U.S. women’s hockey team relishes games vs. Canada
With the Olympic tournament about 14 months away, the U.S. women’s hockey team has a singular goal.
The Americans want Olympic gold in Pyeongchang, and they know they’ll need to beat Canada to get there.
Canada has beaten the USA to win the last two Olympic gold medals. Since the 2014 Sochi Games, the Americans have won the last two world championships, beating their Northern rivals for both golds.
In the next four days, the nations will play each other twice, starting Saturday in Plymouth, Mich., at 4:30 p.m. ET (NBC Sports Network). Monday, they play again in Sarnia, Ontario.
For forward Hilary Knight, a two-time Olympic silver medalist, playing Canada takes on significance, even when there are no medals up for grabs.
“Every game is a process. We’re not going to know who we play necessarily in the Olympics,” Knight said. “Hopefully we’ll get to play (Canada) twice (in the Olympic tournament). You never know how the tournament unfolds. ... I think the end goal is to win a gold medal against whoever we’re playing. But right now, on the docket for us it’s Canada, and that’s part of the process of getting ourselves to the gold medal game.”
Knight is one of 14 players from the 2014 Olympic team in camp this week in Plymouth. The team is coming off winning the Four Nations Cup last month in Finland, where the Americans lost to Canada 3-2 and on the following day beat the same team 5-3 to win the tournament championship.
With 37 players in camp, the series with Canada will give Reagan Carey, USA Hockey’s director of women’s hockey, time to evaluate talent before the world championships, which begin March 31. The roster will be cut to 23 players. It’s the biggest tournament before the 2018 Olympics and the fourth time the USA will host worlds, this time in Plymouth.
“As we go into the U.S.-Canada game, it certainly gives us an immediate opportunity to see how everybody stacks up in our own player pool and also from team to team,” Carey said. “It’s a unique opportunity; it’s one we don’t typically have in the middle of the season.”
Many U.S. players are on break from their National Women’s Hockey League teams this month. Knight plays for the Boston Pride along with Kacey Bellamy, Alex Carpenter, Brianna Decker, Meghan Duggan, Zoe Hickel, Gigi Marvin and Amanda Pelkey. All are in Plymouth training this week.
The player pool for selecting world championship and Olympic teams is deeper than ever, Carey says. This year she has 24 postgrad players in the system. “In 2010 we maybe would have nine or 10 post-grad players,” Carey said. “So we’ve more than doubled that number. … (For college players) those spots are more limited than they used to be. It just makes the competitive environment and the competitiveness of our player pool increase exponentially.”
One of the reasons players such as Knight and goalie Alex Rigsby look forward to playing Canada so much is because they have limited games for competition.
Rigsby has played one game this season with the Minnesota Whitecaps, an independent team, but she lives and trains in Madison, Wis., and works with a goalie coach and strength coach.
The 24-year-old posted a 1-0 victory against Canada in the 2016 world championships in April, a game the USA won in overtime.
“I prepare all year and make sure that I trust my training, that I’m prepared going into these camps and tournaments ... and never take my foot off the pedal,” said Rigsby, who holds the career save record (2,530) for the University of Wisconsin. “I just want to continue to prove that I deserve to have an opportunity to play in the big games.”
She was the last goalie cut from the 2014 Olympic team that won silver in Sochi. Like Knight, Rigsby has no trouble getting up for games against the team’s biggest rivals.
“Being able to play them, you never want to take it for granted,” Rigsby said. “Every opportunity is awesome.”
“On the docket for us it’s Canada, and that’s part of the process of getting ourselves to the gold medal game.” U.S. forward Hilary Knight