where Schammel was waiting to put it home.
“We just did a great job of getting bodies to the net and the rebound came right to me,” Schammel said. “I was lucky to be there.”
Junior Sarah Potomak iced the win for the Gophers (32-5-1) with an empty-net goal with 32.4 seconds left in the final period.
Read MoreWisconsin redshirt senior captain Annie Pankowski is standing outside the Badgers locker room, giving an interview to a handful of reporters, when a she gets distracted for a moment and then pauses her answer to lean down and scratch the head of a dog that’s now happily wagging its tail and sitting at her feet. Pankowski gives the dog a quiet command and then stands up to pick up exactly where she left off in giving an answer.
It’s a scene that has become familiar around the Wisconsin women’s hockey locker room the past few years as Pankowski has become involved with OccuPaws, an International Guide Dog Federation accredited in-home program that trains and places fully trained guide dogs with visually impaired Midwesterners at no charge. She has logged more than 2,000 hours training guide dogs and readying them for a life as a service animal. These days, it’s rare to see Pankowski without a dog by her side, so much so that she said her teammates often express disappointment when she shows up at the rink without a four-legged friend.
The daughter of two veterinarians, Pankowski has been around animals her entire life.
Read MoreMadison, Wis. – The Syracuse women’s hockey season came to an end with a 4-0 loss to No.1 Wisconsin on Saturday.
The Orange had something of a miracle run to close their season and earned their first College Hockey America conference tournament title and first NCAA berth, but for its efforts it received a return trip to Madison to face the top team in the country.
After having lost to Wisconsin in early December 6-1 and 9-1, Syracuse coach Paul Flanagan focused on slowing the game down and worked to try to prevent the Badgers from getting to the front of the net. The Orange finished the game with 21 blocks, and junior Ady Cohen made a career-high 43 saves.
Read MoreHad she made the Canadian Olympic team, Sarah Potomak would have been the youngest player on the team by two years. Though making the team so young would have been a stretch, it's also something Potomak imagined was within her grasp over her last couple of seasons.
She made her debut with the senior team in 2015, winning silver with Canada at the Four Nations Cup. She was a fixture of the senior team in 2017, winning silver at the IIHF Women's World Championships and had high hopes – and expectations of herself – when she was named to the centralization roster prior to Pyeongchang.
Read MoreCayla Barnes' second freshman year at Boston College is likely going to go very differently than her first.
She has started her red-shirt freshman season at Boston College after winning gold with Team USA at the Pyeongchang Olympics. Heading into last year, Barnes enrolled at BC after not being named to the initial USA centralization roster. She played in five games for the Eagles before she got a surprise phone call asking her to join Team USA in Tampa.
Barnes left school on October 28 and, less than two weeks later, tallied two goals and an assist with the national team as they took gold in the Four Nations Cup. Just more than four months later, Barnes was suiting up for the Olympics as the youngest player on the team, having just turned 19 in early January.
Read MoreWhen the Wisconsin Badgers took to the ice to open their season last Friday, it had been 551 days since Annie Pankowski had put on her familiar white sweater with a large red W on the front.
Taking a year off of college and deferring eligibility in an Olympic year isn't that unusual – her teammate Emily Clark did the same thing in order to play for Canada in Pyeongchang. The 18-plus months of toil and sacrifice had a payoff for Clark as she won silver with Team Canada.
Not so for Pankowski, who was cut from Team USA in early December, just 64 days before the team's first game in Pyeongchang.
When Team USA named their roster for centralization in May 2017, there were 23 women on the roster – the number of players they were allowed to take to Pyeongchang. It was an unusual move to not have a larger pool of players that would be whittled down during the residency process, and many assumed that this roster was the one that would eventually and officially become the Olympic team. Then, in November, three additional players were added to the roster and it was clear cuts would need to be made prior to leaving for the Olympics.
It was a frustratingly familiar situation for Pankowski, who was one of the last two players cut from the Team USA roster prior to the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Then still in high school and the youngest player on the roster, Pankowski had come to terms with that cut. Before her 2018 experience, she referred to the 2014 cut as "The Setback" and said it helped her learn what it was like to go through adversity, which seems almost laughable now.
