UNFINISHED BUSINESS
VPD officer aims for fifth Olympic appearance
Given everything she has accomplished in her career, and everything she has been through in the last three years, you’d think Meghan Agosta had squeezed every last drop out of hockey and is now ready to begin the next phase of her life.
She’s 31, right? And she’s been to four Olympics, including this last one, which took its toll emotionally and physically. Throw in her somewhat-demanding day job — constable with the Vancouver Police Department — and it seems Agosta should bring down the curtain on a rewarding career as one of our country’s greatest Olympians.
There’s just one thing. Agosta is wired differently than most. She might be staring at another three-year climb up K2 to prepare herself. She might be starting a journey that promises nothing but pain. But, right here, right now, she’s saying “I’m in for Beijing.”
And while it’s unclear if she’ll make it to 2022, one thing is crystal clear: You’d be a fool to bet against her.
“I think with how I improved this last year, I don’t think I can retire,” she says. “2022 is totally in my vision. Hockey Canada knows I’m not ready to retire.”
Hockey Canada has come to know a lot about Agosta over the years — which means they know she doesn’t give up easily.
The Team Canada centre is chatting amiably at a South Surrey Starbucks a day after returning from a bittersweet, but mostly bitter, Olympic debrief in Calgary.
If you need reminding, and Agosta didn’t, the Canadians met Team USA for the sixth time in their ongoing blood feud for Olympic supremacy and, for the first time since 1998, Team Canada lost the gold-medal final.
The condensed version? Agosta and her colleagues were leading 2-1 with just over six minutes left when American goalie Maddie Rooney got the shaft of her stick on a two-on-one bid by Laura Stacey. As the play left the zone, Canada failed to get the puck in deep on a line change, Monique Lamoureux took a stretch pass and scored on a breakaway, sending the game into overtime and, eventually a shootout.
Agosta, Canada’s second shooter, beat Rooney easily on her first attempt and was out again after Team USA’s Jocelyne Lamoureux scored on a deke for the ages in the extra round. She went to the same move she scored on, but this time Rooney took away the shot. Agosta then went to the backup plan, attempting to open up Rooney’s five-hole with an extra move, but the American goalie closed that down as well.
A month later, she’s asked if she still carries that moment around.
“I’ve thought about it,” she says. “Is there something I could have done differently? Is there something I’d change? I think a lot of my teammates felt the same way. But you have that grieving stage and you move on.”
She pauses for a moment, then says something extraordinary.
“I know at the start of the year it’s nothing but gold, but I’m proud to say we’re silver medallists. I talk to kids a lot and I’ll be talking about what it is to lose and the lessons you learn. That’s huge. It’s something I never had to do.”
As mentioned, she’s wired differently than most.
Agosta’s place in the women’s game was secured long before South Korea and will remain intact whatever transpires over the next Olympic cycle.
At the 2006 Games in Turin, Agosta was the rising star of a team that included seven veterans who had been with the program since 1998.
That year Canada romped to a gold over Sweden as Agosta turned 19. Her teammate, Danielle Goyette, was 40. Agosta was back for gold in Vancouver four years later and Sochi four years after that.
But, all that while, the pull of policing was as strong as her love of puck. Agosta attended Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, largely for its criminal justice program, and says joining the force was just a matter of time for her.
That time came in 2014, when she joined the VPD as a probationary constable. Originally from the Windsor area, she started spending time around Vancouver after the 2010 Olympics and played with the VPD men’s team. After one outing, she was informed the department was hiring.
She graduated from the police academy in May of 2015.
“As a kid, I’d hear lights and sirens and I’d think, ‘Where are they going? What are they doing ?’” she says. “I wanted to do that. I wanted to help people.”
Still, she needed hockey, and that became complicated when she began preparing for Pyeongchang. There was no elite women’s league with a base in Vancouver and the VPD team might play once a week.
Another officer eventually put her in touch with the Langley West Valley Hawks, a triple-A midget team that invited her to work out with them.
She also hired Mike Sommer, an assistant coach with the UBC women’s team, as her skills coach. And when there was no one else around, she’d practice on her own — in Delta, Surrey, Richmond, wherever there was ice.
“I think it made me a better player,” she says.
“I really had fun this year. We had something special. I think that’s why it was our toughest defeat.”
She’s looking at the same ordeal again but, this time, there will be no surprises. If she makes it to Beijing, it will be her fifth Olympics and she’ll join Hayley Wickenheiser and Jayna Hefford as the only five-time Olympians in the women’s program. When she was nine, Agosta attended Hefford’s hockey school in Ontario and met national team members Vicky Sunohara and Cassie Campbell.
“I left there and went right to my parents and said, ‘I want to be like them one day, I want to play with them,’” Agosta says.
She won gold in Turin with Campbell and Sunohara. In 2010, she played on the same line with Hefford in Vancouver on the way to gold.
She now looks at the changes in the women’s game and understands she’s been in the middle of something meaningful. Campbell, who started playing on figure skates, is now leading the charge for a unified women’s league that hopes to have the backing of the NHL.
In China, unprecedented resources are being thrown at two women’s teams in advance of 2022, including decent salaries for American Kelli Stack and Finnish goalie Noora Raty on Kunlun Red Star.
A gulf still exists between the rest of the world and the Canadian and American teams, but it’s closing as opportunities grow in the women’s game.
“The game keeps evolving,” Agosta says. “When I took the year off and came back it was, ‘Holy Cow, these girls are awesome.’
“My hope is the next generation will be able to play the game they love and get paid for it. It’s the things we do now which will pave the way for the next generation.”
Until then, she’ll remain a member of Vancouver’s finest.
Never has the term been more appropriate.