Read MoreIn the course of Kassidy Sauve's four years at Ohio State, the program had three head coaches, nine assistant coaches, and four goalie coaches. She committed to two different coaches before she stepped on the ice as a rookie. Her body has taken a beating. As the last of the players and closest friends that she started her Ohio State experience with graduated and moved on, Sauve, who graduated from Ohio State in May, began to consider that there might be other options for her.
The previous few seasons had left her emotionally, mentally, and physically drained. She was feeling a bit lost and disconnected. She normally takes time after the hockey season away from the ice to rejuvenate, but that had become difficult for her. So she reached out to the NCAA to be granted release and gather all the information she needed to start to consider transferring. The more she thought about the benefits, the more it felt like the right decision.
"There was a lot of reasons to go and obviously, there's a lot of reasons to stay to. It wasn't an easy decision. There are so many things that contributed to this decision," she said. "I had no idea what I was getting into. I kind of just took the gamble and hoped for the best."
Read MoreIn December 2016, Kelly Pannek had never been invited to a senior camp with USA Hockey. Fifteen months later, she won an Olympic gold medal. Her coaches at the University of Minnesota weren't planning on her missing the 2017-18 collegiate season. It wasn't that they didn't think she was skilled enough–it was just practically unheard of to have a player go from outside the pool of prospective players to Olympic roster in such a short time.
The timeline is actually even more compact than that. Though Pannek was invited to her first senior level camps–the December 2016 development camp–she was not put on the roster for the series between the US and Canada that took place that month. Her first senior level tournament was at the 2017 IIHF Women's World Championships, where Team USA won gold.
It all happened so fast that Pannek said she didn't really ever have time to freak out or get too far in her own head about it, though she said her family had a bit of a gut-check for her when they saw the speed of play at the World Championships, worrying if Kelly was prepared for what she was getting into. She didn't tally any points that tournament, but was had nine shots on goal. Less than a year later, she was winning Olympic gold.
Read MorePeters is one of five finalists for the 2017-18 Hockey Humanitarian Award, which is presented annually to college hockey’s top citizen for his/her service contributions to their team, school and community. The winner will be announced at the 2018 NCAA Men’s Frozen Four in St. Paul, Minn., in April.
Read MoreMADISON, Wis. – For the first time since the 2010-11 season, the University of Minnesota women’s hockey team has been knocked out of the NCAA tournament in the quarterfinal round.
Read MoreMINNEAPOLIS - The Wisconsin women’s hockey team’s season ended in heart-breaking fashion late Friday night as they lost, 4-3, in two overtimes to Colgate at Ridder Arena.
Read MoreMINNEAPOLIS — Boston College freshman forward Daryl Watts has been awarded the 2018 Patty Kazmaier Memorial Award.
Read MoreFreshman Elizabeth Giguère scored an unassisted goal 7:55 into overtime on Sunday evening to give the Clarkson Golden Knights their second-straight national championship and their third title in five years.
Read MoreMINNEAPOLIS — Breanne Wilson-Bennett’s hat trick, capped by a power-play goal in the second overtime period, led the Colgate Raiders to a 4-3 win over Wisconsin on Friday in the Frozen Four semifinals.
Read MoreWisconsin-River Falls senior Carly Moran admits that last season’s NCAA opening round loss to Gustavus Adolphus is still a sore subject for her — something she doesn’t really want to talk about.
Read MoreThe St. Lawrence Saints returned to the NCAA tournament for the first time in five years last season. They had been a consistent presence in the postseason tournament, earning a bid every year from 2005-2009, but the 2012 appearance had been their last for a few seasons.
Read MoreThe college hockey season really only ends up being successful for a handful of squads, depending on their expectations and achievements. The nature of the season says that there’s a single championship. The other top teams that make it to the Frozen Four, only to fall short, will be disappointed. There might be some programs that make the playoffs or advance to the NCAA tournament for the first time who will mark their season a success. Everyone else falls short.
Read MoreIt’s been something of a transformation the past few season for Colgate. In 2014-15, they won just seven games, but in each of the past two seasons they’ve amassed 22 wins and berths in the ECAC tournament.
But the dream has stalled there.
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